AAAAHHHHHH!! Locusts (2005)

[trekgeezer]

So what's with CBS? Are they going into the B movie business?

This stars Lucy Lawless, John Heard, Mike Farrell, and Dylan Neal (who you may remember as the talking 2x4 of a US Marshall in Chupacabra: Dark Seas on SciFi)

You know what it's going to be when one the main characters says "My locusts were engineered to be immune to all known pesticides." It's another military experiment gone bad.

Go to the official website here.

[peter johnson]

Personally, I'm all in favor of the networks providing a bit o' B-grade fun --
Maybe CBS could remake The Giant Leeches!!
peter johnson/denny crane

[Mr_Vindictive]

I saw the commercial last night during CSI: Miami and thought the same thing Trek.  I'm really surprised to see a major network come out with stuff like Spring Break Shark Attack and now this.  

I though SciFi had that market covered.

[ulthar]

Wasn't it last year that NBC had 10.5 and it seems like there was another right after that.  Someone at the networks may be starting to realize we, the viewers, don't really want 60 "reality" shows, and a different flavor of either Law and Order or CSI EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.

My first thought when I saw the commercial was "Wow, Lucy Lawless."  My wife said, "that does not even look like Xena."

This one should be fun, in the way only a made-for-tv military experiment gone bad rampant insect movie can be.

[Flangepart]

Break out the Black Flag and cheese puffs...its gonna be a loooong Bug Hunt!

[Mr Hockstatter]

Sounds like it's worth a watch.  Got some movie called Parasite on Sci-Fi Saturday (a whopping 2.9 / 10 rating on IMDb), then this on Sunday.  Woo-hoo!

[Gary Brown]

What a horrendous and inexcusable waste of life spent with this miserable excuse for a movie.  Obviously, someone, somewhere got some kind of real "pay-off" to close their eyes and air this crapfest.  Shame.

[Menard]

But seriously, Mr. Brown, what did you think of the movie? (:

[Cheecky-Monkey]

I can't believe I sat through this whole film. It was so cliched and unoriginal. Oh, and you gotta love how for some out-of-focus shots of the "locusts", the filmmakers used crickets (!)

[Mr Hockstatter]

I didn't think the first hour was too bad.  It had a nice B movie charm to it.  Open right up with Lucy in her undies.  About halfway through it really started to stink though.  They got so carried away with trying to demonize the military (oh, maybe the UN will save us!) they lost track of the story.  That scene with Lawless trying to kill everybody in the helicopter, and then afterwards everyone acting like nothing happened, oh puh-leeze.  The ending was just so absurd.  Like, yeah, that would so totally work.  You can run hundreds of times more electiricity through a wire than it was designed to take.  And it creates an electrocution zone around it.  I mean, you might possibly create a great big magnet, but...

And the locusts are attracted to shiny objects.  Wouldn't they probably all drown after they flew into the first lake they passed over?  Wouldn't they fail to make any progress across the country because they'd be attracted to every shiny building (assuming the Lawless farm was no more or less shiny than any other)?  And don't even get me started on electrocuting bugs by attaching a generator to the side of a barn.

And, um, they didn't breed any more at the end because they were sterile?  But only about 5 of them got loose in the first place.  How the hell did they get a swarm of trillions of the things without breeding?  Huh?  Whuh?  Duh?

Gotta say, Lucy Lawless is a far better actress than I even knew.  Too bad her character was so ridiculous.  The special effects were kind of okay.  Didn't look real, but at least they didn't make me laugh.

[Flangepart]

Oh, man....did i miss a stinker or what?
Did the bugs eat people? If they don't eat people, what did they do? Eating crops IS what makes these things so deadly, in real life, but in a movie...come on!

BTW...no Peter Graves Cameo?

[DaveMunger]

Phew, I tried to write some stuff here halfway into the movie, but I'd forgotten my password, and I think I entered the wrong email address in the "I forgot my password" thingy. (I usually forget to log out, so I'm logged in for months at a time. I hope that dosen't screw stuff up).

Anyway, lots of bad movie cliches in this one. Fire extinguisher as a weapon. Scientist with "Bats" complex (why did I alter these things into a more harmful form? I'm a scientist, that's what we do!!!). Military heavies. "Monster" electrocuted by ludicrously jerry-rigged contraption. I believe a couple getting it on in the woods were the first fatalities? I think the locusts could be considered a singular kaiju, they kept all bunched up instead of fanning out, and they went straight for Pittsburg as if they wanted to knock the buildings down instead of say, going where there was suitable food for them.

