Sadly Over-hyped

As Good As It Gets

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I kind of knew that The Hive was going to be heavily flawed. But as bad as it actually turned out to be? Actually no. This for me was truly awful, not among SyFy's very worst but if there was a list of SyFy waste-of-times The Hive would almost certainly be on it. While not the biggest problem, the title is misleading, when you think of hives you think of bees instead of ants. But again that is not the worst part of The Hive, because there are so many things wrong it is actually difficult to pinpoint which was the worst. Even for SyFy, The Hive looks very poor. The camera work is some of the worst I have seen in a long time and the effects are very fake-looking. The scenery can be a strong point in these films, but here it is unauthentic and drab. The music is forgettable and over-bearing, while the writing is very hackneyed and trite with the rhetoric manging to be pointless and repetitive and the characters are stereotypical and annoying, none are likable and not much is done to develop them. The ants look cheap and are not scary at all. The story is dull and predictable especially at the end, with underdeveloped and eventually pointless subplots with no suspense or sense of horror. Only the bugs in someone's ears evoked any nightmarish feel. The acting is messy too, Elizabeth Healy especially is irritating despite her beautiful appearance. Overall, an awful film in almost every way. 1/10 Bethany Cox

I've liked movies about rampaging army ants ever since seeing Charleston Heston chewing the scenery in 1954's "The Naked Jungle." So I knew I'd have to check out "The Hive" on Sci-Fi (or SyFy, whatever they are this week.) This being the Sci Fi channel, I knew not to expect much in the way of special effects, and was not disappointed. The effects were, as usual, terrible, and the acting was only a small step better. Kal Weber stars as a cut-rate Keanu Reeves, Eizabeth Healey is annoying as the inevitable too-earnest scientist / love interest, and Tom Wopat of "The Dukes of Hazard," now so grizzled that he was completely unrecognizable, twitches and jerks as the world's most macho exterminator.But as I said, all that was to be expected of a Sci-Fi original; if you can't take that, you need to look elsewhere on a Saturday night, because bad acting and effects are a given on that network's home-grown films.Where "The Hive" improves over most of their flicks was in the story. The idea of an ants as individual cells in a larger brain, so that the colony can become self-aware and even sentient, is pretty novel, and was fairly well-handled. This revelation followed closely on the discovery that the ants had developed new physical tricks like working together to form huge tentacles. These tentacles could have been overdone (and later were) but were very effective in a couple of surprisingly subdued scenes; a field of writhing giant ant tentacles (which might have been expected to attack but instead were shown just looming ominously) was satisfyingly creepy. Coupled with a pretty cool ant-zapping ray gun, fairly plausible environmental suits for the exterminator / special forces team, and some good location shots and it's enough to keep me watching (if there's nothing better on.) Now, the gripes. First off, while bees come in hives, ants form colonies, so the whole title is wrong. Secondly, people who use the words "telemetry" and "species" in daily life would likely know how to pronounce them, not as "teleMETry" or "spee-shees." The subplot of Bill (Wopat) having an ant in his ear biting down every now and then to access his nervous system seemed to be forgotten; after all the foreshadowing I kept expecting the ants to exercise some kind of control, but the only effect was for Bill to drop into an occasional stupor or jerk like a dog with a shock collar, both of which were well within Wopat's acting abilities. The native Thai extras (only a little less talented than the main cast) were used in two ways: to walk past the camera or to run in terror past the camera. In both cases they looked mainly bored, and a little embarrassed.Finally (and worst of all) the writers seemed in the end to not know what to do with their promising storyline. The gradual revelation of the ants' physical and mental abilities was pretty effectively done (and who could have resisted having the ants form a giant ant that stamps on a human?) but the ant-based computer pushed the limits of even my generous tolerance for BS. The final reveal (that the whole thing was caused by aliens) was just a let-down.Overall, "The Hive" isn't great cinema, but it's worth a look, if just for the schlock factor. It's definitely one of the better of the Sci-Fi originals (talk about a low standard!) Keep your expectations realistic, and you won't be too disappointed.

"The Hive" is a TV-movie, made for the sci-fi channel, so the product qualities are not great to begin with, since the budget is limited. That really shows off in the cheap and bad CGI-effects, they won't even fool a blind dog. The story is on the other hand not boring, with little dialogue and enough action. It even starts off promising, but it takes a lot of stupid turns along the way. "We Won"t Negotiate With Ants !", I think that quote says it all. Like in the classic "Starship Troopers" they made their critters "smart", but it doesn't work here and is rather laughable. The totally unknown cast is not bad (not great either), and I watched it 'til the end. So 3 out of 10, could be worse, but do not expect anything really good.

This is one of those misleading films that you see in IMDb and you instantly assume that are utter trash. I guess most people will dismiss this film as silly and awful without haven't even watching it. I pity them. And I'm not talking about your regular "This is so bad its good!!!". No dear internet fellows, I'm talking about, "This is so good its awesome!".The, for most people I guess, apparently laughable plot (a film about killer ants, you say?) hides an extremely satisfactory script that manages to deliver thrilling action and top of line dialog lines. Not many low-budget TV films manage to capture the essence of what every sci-fi should aim at: originality, compelling story and, above all, credibility. The final twist of the film is the perfect example of that: pure indie brilliance.I'm not giving the film a 10 since CG scenes are a bit blurry because of the film's low budget, but don't let that mislead you: this is one film you owe yourself to see.