Rating: C
Dir: Jeffery Scott Lando
Star: Meghan Heffern, Rhonda Dent, Shawn Bachynski, Samantha McLeod
If you ever wondered, how good a film can be when the effects are utterly dreadful… Here you go. This does a fair amount right, from decent enough characters, to effective pacing and a pleasant quantity of gratuitous nudity. However, whenever the insects show up, any goodwill the movie has generated, dissipates like a soap bubble in a cacti warehouse. I do appreciate, a) this was made over twenty years ago, and b) the budget on it was likely comparable to that of a sorority for Rush Week (I will be showing relevance for that comparison shortly). Both these seem more of an explanation than an excuse, for the balsa-flimsy nature of proceedings.
Cami (Heffern) is a girl scientist. As usual, this means slapping some glasses on her and pulling her hair back into a ponytail. Hey, presto: Insta-Nerd! She’s studying bugs at college, and takes her work home with her, to Cami’s sorority dorm (there’s your relevance!). They keep escaping, much to the annoyance of slutty sorority sister Josi (Dent), who sprays Raid over all of Cami’s science project. This doesn’t kill them, so much as cause them immediately to become freakishly large. I can only presume it’s related to the vague genetic modifications Cami casually mentioned earlier. Some house inhabitants – and their boyfriends, for these insects are equal opportunity monsters – subsequently get eaten (top). Typically, after taking a shower. Others become hosts for the next generation.
It’s therefore up to Cami – and to a lesser extent her boyfriend Martin (Bachynski) and sister Sophi (McLeod) – to repel the insects threat and save the day. Plus save the members of the Beta Upsilon Gamma sorority. Yes, its initials spell out exactly what you think, and should give you a good idea of the level at which this operates. I do sense it is deliberately intended not to be taken seriously. It seems to use this as a “get out of jail free” card in regard to anything and everything. What about spraying them with Raid triggers ridiculous growth? Why are people able to take a shower without noticing dismembered body parts in there? Because it’s all just a joke, bro’! Nice Psycho reference though.
There’s an Oriental exchange student – I’m going with the O word, because her provenance is uncertain – who knows martial arts because all Orientals do. Naturally, it’s slutty Josi who starts to turn all maggotty, and the practical effects as she degenerates are decent. I liked the opening credits, which splice the cast and crew names into diagrams of insect biology (quite put me of my burrito). In this and the Cami character, I did get odd notes of Re-Animator. It feels like Ticks might have been another influence. The difference is, neither of those movies were kneecapped by inept CGI, which re-uses rendered footage in painfully obvious ways. It’s not often I wished a film showed less of its monsters. This might be one such case.