Attack of the Killer Ants (and the Script)
There’s a special place in cinematic purgatory for movies that manage to be both a homage and a warning. It Came From the Desert (2017) is one such film — an 87-minute exercise in what happens when nostalgia, low budget, and Finnish enthusiasm collide in the desert like a head-on ATV crash.
Directed by Marko Mäkilaakso, this “adaptation” of the cult 1989 Amiga video game promised giant ants, B-movie thrills, and tongue-in-cheek fun. What it delivers instead is a fever dream about motocross, ethanol, and the long, slow death of irony.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a film that looks like Mad Max: Fury Road remade by people who just discovered YouTube tutorials, congratulations — your ant queen has arrived.
Plot: A Bug’s Life on Acid
The film begins with Brian, a nerdy, socially awkward motocross enthusiast who’s as interesting as an unplugged toaster. His best friend Lukas, meanwhile, is the human embodiment of a Red Bull commercial — loud, reckless, and determined to shout every line like the director was holding his cue cards at gunpoint. Together, they head into the desert for a motocross festival that looks like it was sponsored by Monster Energy and poor decision-making.
They’re joined by Lisa, the token love interest whose primary function is to remind the audience that women exist. She’s tough, sarcastic, and tragically trapped in a movie that thinks character development means “wear shorts and hold a flamethrower.”
Things go south — or at least underground — when our trio stumbles upon a secret military lab where a scientist named Dr. Renard has been breeding giant ants. You know, like one does when government funding and common sense are both unavailable. The ants break loose, chaos ensues, and the characters must fight to survive using motocross stunts, improvised weaponry, and sheer plot immunity.
It’s part Starship Troopers, part Tremors, and all migraine.
The Ants: More Pixels Than Terror
Let’s talk about the ants — the “stars” of the show. In the 1950s, creature features gave us monsters that, while clearly fake, at least had charm. You could see the strings, the rubber suits, the sweaty extras screaming their hearts out. It Came From the Desert skips the charm and gives us CGI so rough it could exfoliate.
These ants don’t crawl or scuttle — they float, like sentient PowerPoint animations. They roar like angry lawnmowers, because apparently no one on the sound design team has ever heard an actual insect. When they attack, it’s less “terrifying mutation of nature” and more “local Wi-Fi glitch.”
You can almost hear the budget whimpering in the background.
Characters: Evolution in Reverse
Brian, our protagonist, is supposed to be the shy everyman hero. Unfortunately, he’s written with all the charisma of a damp sock. His big emotional arc is going from “awkward guy who loves motocross” to “awkward guy who loves motocross and women.” It’s a journey so underwhelming it makes a caterpillar’s metamorphosis look like Shakespeare.
Lukas, the adrenaline junkie best friend, is the film’s attempt at comic relief. He’s the kind of guy who would shotgun a beer at his grandmother’s funeral and then ask if anyone’s filming. He’s meant to be lovable, but his personality is 80% shouting and 20% confusing fist bumps.
And Lisa — poor Lisa. She’s written as “the girl,” which in this movie means she alternates between eye-rolling at the boys and conveniently getting kidnapped. She has moments of badassery, but they’re undermined by dialogue so clunky it sounds like it was translated from Finnish to English via Google Translate and then punched in the face.
Even Dr. Renard, the scientist responsible for the ants, gets reduced to a video message exposition dump. He looks like he filmed his warnings from a bunker made of leftover props from Sharknado.
Tone: Half Parody, Half Confusion
You can’t tell if It Came From the Desert wants to be a parody, an homage, or an unintentional PSA about ethanol safety. The director keeps winking at the audience, but it’s less “clever meta-humor” and more “please ignore the plot holes.”
The dialogue swings wildly between campy self-awareness and awkward sincerity. One moment, a character quips about giant bugs; the next, they’re sobbing over the loss of humanity. It’s tonal whiplash of Olympic caliber.
The film tries to capture the pulpy charm of Them! or Eight Legged Freaks, but without the timing, writing, or, frankly, the ants that look like they belong in the same movie. Instead, it’s like watching a group of people play pretend in a quarry while someone adds CGI in post because no one told them the ant props never arrived.
Action: Running, Screaming, and Questionable Physics
For a movie about killer ants, there’s an alarming lack of killer — or ants. Most of the runtime is spent watching the trio run through generic desert landscapes, shoot at off-screen enemies, and deliver exposition mid-jog.
The action sequences are edited like the ants themselves took over Final Cut Pro. Shots are spliced together with the precision of a toddler wielding safety scissors. Every explosion looks copied from an early 2000s SyFy movie, and the climactic battle against the queen ant feels like an outtake from Power Rangers: Sandstorm Edition.
Even the motocross scenes — which should at least be entertaining on a purely kinetic level — are bizarrely lifeless. They feel less like adrenaline-fueled stunts and more like an instructional video titled Motocross for People Who Regret Everything.
Science? Never Heard of It.
Apparently, the ants’ one weakness is ethanol, because sure, why not. This means that our heroes spend a portion of the movie weaponizing beer. Yes, you read that correctly — beer kills the ants. Somewhere, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are screaming.
The explanation (delivered via Dr. Renard’s convenient VHS diary) makes less scientific sense than a horoscope for goldfish. But it doesn’t matter, because the movie doesn’t care about science. It cares about vibes. Big ant vibes.
Cinematography: Beige Apocalypse
The desert setting is gorgeous, but the film somehow makes it look like an overexposed commercial for sunscreen. Every frame is sun-bleached and lifeless, as if the cinematographer took one look at color grading and said, “Nah, sand is enough.”
The underground lab, which should be claustrophobic and terrifying, looks like a high school science fair that got a Netflix deal. Fluorescent lights, bad props, and a suspiciously clean ant nest make it hard to take anything seriously.
Ending: Victory by Beer and Bad Editing
The climax sees our heroes arming themselves with makeshift weapons and Molotov cocktails to burn the ants’ nest. There’s a queen ant showdown, a fireball or two, and the kind of CGI inferno that would make Michael Bay weep — not from pride, but from confusion.
When the dust settles, humanity is saved, the festival-goers are freed, and Brian gets the girl. The ants are dead, but so is your attention span.
As the credits roll, you’re left wondering not only how this film got made, but how it lasted 87 minutes without anyone realizing they were filming Ant-Man 0.5: The Finnish Mistake.
Final Thoughts: B-Movie Without the “B” (Just the “Why?”)
There’s bad fun — the kind you find in Troll 2 or The Room — and then there’s It Came From the Desert, a movie so committed to mediocrity that it’s practically an art form. It wants to be self-aware pulp, but it’s just self-inflicted pain.
If you love movies where nothing makes sense, the CGI crawls faster than the plot, and every character looks like they’re regretting their contract, then by all means, dig in. For everyone else, this movie is proof that some things should stay buried — ants, video game adaptations, and this screenplay.
Final Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
(One out of five ethanol-soaked ants — dry, dumb, and destined to crawl back into obscurity where it belongs.)
