Bug

William Castle’s final production – he was co-screenwriter as well – ends up being an unambitious sci-fi horror film whose main point of interest lies in its peculiar narrative style.

After a wide-ranging first half that pays homage to the environmentalist vein of sci-fi films so popular at the time (including nostalgic reflections such as: “communication: man used to have that gift, we’re told. He could talk to the Earth and all the creatures on it. Somewhere along the line, he lost the gift“), the second half turns claustrophobic, focusing on one man’s descent into madness as he increasingly assumes all the traits of a typical mad scientist.

Unfortunately, the end product disappoints on multiple fronts: for at least an hour, the 35-year-old Jeannot Szwarc fails to instill even that minimum degree of tension that the film’s context cries out for; Charles Fox’s soundtrack is basically just racket and annoying to the nth degree; Thomas Page’s screenplay – which makes a series of incomprehensible and ill-timed changes to the plot of his own novel (“The Hephaestus Plague” – 1973) – seems patchy, as well as incapable of conferring any psychological depth to the characters; beyond that, even the danger presented by the incendiary cockroaches seems to lose credibility once lifted from the pages of the novel and transposed into the visual medium.

Finally, the numerous science-laden scenes rich with specialized jargon are plagued by equally numerous inaccuracies (for example, calling an exoskeleton a “carapace”) as well as outright mistakes (as in the case of the dialogue in which the biologist contradicts his former student regarding the fact that they’re dealing with a Blattodea and then states that it’s an insect).

A few decent effects and a Bradford Dillman entirely in his element as the obsessed professor aren’t enough to keep a mediocre and not very engaging movie afloat.