Professor Parmiter is introduced dazzling his biology students with hifalutin palaver about “patterns intermingled with behaviorisms” in nature before attempting to commune with a squirrel that’s wandered into the classroom via a system of chirps and whirrs. Bug tends to oscillate between satire and morality play, an act of indecision that ultimately blunts its efficacy as either. Lest subsequent scenes centered on scientist James Parmiter lead you to believe that Bug has its money on science in that age-old dust-up between science and religion, you should be advised that Parmiter devolves into a madman, not to mention the trusty bible that plays a pivotal role in the film’s fiery finale.

The scene packs the satiric bite of one of George Romero’s zombie movies, conveying its acid-etched take on the Silent Majority’s none-too-silent disapproval of the counterculture personified by their own “hairy-headed children,” as the minister smugly refers to them. As it turns out, the community’s values are rendered asunder just as easily as the church’s edifice since, as soon as the quake hits, the congregation atomizes, and it’s every man and woman for themselves. Further aiding in the wholesale obliteration of the movie from public consciousness is the fact that Bug was released just two weeks before another nature-run-amuck film that was destined to make a much bigger splash: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.īug opens with one of its strongest scenes: Just as the minister at a rural Baptist church has been haranguing his congregation about the modern Babylon that is America, services are rudely upended by the earth splitting wide open. With its loosely hinged bipartite structure, Bug feels like Castle’s attempt to stitch together commercially successful subgenres - part disaster film, part mad scientist movie - into one ungainly whole, resulting in a somewhat shambling Frankenstein’s monster of a movie. Bug is a cautionary tale about a swarm of “firebugs” - impossibly ancient subterranean insects that digest carbon ash and can set things on fire - unleashed on a California desert town by an earthquake.

Bug was the final film of William Castle, the self-proclaimed king of the gimmick flick, who served as producer and co-screenwriter alongside Thomas Page on this adaptation of Page’s novel The Hephaestus Plague.

The Hephaestus Plague by Thomas Page