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Maybe it gets better. I wouldn't know. I made it through the first twenty minutes or so before cutting it off and entering a period of mourning. It was obvious that the plot itself was a familiar one. A man, Paul LeMatt, a professor of entymology at Columbia, drives with his dog to a small town in Ohio in search of his ex wife, Diana Scarwid. There he encounters people who either ignore him or are hostile. Oh, they may smile but there's something going on underneath.
That sort of arrangement is home turf for movie makers and viewers alike, and it's pregnant with possibilities. You can turn out a neatly drawn commercial success like "Bad Day at Black Rock." Or it would have made, and probably DID make, a nice "Twilight Zone" episode.
The cast includes some seasoned performers too, as well as some formerly prominent names. Kenneth Toby, a veteran of science fiction, is the superficially amiable motel manager. Diana Scarwid can give an impressive performance, as she did in, say, "Silkwood." For some of the others, their range is limited.
But it's poorly directed and shabbily written.
Example of shabby direction. That dog of LeMatt's is disliked by Kenneth Toby, right off the bat. So when LeMatt walks out to the street, Toby sneaks up to the window of his room, peers in at the dog, and something zaps. Cut to LeMatt in the street. He hears his dog howling away. Then a POV shot of presumably the dog zipping along towards LeMatt then past him while the wind blows and LeMatt gawks at the camera. Cut to an identical shot -- coming from the other direction! Whatever the camera represents, whatever LeMatt is staring at, is never shown. Maybe it was nothing, because suddenly the wind stops and LeMatt is alone in the street, looking a little bit puzzled. "You should never have brought that dog in the first place," remarks a smiling Toby from the porch. Question: What the hell is that scene all about?
Example of shabby writing. Well, TWO examples. (1) If you were to sit down and write a stereotypical waitress in a small-town diner, without the exercise of any craft whatever, you'd come up with an expressionless babe with her hair piled on top of her head, chewing gum, sauntering among the tables. Right. (2) Anything resembling believability is thrown out the window in favor of special effects. LeMatt's car chugs to a halt, then explodes while it is waiting to be fixed at the garage. Chugging to a halt: believable. Exploding: supernatural. Not even Edgar Allan Poe would endorse such an event.
And the invaders themselves? Think of a modest masterpiece like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Something is going wrong in Dr. Kevin McCarthy's small town, and it takes half the movie for the mystery to be unraveled, and all the time suspense is building and doubt is growing. Here, twenty minutes into the movie, a stranger walks into a motel room and tears off his plastic face, revealing a pulsing, light-emitting, naked brain. The pregnancy is aborted.
I won't tell you the ending because I don't know what it is, nor do I care. I suppose it had something to do with insects because why else would Paul LeMatt be an entymologist? (By the way, who's handling his classes?) But I'm not even sure bugs were involved. It's entirely possible that the bug business was adventitious. The writers may have made him a specialist in insects and then forgot all about it. It wouldn't surprise me.


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