Kept turning into a different movie whenever non-locust stuff came up, like something on the Oxygen network. I get the feeling from a lot of cheap crap that there's some disagreement among the people making it as to what kind of movie they want to make (maybe some of them wanted to do a broad parody of 70s homages to 50s bug movies, and the others wanted to make the bugs a subplot in a boring domestic drama).

 I think Lucy Lawless' character was "not Xena", lots of stuff struck me as being in there just to show how not Xena she is, like the crying, the implied procreative man-woman vag style sex, and the otherwise pointless display of the small, white, non-pointy, non-metalic bra.

How did people know to panic at the sight of grasshoppers before the news was even out that killer locusts were on the loose? Did they even ever get around to specifying how they harm people? Did that one kid just lapse into a coma after they buzzed her for awhile? Did that one guy actually say he was with "the department of voracious insects"?!?!

[ulthar]

Mr Hockstatter wrote:

>  Open right up with Lucy in her undies.

!! Enough said.


I agree the first bit was better than the ending, and I did find my attention straying.  My wife and I had a lot of fun mst style comments during the first hour; not so many later (the plot just drug).

One of my favorites: right at the beginning, when Xena is talking to her assistant on the phone, and she is trying to figure out something about one of the USDA labs, presumably in WASHINGTON DC, she says, "I'll meet you there in 15 minutes.  In the meantime, do some research and see what you can find out about " x,y,z.

I've driven in DC.  Being anywhere in 15 minutes is a stretch, and that would be without the research beforehand.

My opinion about what would have made this better: MAN EATING LOCUSTS.  There was no real danger from the bugs, except for the idea of long term famine that would take a while to materialize anyway.  Where was the immediate threat that would have kept tension higher?

Oh wait, I forgot, the second half plot did not need tension.  We were all asleep by then anyway.

(Note to Flangepart and Dave Munger: typed this gripe about Man Eating Locusts and no real danger before reading your posts....)



Post Edited (04-25-05 17:58)

[peter johnson]

But the bugs DID eat people!!  Remember?  That was the big deal Scare thing about midway through:  They had adapted to eat meat, and "We're what's for dinner"!!
Both my wife and I liked it alot -- It was free and a lot better than we thought it was going to be --
The real gratuitous B-crap we thought were the meaningless references to the Book of Revelations & The Bible.  Either make a Biblical scare fest (We like the Revelations TV show) or don't.  Maybe that woman was supposed to represent a dig at the Religious Right.  I dunno . . .
Really, the acting was right on, Lucy Lawless looked better (younger!) than ever, and the bugs were pretty menacing.
Heck, we want more!!  I hope it did well in the ratings --
peter johnson/denny crane

[ulthar]

peter johnson wrote:

> But the bugs DID eat people!!  Remember?  That was the big deal
> Scare thing about midway through:  They had adapted to eat
> meat, and "We're what's for dinner"!!

Right, but they never really DID go after people. The one scientist dude got bitten to death (sort of) while filling up the gas can, but other than that?  In that silo, they opened this door and let a bunch in, then they just sorta 'went away.'

Actually, that was a common occurence: mean, menacing bugs for a bit, then once the camera angle shifted (or something), attack stopped. Reference the school bus (why was only one child hurt, and there was NOTHING going on as the Dad came on the bus), the girl in the beginning (why was her bf not attacked and the swarm leave the isolation room at that point, etc), on and on.

IMO, the show had some "good" points, but I never really got that sense of "oh crap" from it.

> Heck, we want more!! I hope it did well in the ratings --

Ditto that.  I'd much rather see more of this than what has been tv fare for the past couple of years.
Another thing:  the satellite 'images' of the swarms moved incredibly fast on the US maps...when they said the locusts could fly 300 miles per DAY.  I got the impression the writes thought or believed that noone in the audience had ANY sense of scale or numbers at all.  300 miles per day is VERY SLOW (a typical thunderstorm moves about 20 miles per hour, so that would be 480 miles per day, and you don't seem them moving across whole states in real time on a satellite image).