I've just seen William Friedkin's Bug. I'll cut to the chase here: this was one of the most terrible films I've seen in quite a while. It was complete ass. Be warned, I'm about to give away the whole thing - so don't keep reading if you plan on watching this and don't want to be spoiled. If you do plan on watching this, I'd like to know your reasons, just out of curiosity. Are you a masochist? A boring person? What?

The premise:

Ashley Judd is a trashy lonely woman who lives alone in a seedy motel. She meets a Mysterious Stranger and falls in love with him over the course of about ten minutes. Her jailbird ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr) shows up every now and then to smack her around a little. Before too long, the Mysterious Stranger puts forth his conspiracy theory about how the army infected him with parasitic bugs. Ashley Judd totally buys into this. Chaos ensues.

The problem:

I was intrigued by this film because I was under the impression that the bug thing was this Big Question. Are the bugs real? Not real? Are these two people crazy? Or are they the only sane people? William Friedkin directed The Exorcist, so I assumed he'd be bringing the scary. Like, the producers phoned him up and said "Yo Bill, we need some scary. Can you bring it?" and he was all like "It's done broughted."

But no. Sadly, no. There is no mystery here at all. There is absolutely no question that both Ashley Judd and the Mysterious Stranger are batshit insane, obsessive, delusional, etc. So you find yourself watching something that you thought might be a thriller, or at least have a considerable plot twist at the end. And about a half hour into it you realize - oh snap. This is not a thriller. There is no twist ending to reward me for making it through the next 60 minutes. This is all there is.

And I'll tell you what "all there is" consists of - two crazy people in a seedy motel room, talking about bugs and picking at their own scabs. OMG SRSLY. That's it. That's the ENTIRE FILM. To be fair, there's a brief scene at the beginning that's set in a bar, but the entire rest of the film is set in this crappy motel room.

I suppose there are people out there who like films about two people talking. I mean, this film right here has seven and a half stars on the IMDB. This is because some people equate "arty and pretentious" with "Quality." As a former student of film, I am here to tell you that this is not so. Most of the time, "arty and pretentious" is just plain boring, and people like to pretend that it's not boring because liking that sort of thing makes them feel intelligent. TRUE FACT.

I digress, as I often do. The moral of this story is that You The Viewer wind up watching two nutters talk about bugs for quite a long time. And there's no indication at all that anything else is going to happen. The only thing that happens is that they get crazier and crazier until it reaches the point where they've run off all their friends and have covered every surface of their shitty motel room with aluminum foil.

At the end they die. Because this is the only way to kill the bugs that don't really exist. And you want to know what? I was GLAD they died, because they were tedious boring assholes.

Conclusion: NO

Labels: crap films