Locusts!





I’m not sure what’s gotten into the water over at CBS that suddenly makes them think they can make b-movies. I guess the inspiration goes something like this:

- NBC’s recent “natural disaster” miniseries 10.5 was popular.

- Natural disaster movies (Earthquake, The Towering Inferno) were popular in the 1970s.

- “Animals Gone Wild” movies (Jaws, The Swarm) were popular in the 1970s.

- Therefore, Animals Gone Wild movies will be popular today!

So after last month’s Spring Break Shark Attack the only logical follow-up for CBS was Locusts!, which aired on Sunday night. It was essentially a remake of The Swarm (1978) without the star power. No Michael Caine or Henry Fonda, instead Locusts! has Lucy Lawless and no one else.

Lawless plays Dr. Maddy Rierdon, Undersecretary of Agriculture and an expert on “voracious insects.” She finds out that her old mentor, Dr. Peter Axelrod, has a secret lab near Pittsburgh where he is breeding hybrid locusts. When confronted, Axelrod explains the attributes of his special locusts, pride obvious in his voice. The new locusts are immune to all known pesticides, they grow to maturity four times faster than regular locusts, and they can travel 300 miles a day. When Maddy asks him why in the name of all that is good and holy you would breed fast-growing kill-proof super locusts, Axelrod explains that the locusts will “help children.” Help the children what, get eaten more efficiently? At least Deep Blue Sea (1999) had the decency to pull out the old (if false) saw about how sharks don’t get cancer to explain why they were building super sharks.

Maddy orders the locusts destroyed, but a military agent manages to save six of them. Two escape down the drain of the lab and appear on the street, because the drains at a USDA lab where they handle dangerous pesticides open on the street. The other four are taken to California where they too escape, after the soldier carrying their container is hit in the eye by a bug. I can’t make this stuff up, I swear.

A month later Maddy finds out she’s pregnant by her ex-boyfriend (watch Lawless ACT!!!) and two huge swarms of locusts are converging on the middle of the country. Because this movie doesn’t have much of a budget for a cast coincidence is relied upon to make sure that the same four or so people keep running into the locusts. Axelrod’s daughter is put into a coma (are you helping children now, Mr. Wizard?), and Maddy’s father’s farm is attacked. As the locusts move inland the military becomes desperate to stop them – after all, this situation is beginning to effect states that voted for Bush. They decide to drop VX gas on the locusts, the same kind “Saddam used on his own people,” as if that’s the substance's advertising motto. Maddy comes up with an alternate plan, and I quote the movie exactly, to "create the biggest damn bug zapper the world has ever seen." Two power grids in the way of the swarms are electrified and the bugs killed.

At the last minute the writers of the movie suddenly remember that only six bugs were required to create the swarms of hundreds of millions, and there's no way the power lines could have killed every last locust, so a newscaster closes the movie by explaining that the locusts were sterile... If that's the case WHERE DID THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF LOCUSTS COME FROM IN THE FIRST PLACE??? Stupid movie. That's pretty much this movie in a nutshell. Awful, awful writing. The locusts aren't even carnivorous, so people only die because the freak out. Most of the deaths in the movie, I can only give the locusts an assist. I suppose this kindler, gentler killer bug is in keeping with the CBS most treasured demographic ("People So Old They Will Have Died Before the Demographics Are Reported the Next Day"), but if there's one key to making good b-movies it's that you can't go halfway. Either embrace the concept of killer insects, or make something else.

Posted: Tue - April 26, 2005 at      

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