• U.S.

Cinema: From the Depths

2 minute read
Jay Cocks

BUG

Directed by JEANNOT SZWARC Screenplay by WILLIAM CASTLE and THOMAS PAGE

It would not be fair to say that those responsible for Bug are entirely without resource or a sense of novelty, however grotesque. They contrive, for example, to extend the limits of black humor by turning a scene of a woman being burned to death into a laugh sequence. That this is done inadvertently only increases the merriment.

Yonder somewhere in the California boonies, an earthquake shakes up a small town and sends a deep fissure straight down the middle of one farmer’s property. Out of the depths crawls a strange and sinister variety of insect. These nasty buggers can start fires, attach themselves to humans and, as the police reports put it, “inflict serious damage resulting in death.” How they manage to do this and where they come from are matters of the greatest interest to James Parmiter (Bradford Dillman), a slightly out-of-kilter science professor at the local college. He takes to studying the diabolical little things and unknowingly transports a couple home.

One of them gets into his wife Carrie’s (Joanna Miles) hair while she is cooking a birthday dinner. The bug gets a pretty good blaze going, and it is not long before Carrie is rushing around her California ranch-style house trying to extinguish herself, all the while looking as if she has just been hot-wired in a beauty shop. She expires, however, and Husband James goes even crazier. The fire bugs stun him with a show of their united intelligence and strength. Completely snapped, Parmiter tumbles into the fissure, the bugs besieging and barbecuing him relentlessly, and the earth swallows them all up. Man was not meant for such knowledge, or for such movies either.

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