Jeannot Szwarc (1975)

Bug is an often effective, sometimes frightening horror film about an American science teacher’s experiences with a species of fire-making insects – he breeds and is eventually destroyed by them. The picture is a hybrid which derives from Frankenstein, The Birds and various who-knows-what-lies-deep-in-the-earth pictures.  The screenplay is adapted by William Castle (who also produced) and Thomas Page from the latter’s novel The Hephaestus Plague.   The main character, Jim Parmiter, is played by Bradford Dillman (who looks like a more thoughtful and, as the film progresses, increasingly emaciated version of James Garner).  The animal behaviourist Parmiter is a hip, showoff-pedant, who puts his points over in class by ‘hopping around like a frog on heat’ and getting a grey squirrel to run up his arm.  He’s relaxed and quietly arrogant with his students.  Parmiter automatically dismisses the notion of the bugs – mutant cockroaches released by an earthquake and allegedly able to start a fire by rubbing their legs together.  When he actually encounters the creatures and their capacities, Parmiter sees them as threatening his intellectual self-esteem as much as public safety.

The so-you-think-this-could-mean exchanges that are par for the course in laboratory-based thrillers are replaced in Bug by what sounded to me like credible dialogue.  After causing numerous fires and several deaths and injuries, the firebugs begin to die off.  Although he and a colleague agree they can’t propagate, Parmiter is nevertheless determined to breed the insects, with the help of a pressure chamber.    The sequence of events is a bit confusing at this point:  Parmiter’s nervously lovely wife (Joanna Miles) is killed by a bug when the species are on the point of extinction but after her husband has begun his breeding experiments.  Parmiter is so hellbent on the project that his wife’s death has hardly any effect on him.  You could probably write the rest of the script yourself.  A female bug mates with a male cockroach; the powerful, carnivorous offspring retains the combustive abilities of its parent.  The bugs multiply and turn against their creator, who is driven mad by a combination of the insects and his own isolation.  A huge split in the ground caused by the earthquake which brought forth the bugs originally swallows up, in a final inferno, both Parmiter and the by-now airborne creatures.

The Birds is often described as apocalyptic.  Bug is more so, even though the biblical metaphor is so confused that the effect might be accidental.  When the earthquake strikes, we’re watching a church service; the god-fearing are being harangued on the rottenness of modern America.   As the light-fittings start to shake and the building caves in, panic breaks out in the congregation.  A plague of baleful insects and the final conflagration reinforce the apocalyptic flavour.  Alfred Hitchcock offered no explanation for his birds’ hostility and Jeannot Szwarc follows suits in Bug.  This film doesn’t have the elegant craftsmanship of Hitchcock; there are no smoothly sinister pans of the massing enemy as there were along the telegraph poles in The Birds.  The physical attacks in Bug are relatively vivid (and offensive), though – quite unlike The Birds in which, after the climactic assault, Tippi Hedren emerged with a few tiny scratches on her face.  It’s terrifying when, late one night, a cat eats one of the insects then dies in torment, smoke pouring from its head – but the clever editing and the darkness stop you from resenting the shock:  you’re straining actually to see the stricken animal.  When people are attacked in broad daylight, however, you do resent it:  the camera zooms leeringly in as bugs land on ears and eyes.

The vicarious appeal of the recent disaster movies was that the situations they described were possible but improbable.  It’s different in Bug.  The idea of exploding, untouchably hot, lethal insects is impossible but the creepy-crawly detail is highly familiar (more so even than the flapping of birds’ wings in a restricted space).  This is what Szwarc shrewdly exploits.  The dry scratching noises on the soundtrack aren’t imaginative but they’re sufficient to irritate the audience physically.  The head-splitting buzz of the insects’ wings in their final attack on Parmiter is an amplification of a sound that everyone will recognise – a droning bluebottle in an airless room.  Physically, the bugs are very unusual – steely, throbbing shells.  The mutant insect is alluringly obscene, coated in thick, syrup-like black varnish and cased in indestructible red brick.  The mechanical special effects by Phil Cory are ingenious.

The film begins to collapse when the scientist goes mad because Bradford Dillman doesn’t express insanity very well and because you’re distanced from the action (more distanced because of the corny histrionics).  You don’t really identify with Parmiter once Dillman brings out suppressed madman giggles and random smiles.  Jeannot Szwarc pours light onto Dillman’s staring, frightened face so that it seems to be disintegrating – but the actor is too obviously straining to realise a man in meltdown.   The crazy fear is sustained, though, by shamelessly contrived means:  when the bugs turn on Parmiter, they demonstrate their excellent command of English by configuring themselves on a wall so that they write his name and, in a chillingly ominous stroke, ‘We live’.   Did we really see it or did Parmiter, his mind disturbed, imagine it?    The exterior photography by Michel Hugo contrasts beautifully with these lurid effects yet it’s equally unnerving.  The landscape – blue sky, yellow sand – is an unreal, motionless terrain, enervated, like the twitchy characters in the story, by the summer heat.  It seems vulnerable to attack.

I don’t like Bug but it’s clever, on the same level as Jaws.  Like Spielberg, Jeannot Szwarc gets mileage out of preparing you for shocks that don’t materialise; after we’ve seen one car explode, the camera looms up to others then moves away.  There’s scarcely an original touch in the film but, though it borrows from trashy movies, you don’t mind because the director is having fun squeezing the melodramatic juice from the various elements.  However, when Bradford Dillman, on fire, rushes frantically to his death in ‘lyrical slow-motion’ that’s meant to intensify his pain and panic, the film looks silly:  this is too blatant a pinch from The Towering Inferno (which tried to create a ‘beautiful’ visual device in a vulgar setting).  Bug will die a death in cinema history, I should think, and it starves the memory but, while it’s on screen, ‘It lives’.

[1970s]