Bzzzzz! Movie bugs with just the right sting

Honestly, there are not many great insects of the cinema. The few memorable ones are rarely the stars of the film. They support, make cameo appearances and are almost always below the title. Stupid humans — they’re more into other stupid humans as protagonists.

Even worse, lately, the only insects people shell out money for at the movies are cutey-cute, tired-concept, anthropomorphic animated bugs. “A Bug’s Life,” “Antz,” “The Ant Bully” and now the less-than-thrilling (sorry, people with kids, it just is) “Bee Movie.” Have any of these creatures been as awesome as Jiminy Cricket? Did any of them teach you stuff? Warn you against disobedience to parents? Wear a top hat? Spats? No. None of them did that. And that’s how you know they’re inferior. 

But these bugs aren’t. They’re the insectiest:

“Bug” (1975)
The 2007 movie called “Bug” has no bugs in it. I felt kind of cheated — even though that movie is still cool because Ashley Judd goes cuckoo-bananas in it and lines the entire inside of her room with aluminum foil — because I thought it was going to be a remake of the 1975 one where cockroaches sneak up on people and start fires. Best of all it’s got one of those posters that barks at you: “THE PICTURE YOU SEE WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED!” This is followed by: “CHECK LIST AFTER VIEWING ‘BUG’: 1. CHECK YOUR CAR 2. CHECK YOUR NECK 3. CHECK YOUR HAIR 4. CHECK YOUR BED.” And because this isn’t quite enough, under the photo of a screaming woman holding a telephone receiver that’s on fire because of a cockroach, there’s “A SERIOUS WARNING” from screenwriter William Castle about how you probably shouldn’t see the movie at all. Reverse psychology!

“Creepshow” (1982)
More cockroaches. Obsessively clean and Scrooge-mean E.G. Marshall lives in a hermetically sealed environment. And then the roaches show up, threatening to turn his home into “Joe’s Apartment.” Finally he’s consumed by them. It’s basically the moral template for the “Saw” movies, where jerks are hoisted on their own petards and killed by something super-disgusting while the audience thinks, “Ew. Well, he deserved it.”

“The Swarm” (1978)
The bees in this movie are, admittedly, not even as interesting as the bees in “Bee Movie” because it appears that they’re actually a lot of raisins being thrown into the air opposite some giant fans. But what makes it all weirdly fascinating is how far the mighty Irwin Allen brand of disaster movie had fallen into cheapness and disrepair by the time this was made in the late ’70s. Stocked with big names out for a paycheck, they got Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland to be in it. Michael Caine, too, but he said yes to everything. Anyway, they’re pretty funny raisins.

“Them!” (1954)
A true B-movie, back when there was a definite line between a movie about giant mutant creatures and a movie that people were supposed to take seriously. Of course, now people sort of do take this one seriously. It was a bar-setter for movies about giant mutant things, a standard by which others are measured. Here the giant mutant things are ants and they got that way because it’s New Mexico, home of all things nuclear and terrifying. The ants kill people. Then more people run and scream. A lady gets picked up by one. You know, fun. A radiation classic.

“The Fly” (1958 and 1986)
Both versions are classics, but David Cronenberg’s is the goriest and therefore the winner. Because you just can’t ignore the nasty, maggoty genesis of these creatures. It’s cheating if you do. Cronenberg would resurrect his bug-fascination in “Naked Lunch” but it didn’t hold a candle to the Jeff Goldblum supergoo.

“Starship Troopers” (1997)
This mindblowingly crazy fantasy about a fascist future of evil insects and how hyperactive military forces have to blow them away in the most violently graphic ways possible is one of the greatest, silliest, smartest, weirdest, most political movies of the 1990s, one where you cheer on the military and the monster-bugs. If you took all the insanity of director Paul Verhoeven’s earlier movie, “Showgirls,” and substituted building-sized, rip-you-to-pieces insects for naked strippers pushing each other down flights of stairs and then soaked it all in Hitler sauce and cocaine, that would be this movie.

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