Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

When the day of a professional slacker named Cooper began (Chris Marquette), he was just about to get fired from his job, an event which would’ve been the best part of Cooper’s day in writer / director Kyle Rankin’s giant bug movie ‘Infestation’. You see later that day, or maybe a few days later, I’m not sure, Cooper wakes up in his very same office and finds himself encased in some kind of web-like cocoon. He makes his way out of this cocoon, vomits, and then finds himself being viciously attacked by a giant bug. See what I mean by this not being a very good day?

Anyway Cooper manages to fend off this giant bug and observes his whole office is encased in this webbing, and not only that, it looks like all of Bulgaria… errr… I mean this sleepy New England town is wrapped in this cocoon like gunk. Circumstance leads Cooper outside his office building to free up a young pretty doctor named Sara (Brooke Nevin), with circumstance rearing its ugly head once again forcing Cooper and Sara into a nearby deli. Inside this deli Sara, against Cooper’s vehement protestations, begins freeing up the deli inhabitants. Cooper, as it turns out, is a selfish, self absorbed, solipstic asshole… at least for the time being.

Cooper and Sara break down the sit-chu for these people but there’s always those who think they know best. They aren’t going to make it. That will leave our couple and their new friends Leechee (Linda Park), Albert (Wesley Thompson), Albert’s deaf man-mountain of a son Hugo (E. Quincy Sloan), and pretty weather girl Cindy (Kinsey Packard)… who will serve as our WE ALL GONNA DIE GUY in this movie… to navigate the treacherous terrain and make it to the house of Cooper’s father (Ray Wise) who has guns and a bomb shelter. Because he’s a paranoid control freak.

I think we all know that the journey will be a treacherous one. Plus they’re traveling on foot because you really don’t want to drive a car around these bugs if you can help it. And the bugs are everywhere, in addition to being lightning fast with some possessing

the ability to fly. There are surprises along the way… think ‘The Thing’… in addition to damsels in distress that need to be saved and a boy finally becoming a man, at the tender age of thirty or something, in order to save the Planet Earth. Simply Outstanding.

To be honest with you my friends it would be very difficult for me to deliver to you, my loyal fan who e-mailed me that one time, an objective ‘review’ of this movie ‘Infestation’. I am stone-cold sucker for big bugs and monsters eating people. If somebody out there was stupid enough to let me make a movie it would have giant bugs and ninjas and this movie would star Danny Glover, Bruce Willis and Linda Blair. That’s the movie I would make and it would be sweet. For me not to enjoy this movie, at least on some level, it would have to be totally and completely incompetent. I have seen total and complete incompetence on numerous occasions so I know this goal is not out of reach, but thankfully Kyle Rankin knows how to make a giant bug movie.

I think most everything one would want in a giant bug movie is present in that we have a reasonably palatable hero played by Chris Marquette, an attractive heroine in Brooke Nevin, and the narrative is firmly tongue-in-cheek but not overtly so to the point it becomes too silly to watch. Plenty of screen time was given to the bug menace, the story moved quickly and we even had a completely unnecessary and gratuitous titty shot. This is a 1950’s style B-movie - minus the titty shot of course - in sense and sensibility with bug miniatures replaced by CGI bugs and the CGI was reasonably well done, but of course you gotta have the tech guy behind the door off-camera holding the full size pincers attacking people with them.

Now if we were the type of person who liked to over-analyze things we could point out that the story was inconsistent in spots that were hard to ignore, say like one guy might turn into a giant bug in a day or two while another transforms in an hour or two. We might also notice that if these bugs are blind and navigate by sound only, then chances are they would hear everything. They would probably be able to hear you breathe. There was also the occasional plot hole here and there that could’ve used some filling and I really, really could’ve done without seeing this movies final scene. That didn’t make me happy. Everything else in this movie made me happy but that didn’t make me happy and thusly I left the movie unhappy.

But even though I really, really didn’t appreciate that final scene, I mean really… ‘Infestation’ was still 99% worth of a pretty damn decent giant bug movie.