During construction at the old, hard-pressed Lakewood Hotel, a tense discovery sets the tone for a crisis nobody anticipated: a swarm of ants, ferocious and unusually aggressive, swarms a closed section of the building. Two workers uncover the nest and, realizing the danger, try to warn others, but a tragic misstep leads to them being buried alive before their warning can spread.
Anthony Fleming, [Gerald Gordon], and his partner and mistress Gloria, [Suzanne Somers], arrive at the hotel to haggle with the elderly proprietor Ethel Adams, [Myrna Loy], and her daughter Valerie Adams, [Lynda Day George], as they press to convert Lakewood into a casino. The scene is a sharp contrast between flashy ambition and a crumbling, claustrophobic hotel that seems to be spiraling toward disaster. At the same time, foreman Mike Carr, [Robert Foxworth], who is in a relationship with Valerie, teams up with his co-worker Vince, [Bernie Casey], and the two soon stumble upon the fate of the missing workers, found dead from poisoning. The ominous presence of the ants is felt more and more as the insects begin to move, attacking a boy, killing a hotel cook, and nearly claiming Vince during a tense recon mission into the pit where the workers disappeared.
Peggy Kenter, [Anita Gillette], a Board of Health inspector and an acquaintance of Carr, decides to quarantine the hotel, convinced that a virus could be the culprit behind the strange illnesses and attacks. Her decision sets the stage for a cautious, methodical response, even as the ants’ numbers mushroom and the threat feels almost unstoppable. Tom, a BOH researcher, [Stacy Keach Sr.], joins the investigation and makes a chilling discovery: the ants are not only venomous, but also unusually resistant to insecticides, complicating any straightforward containment plan. The team now faces a menace that isn’t easily stamped out with typical remedies, and the urgency in their voices grows with each new report of an attack.
By this point, the ants have swarmed the hotel by the millions, tearing through rooms and corridors as they drive casualties into the upper floors. Gloria and Peggy’s assistant White, [Steve Franken], fall victim, while Carr, Valerie, Ethel, Anthony Fleming, hotel employee Richard, and his girlfriend Linda, [Karen Lamm], are forced to retreat upstairs as the threat closes in. The situation tightens into a high-stakes standstill, with the living trapped inside and the clock ticking toward a potentially catastrophic finale. Vince alerts the authorities, who attempt to contain the swarm with a trench—first filled with water, then with burning gasoline after Tom notes the army ants’ peculiar behavior of crossing streams on bridges made from ant corpses—an improvised barrier that buys precious time and saves many lives.
As the rescue operation unfolds, Carr, Valerie, and Anthony Fleming find themselves cornered by the relentless surge of ants. Tom—calm and composed—tells them not to move, hoping to avoid provoking any further attacks. The insects begin crawling over the trio, and panic seizes Fleming as he attempts a desperate leap from the room’s balcony to the pool below. The jump goes badly wrong, and he dies in the fall, a stark reminder of how thin the line is between escape and disaster in this unfolding nightmare. Two suited-up rescuers arrive and secure Carr and Valerie, pulling them to safety as the hotel’s corridors echo with the frantic crackle of alarms and hurried footsteps.
In the immediate aftermath, Tom reassures Carr that such a bizarre case is unlikely to recur, grounded in the belief that the hotel estate’s unique environmental conditions were essential for the ants’ nest to thrive. The story closes with a quiet acknowledgement that nature can create extraordinary odds, turning a crowded hotel into a field laboratory where humans witness the limits of their own ingenuity in the face of a living, venomous swarm. The Lakewood episode, while resolved for the moment, leaves a lingering sense of how easily a pristine-seeming place can become a battleground when nature asserts its indomitable will.
