Insecticidal

Intensity

Stupidity:Nudity Ratio

7:5

Budget

Medium

Yikes, this is a bad film. Such a shame too,

As our movie begins we see Cami (Meghan Heffern) being attacked by a giant bad CGI bug. The screen goes black and we see "Six hours earlier" on the screen. The camera slowly pans across a bedroom floor to the bed where Josie (Rhonda Dent) and Mitch (Travis Watters) are having sex. Josie complains about the lack of excitement and wants to be called a princess. Her screams change in tone when she notices the small, but still really bad, CGI bug in the room. It scurries down back down the ductwork to Cami's room where she is berating Martin (Shawn Bachynski) for letting the insect escape. She puts the bug back into its cage just in time for Josie to show up with a can of bug spray and dose her entire swarm of insects (which apparently numbered four) with insecticide. A forlorn Cami drops three cockroaches into the garbage and rebuffs Mitch's attempts to cheer her up. Eventually Cami's sister Sophie (Samantha McLeod, "Snakes on a Plane") drops in to invite Cami up to the party and tells her to get over it or she will have mom and dad send Cami back for some serious couch time with a shrink. Cami starts to take her advice only to run into Josie (who has just had sex with some other guy in the shower). After Josie insults her, Cami thinks she sees a giant bad CGI bug go running down the hall and instantly assumes that bugs she thought were dead had grown (and apparently changed species as well. We see her with three cockroaches, but the giant bugs are a praying mantis, a rhinoceros beetle, a tarantula and a scorpion). She is mildly curious about this and soon notices a giant, bad CGI praying mantis outside the house. When she mentions her concerns to Sophie, Cami is told that she is imagining things. No one seems overly concerned about the fact that all the doors and windows are sealed over with some green gunk. Eventually the giant bad CGI bugs start killing people in more obvious ways and eventually our heroes fight back killing the four giant bad CGI bugs and Josie who is infested with larvae.

Potentially this could have been a great B movie. Rhonda Dent takes off her top three or four times and Samantha McLeod never quite manages to get hers all the way on. There are numerous fairly humorous situations and a couple of attempts are real acting by both Heffren and McLeod. This is another one I think I am going to blame the director for. There is one scene where the cast is frightened by a giant bug on one side of the room and so they all run to the other side of the room. Now in a real life situation (work with me here, I know there are no giant bugs in the real world) having just seen a giant bug kill somebody, you are not going to see a group of people saunter from one side of the room to the other. They would be frantic from alcohol and adrenaline and would run in a dozen directions knocking down anyone or anything in their way. But these guys are mildly upset that there are giant bugs on one side of the room so they move quickly to the other side of the room looking carefully for their marks.

The movie is meant to be played for laughs, so the tone is supposed to be light but still our heroes are pretty uncaring about the carnage going on around them. When Sophie's girlfriend gets killed, she is only upset for a couple of minutes before making eyes at one of the other girls. Cami says everything in a very monotonous flat tone and shows no emotion at all. So while there are a couple of interesting and amusing bits, the movie overall is just flat. The bad CGI bugs set the tone of the movie. They are obviously CGI and the resolution of the images is very low so that they look fuzzy. The interaction with the actors is clumsy and any time one of the actors is killing a bug, they get sprayed with handfuls of green goo. You can feel this kind of ineptness all the way through the movie and eventually it just becomes annoying. I've talked before about not letting your monster get the better of you. Insecticidal showed the monsters often and early and they were awful. There was no chance to suspend belief because the special effects were so bad you felt insulted every time a monster showed up.

On the plus side, Rhonda Dent reminds me for the world of Brinke Stevens. Her face, body and slightly smoky voice are all just like Brinke in her younger days. The deadpan delivery Dent displays in this movie brings out the similarity even more. They even look the same in the shower.

Rhonda Dent

Brinke Stevens

 

This is Fumi (Vicky Huang). Despite the fact that we see her practicing martial arts and brandishing some ninja knifes, she ends up being killed by the praying mantis. Immediately after this, Cami manages to pin the giant bug to the wall with the spear. Which proves it is better to be the final girl than to study and train for years.

Sarah McLeod. Sigh. Sarah never takes off her shirt in this movie, but then she never really quite puts one on either. She has a lot more lines in Insecticidal than she did in Snakes on a Plane and she really seems to be able to act. She could be a great Scream Queen.

 

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