I hate summer. Winter is great. Fall is great. Spring I can tolerate in small doses. Summer can fuck right off. Once you’re old enough to get a job during the summer months, your vacation from school is essentially meaningless. Once you’re done with school, the significance once held by those magical days of no responsibility disappears completely. Work holds you in a grip of wasted time and slowly dying dreams no matter what time of year it is. Not to mention it’s fucking hot outside. Negative temperatures I can handle, but once the thermometer rises past 75 degrees, it’s too fuckin’ hot for this Incarnation of Doom (I am, after all, the Norse Incarnation of Doom). You can’t drive more than 15 miles without hitting a construction detour, which will inevitably be there for at least a month, even though there are only workers actually doing something for maybe a week of that time. And then there are the bugs. Fucking hell, I hate bugs. They crawl into your house, bite you while you sleep, pester you while you eat, and strafe you every goddamn time you go outside (which is something intelligent people do only out of necessity in the summer, as that’s where the air conditioners aren’t). As much as they suck, though, Iowa bugs are some of the more tolerable bugs in the world. At least I don’t have to worry about ants capable of killing and eating myself and my entire family in an afternoon, or bees that won’t rest until their target is dead, or lethal spiders that are immune to pesticides and so aggressive that they will actually chase your ass down to bite you. Or carnivorous, hive-mind roaches capable of assimilating the morphology of their victims.
Which brings us to today’s movie. It’s been years since I’ve read "The Nest", I don’t remember that much about it, and I didn’t have time to read it again before the deadline to compare. I don’t remember there being roach-cats and roach-people in it, though. I’ll get to it right after I’m done with "The Physics of Superheroes" and all these “Twisted Toyfare Theatre” compilations I borrowed from my buddy Bob. Oh, what difference does it make? Since when has a Corman (Roger or wife Julie) made a faithful adaptation of a book property they bought the film rights to? What’s that? Oh yeah, it’s a Corman flick. Produced by, not directed, but does that really matter? It says Julie Corman on it. It’s a Corman flick.
The quiet little town of North Port (Long Island, where evil dwells according to Wiseblood and Fear Factory?) is having some problems losing tourists lately, and local sheriff Richard can’t figure out where all the corpses disappeared to. Homer the exterminator has also been working overtime, with everyone’s home and business being overrun by an unusually high number of cockroaches.
Seems the Mayor has made a shady deal with a company called Intec, ostensibly to build condos and modernize the island, but Richard and the Mayor’s daughter Elizabeth, back in town for his birthday, discover different. A scientist named Hubbard has been experimenting with a strain of roaches that would eat other roaches into extinction and die off in one generation. The experiment failed (when do they ever succeed, really?), and the roaches not only became aggressive, colonized, and highly immune to pesticides, but they developed the ability to take on characteristics of other creatures they eat. Eventually, Richard and Liz manage to blow up the roach nest and the gigantic queen roach/human hybrid creature, but we’re left with an image of a roach that seems to be laughing at the camera.
Man, I really want to like this movie. It’s got some good gore, and very ambitious (if not entirely successful) monster creations, but it just falls flat on its face. The setup originally makes us believe that it’s going to be another Jaws knockoff, with the town’s Fish-A-Whack festival (don’t ask me what the hell that’s supposed to mean) being threatened by an onslaught of roaches…and then they forget about it.
And I really have to wonder what kind of entertainment they have in the universe of b-movies where public officials make shady deals with huge corporations to perform scientific testing in their community. Does not one of the books, movies, or TV shows in the genre of horror make mention of science gone awry? Is it all just ghost stories? Or is there no horror genre in this universe, no body of cautionary fiction to warn man not to repeat the mistakes of his past?
Either way, The Nest doesn’t work. The actors seem to be relying on the director to create tension in the editing room, and the director seems to be relying on tension existing just because it’s a horror movie, and if he just points a camera at something, it’ll be inherently interesting via the magic of filmmaking. The only attention-grabbing parts of the movie come from the roach/other creature hybrids, and even then, it’s more of a, “Oh, that’s a really cool idea, it’d look great if Stan Winston or KNB did it”, kind of reaction. It’s one of those kind of movies you want to grab by the throat, shake around, and yell “DO SOMETHING!” at until it either submits and entertains you or dies of a shattered spine. Either one would be fine, really.
Meh.
The Moral of the Story: If you use a “La Cucaracha” gag in your killer bug movie, you stand a good chance of at least one disgruntled b-movie reviewer tracking down your address, coming to your house, and kicking you in the balls.
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