Rating: C+
Dir: Riccardo Paoletti.
Star: Alessio Lapice, Cristina Marino, Salvatore Langella, Filippo Tirabassi.
a.k.a. Insect.
This Italian production is the first film I’ve seen with “The Asylum presents” label. I guess they are unable to make enough B-movies themselves and so are now forced to import them. Where are Trump’s tariffs when we really need them? These initial feelings were not enhanced by the dubbing – though weirdly some characters still speak in the original Italian, while at least one uses natural English. This is apparently a remake of a 2000 film called Tafanos, the Italian word for horseflies. That should give you a clue about the direction this will take. Although, it also throws in an escaped psychopath from a nearby facility, as if the insects were not a sufficient threat.
A bunch of (maybe supposed Spanish?) students go for a vacation in the country, only to be targeted by both the horseflies – which roar, as is obligatory for all species in this kind of thing – and the psycho. Though, in an unexpected twist, the insects’ first victim is the psycho. He is lifted up into the air by the swarm, and then explodes, because… Let me get back to you on that. Mind you, the creatures don’t seem like normal flies anyway: the way their whole head opens up like the monsters in Blade II is not entirely normal. Anyway, bad news! The students find themselves under siege in their vacation home. Good news! The flies are repelled by smoke. Specifically, marijuana smoke.
This idea is similar to Grabbers, where being drunk offered protection from the monsters. As you can probably tell, the tone here is not entirely serious, though the film lacks the characters to be able to pull it off. The only one to be more than a caricature e.g. the nerd, the gay or the slut, is caretaker Lionel. He’s the English speaking one mentioned above, and is played by Clive Riche, who seems to be channelling Keith Allen, and has been in Italy for a while – he’s in Cemetery Man. There is also a crypto-fascist farmer whose brave stand against the insects, armed with only some insecticide spray, is doomed to messy failure. Apart from the exploding psycho, it’s the only death you might remember.
Of course, the method of defense does lead to the protagonists being rather hampered in other ways. They’re prone to falling over, for instance, as they attempt to find and defeat the queen behind the swarm. The results aren’t as terrible as I feared. It’s dumb, and the effects are no great shakes, absolutely. However, it has energy, and a sense of its own stupidity, both of which go some way to papering over the cracks. I’ve a feeling it might well be considerably more amusing if you join the characters in partaking of the herb throughout. Then again, so is doing laundry, I imagine. On nothing stronger than a Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy, it just about provides enough entertainment to be acceptable.