Bug (1975)

A church with a firebrand priest is hit with a massive earthquake making the floor undulate and the walls crack. A farm is ripped in half and people are running scared. As parishioners flee the church a man gets a lift with his son and the woman he’s meant to also give a lift to is left behind — luckily for her as it turns out.

The truck the man is getting the lift in stalls not far from his property — the farm that had its fields destroyed — and as they’re trying to restart it, the truck bursts into flames killing the occupants.

That night Gerald Metbaum (Met to his friends) is going to check on his girlfriend, Norma, in the aftermath of the quake and comes across a truck stuck at the side of the road. It’s Norma and her older brother Kenny who have fled the farm after seeing their father and brother get burned to death in the truck.

Met offers to take Norma and Kenny back to the farm (which is odd as they were trying to get away from it) and after they drive off, Kenny’s truck bursts into flames just like the truck his father was in — what a weird coincidence!

Back at the farm, Met heads out into the fields to check out what has happened and he comes across a massive crevice in the ground. It seems to have no bottom but coming from within it are a load of weird bugs that look like prehistoric trilobites. Strangely the bugs don’t seem to be afraid of Met, or don’t notice he’s there, and don’t scatter like a normal insect would but when he picks one up it seems to emit some kind of heat and burns his hand.

Met then hears a cat crying out in pain and to his horror he sees that the cat is covered in the bugs and is being burned and eaten by them. The following day, Met heads to the local college where he shows the dead cat to Professor James Parmiter. Intrigued Parmiter heads to the farm where he collects some of the bugs to study them.

Unknown to Parmiter, the bugs are crawling into cars and escaping the farm — and it’s the bugs in the cars that are causing them to explode thanks to the heat generated by their legs rubbing together (or something like that, it’s not clearly explained). A handyman arrives at Parmiter’s home to fix some damage caused by the earthquake and offhandedly mentions that there are strange noises coming from Parmiter’s car.

Checking it out, Parmiter realises that the bugs are now free of the farm and tries to collect them all up but he misses one it makes it into the house where it hides. Later on, Parmiter’s wife, Carrie, is making dinner when the bug crawls into her hair and sets it a light with the heat from its legs, burning the wife to death and setting the house on fire.

Parmiter becomes obsessed with knowing everything he can about the bugs, hiding himself away in a shack on the farm so he can conduct research on them in private. He realises that the pressure on the Earth’s surface is causing the insects to die (which you would think would be a good thing but apparently not) so Parmiter decides to breed them with a surface-dwelling cockroach. Of course! Why not breed another version of the creature that killed your wife, what could possibly go wrong?!

As his experiments go further and further down a dark path and Parmiter’s relationship with the bugs deepens it’s difficult to tell where Parmiter ends and the insects begin.

Thinking that he is in control, can Parmiter break free of his fixation with the strange creatures that caused his wife’s death? Can Met help break the spell they have over Parmiter or will they drive him to madness?

Not Even The Lord Can Save You!

🎃Warning! Spoilers for Bug ahead!🪲

Bug is a strange film, it’s not really horror, it’s not really science fiction and it’s not really an allegory. Not a lot really happens, it’s just a film that picked up on an insect theme that was popular at the time with 1974’s Phase IV and the TV movie Killer Bees are prime examples.

What I did find interesting was how the film frames religion as something that can’t save you from the insects, and that the insects might be sent from the bowels of hell.

At the start of the film we’re in a church with a zealous preacher that doesn’t seem to have much respect from the congregation, and when the earthquake hits, the church is ruined with the bell tower and walls cracking, pews falling over and the ceiling falling in.

So the church being destroyed as the ground opens up freeing the insects can be seen as a allegory that not even God can stop the rise of these ancient beasts.

Added to that is when Sylvia, a friend of Parmiter’s wife, arrives to return Carrie’s bible some of Parmiter’s hybrid insects have escaped and attack Sylvia. Even though she’s carrying a bible that apparently can’t save her as she’s burned and eaten by the Parmiter Insects. She doesn’t even use the bible to bash at the insects which would have been my first instinct but not even the Word of the Lord can save Sylvia.

And at the end of the film, when the flying bugs come and attack Parmiter, setting him on fire as their predecessors did to his wife, the hole that they fly out of is glowing, like it’s an opening to the depths of hell. The film ends with a burning Parmiter falling in to the hole and having it close over him like mans fall from grace due to his sins.

Is this commentary on religion intentional? No, I don’t think it is, I think it’s just a coincidence and I’m reading more into it that the film deserves as it’s quite shallow in reality.

It’s an interesting concept though and one that could have had a lot more done with it had the film makers been intentional about the religious undertones.

Bug Off!

Parmiter’s descent into madness is well acted by Bradford Dillman — or should that be Bradford Dillman’s facial hair is doing a lot of acting here?

The only way we know that there is a significant passage of time is that Parmiter grows a beard and, as he gets more unhinged, his beard gets longer and more unkempt.

While I can understand Parmiter being distraught by his wife’s death, I mean it was his fault as he brought the bugs back to the house, and I can understand why he became obsessed with the bugs that were the cause of his wife’s death I can’t understand the direction his obsession takes.

The bugs die off after a while at surface level, presumably because the pressure underground in their natural habitat is much higher. So you’d think that Parmiter would be happy with that, right? You’d think that Parmiter would want the creatures that killed his wife to die.

But no! He experiments on them and creates a hybrid that he can apparently communicate with, which then mutates further into enormous flying bugs that end up killing him before returning back underground. Why would you do that? Why make a hybrid that is worse than the thing that killed your wife and might end up killing hundreds more people?

This part of the story makes no sense at all. I could have understood it if Parmiter was trying to develop a hybrid to kill off the fire bugs (think the Judas Breed of cockroaches from Mimic without the murderous man-sized one) but instead he makes a flying version!

So this story doesn’t really makes sense and there really isn’t much to it: the “horror” is non-existent really and the creature effects are adequate but not ground breaking.

I think the main message of the film is to not lock yourself away in a cabin after you accidentally kill your wife with an ancient fire bug… maybe?

Watch Bug if you’re not afraid of bugs because there are a lot of them. Or watch Bug if you are afraid of bugs and want to use this as immersion therapy.

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