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BUG

IN A MOVIE ABOUT FIRE-FARTING BUGS, THE KILLS AREN'T WORTH THE WAIT



★☆☆☆☆ (Kill It With Fire)

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

1975


I don’t mind a good monster-insect flick. Slugs is okay, Cronos was directed by Guillermo del Toro (enough said), and Arachnophobia will do on a rainy Sunday. When it comes to killer creepy crawlies, all I want are goosebumps and interesting kills. The first half of Bug fails miserably on that front, and by the time you get to the second half, you’re so fatigued, you’re reaching for your phone. During my first viewing, I paused the movie before reaching the halfway mark, and considered calling it a day and forgetting this ever happened, but I’m not a quitter, so I pressed play with all the enthusiasm one can muster when asked to listen to your niece sing JoJo Siwa’s “Boomerang” for the thirty-fourth time.


I joke about the bugs farting fire, although this would have made the film infinitely more interesting. The first time I saw this movie, I thought that’s what they were doing, but I must have zoned out because during the torturous re-watch for this review, I heard the protagonist explain the bugs create fire by rubbing their legs. This is only one example in what turns out to be a Masterclass in bug anatomy disguised as a film.



The movie begins with a terrible earthquake that almost destroys the church many of the characters attend (don’t worry about getting attached, you won’t remember them) and at first glance, this desert town is a great location for a bug movie—very similar to Perfection in Tremors—but we bounce from desert to city to lush suburb to desert so rapidly and without explanation that I couldn’t tell you where this film took place. Anyhow, the earthquake unleashes a subterranean cockroach capable of starting fires, and the following uninspired deaths are few and spread out amidst a movie that’s one hour too long. You watch characters walk room to room. You watch them have conversations with no purpose. You watch nothing happen. This movie had to have been written by an entomologist or a screenwriter showing off their impeccable research, unable to kill their darlings.


You don’t even know which character is the protagonist is until he talks to a squirrel in one of his classes. The professor is a smug man who takes an interest in the bugs early on, unwittingly bringing them into his house with disastrous results.


This is where we hit the middle mark, and a few noteworthy events take place. After losing his wife to the killer anthropoda, the professor plots his revenge by breeding a “super cockroach” to kill the original, alien ones. I chuckled once, and that’s when the professor cheers on two roaches in a pressure chamber while they mate. The film suddenly focuses on a revenge plot as the professor hides in a shack in the desert, grows a beard, and pushes his friends away in order to reach his goal. Does he get what he wants? Well, things didn’t work out so well for Dr. Frankenstein, so take a guess. Though Bug has a few amusing moments, they’re not enough to keep this movie from being the cure for insomnia. It should be thrown into the subterranean pit with the roaches.






GENRES: Apocalyptic, Monster/Creature


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