Cinema
Flaming movie
Kenneth Robinson
Bug Director: Jeannot Szwarc. Stars: Bradford Dillman, Joanna Miles, Janie Smith Jackson. 'X' Ritz (95 minutes).
I'll be getting back to culture again next week with Ken Russell's .Lisztomania. But from the other Press shows I have selected a film you ought to know about, called Bug.
Not that I saw it with the Press. I've said before that I find an occasional visit to an audience show very rewarding. This time the audience really was astonishing in its reactions. Whenever somebody caught fire and staggered about in agony, the cinema was rocking with laughter and cheers.
Why do the people catch fire? The first reason is, of course, that this is the year of flaming film actors. Ever since The Towering Inferno producers have found excuses for lots of quite tiny infernos. I'm told this has something to do with the development of technique for simulating men and women on fire.
The other reason for the flames is that the plot demands it. The producer was very astute to find a story that required so many buildings and people to be burned. After an earthquake in a small American town, hordes of large insects creep out of the crevices and rub their legs together. By doing this they produce fire. 'Like boy scouts,' somebody said, rather fatuously thought.
The two people most concerned are a science student, whose wife has her ear burnt off, when she carelessly answers a telephone with a bug sitting on the ear-piece. And the other is a science schoolmaster, whose wife is about to prepare smoked salmon and fried beef when her hair catches fire and transforms her into frizzled spouse.
Until the end of the film it is only the women who are damaged or destroyed. Another pretty girl has an eyeball set on fire. And what with her screams and the electronic noises made by the insects, it was almost impossible to hear the audience laughing.
By the time all the women have been disposed of the schoolmaster is obsessed with the idea of mating a fire-bug and an ordinary cockroach. The results are dreadful. At first the new breed crawls over the walls, spelling out messages like 'We Live'. The schoolmaster is shocked. Quite clearly he had expected better manners from his brain-children. But they then produce an enormous egg which releases dozens of bugs looking like flying goldfish. When these have set fire to the schoolmaster, who runs in flames to a crater and falls down it, they plunge after him and the earth caves in on top of them.
It seemed worth describing this film at some length in a. bleak week of film going, if only to stop any of you seeing it by mistake. It is, of course, part of the new wave of sadistic films that is replacing pornography in the cinema.
You might suppose from MY reference to audience laughter that the brutality in this film is unconvincing. But I'm sure the laughter springs from all kinds of mixed emotions, like fear of what is to come or relief that another bit of scorched flesh has dripped its blood and moved on.
Maybe I'm wrong, but somehoW the whole thing bugged me.
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