Review – Bug (1975)

I should have bailed on this one right after they burned the cat to death. Either they really did it or the effects used for that sequence (and the subsequent cat corpse) greatly exceeded the quality of the rest of the movie. Further, this represented the most dramatic volume ramps I’ve ever had to do between the whispered dialogue and the nerve-grating racket of the monster attack scenes. And yet I stuck with it based on a faulty memory from childhood that assured me this was a lot better than it was. Maybe watching roaches set stuff on fire with their butts was more entertaining back when I was nine years old. Bradford Dillman plays an entomologist who goes off the deep end after subterranean fire bugs incinerate his wife. He eventually captures one of the critters and forces it to breed (despite the fact that we’ve already been told they don’t have sex organs) with a common cockroach. The resulting spawn turn out to be super smart and psychically connected, swiftly learning to arrange themselves into words on the wall. He should have crossed them with the screenwriters. That would have provided them with much more limited intellect. This is director Jeannot Szwarc’s worst movie ever, and in a catalog that includes Santa Claus The Motion Picture that’s really saying something. It’s also the last movie William Castle ever produced. What a sad end to an illustrious career. Avoid at all costs