July 22^nd, 2002

"BUG REPELLENT REQUIRED"

Everyone loves a giant (or even regular size) insect horror movie once in a while. And while they may not be quite as popular a sub-genre as say, the slasher flick, they're usually always fun to watch.

Since "big bug" movies are usually direct-to-video we've decided to celebrate the big studio release of Eight Legged Freaks by bringing you three bugged-out movies to prepare you for giant mutant spider romping (and a surely annoying performance by David Arquette).

Kingdom Of The Spiders [1977] is probably William Shatner's best non-Star Trek performance. Sure, I'd have to say his acting job on 1974's Impulse is my favourite (but for reasons other than skill) this one is his most well-rounded one.

He plays a small town vet who with the help of entomologist Tiffany Bolling starts to investigate a bunch of livestock deaths in his town. Little did he realize these are the work of a whole lot of tarantulas and that humans are next on the menu.

While similar to Night Of The Living Dead in the second half where everyone holes themselves up in a farm house, this is an entertaining little film that manages a couple of moments of okay suspense and works decently (especially if you hate spiders).

Night Of The Creeps [1986] is probably the biggest cult movie of the 1980's apart from Return Of The Living Dead. And now since ROTLD is getting a DVD release in August we can cross our fingers and how this will be next (I believe MGM owns the rights to this one also).

Fred Dekker (before toning it down with 1987's The Monster Squad) puts his foot to the floor for this horror/sci-fi/spoof that has a college campus overrun by some alien slugs that like to transfer from body to body through the mouth and turn whoever's body it inhabits into a shambling zombie.

There's lots of messy head explosions, some cool ass effects and Tom Atkins as a cool police detective who spouts the memorable line "The good news is your dates are here.the bad news is they're dead".

This is just one highly entertaining ride with enough slug, zombie and gore mayhem to please everyone.

Starship Troopers [1997] is another fine addition to the filmography of Paul Verhoeven who took sci-fi/action to its limits with 1987's Robocop and 1990's Total Recall.

Set in a future where humans spend their time joining a marines-type Military group who are assigned to travel the universe eliminating some nasty alien insects this not only sports lots of awesome effects, some funny "commercials" (something Verhoeven used in his other two films mentioned also) and Clancy Brown as a cool drill sargent but is fun to boot.

Sure, leads Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards are a little weak at times but we don't really care as this is an action packed, quite gory and high-energy film that's much better than Verhoeven's next horror genre film 2000's Hollow Man.