As the final film from producer/co-writer William Castle, Bug is lacking a lot of what made his previous films like The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, and 13 Ghosts amusing to watch: mainly his showmanship and the fact it takes itself way too seriously. Instead of delivering the “killer insect” camp promised by the lurid box art, we’re treated to a fairly listless horror/sci-fi flick that doesn’t deliver much in the way of attack scenes for the first two-thirds and becomes a difficult to watch bore in the final third when it shifts gears into dry scientific ramblings and a somewhat abrupt ending.

Things kick off with a disaster movie feel as a sermon at a small town church is interrupted by an intense earthquake destroying most of the furniture inside and causing the building to pretty much crack down the middle. Not long after, the pick-up truck containing a father and son heading back to their farm explodes seemingly at random. Only it’s not, as it turns out to be the work of some beetle-like insects who have been unleashed from underneath the earth due to the quake and have the ability to set things ablaze by rubbing the two antennae in their rears together – which gives off a sparking electricity noise that comes across as silly for the most part.

Into the middle of this comes professor, and insect specialist, James Parmiter (Bradford Dillman) who sets out to try and not only figure out where these arsonist bugs came from but try and come up with a solution to stop them. In the meantime, director Jeannot Szwarc throws in a slender amount of so-so bug mayhem, including the telephone one so prominent on the film’s artwork, and plentiful close-up shots of our firebug insects and way too many scare attempts from the “Oh no, it’s on you, look out!!” school of chills.

Which is all fine and dandy since the first half of Bug is ridiculous enough to keep your attention. True, there’s barely any real threat from the insects with the first forty-minutes offering up one or two deaths but at least there’s an okay drive-in feel to everything. That all changes when, after his wife is killed in an unintentionally funny scene where her hair is set aflame, the good professor goes a little loopy and holes himself up in a cabin as his obsession for the bugs (and eventually cross-breeding them) takes over his rational thoughts which, in turn, slows the film down to a crawl - though the moment where the bugs spell out "We Live" on a wall is fairly creepy.

Dillman doesn’t do too badly in the lead role making an acceptable slide into crazy, even if it’s dull in execution. Still, I didn’t have a lot of trouble buying him as a scientist type and he would continue appearing in creature features during the 70’s with roles in both Piranha and The Swarm. Meanwhile, Joanna Miles turns in a pretty wooden performance as the throwaway character of the professor’s wife – though she does get the most amusing death scene. Other than that, the cast is filled out with some fairly familiar faces (mostly from the various television cameo appearances that litter their resumes), but none of them made any real impression on me.

But that’s basically the entire problem with Bug; it fails to make much of an impression in all areas. Castle, who co-wrote with Thomas Page based on his novel “The Hephaestus Plague”, should’ve have tried to inject the fun of his past work into this but, instead, everything just feels too bland. Director Szwarc was a veteran of television by the time he did this and it tends to show since this feels like one of the many “Movie of the Week” flicks with titles like Tarantulas: Deadly Cargo and Ants! – He’d fare much better with the entertaining, if unnecessary, Jaws 2. (Chris Hartley, 1/17/10)

Directed By: Jeannot Szwarc.
Written By: William Castle, Thomas Page.

Starring: Bradford Dillman, Joanna Miles, Richard Gilliand, Jamie Smith Jackson.