The Nest (1988)

Killer bug movies typically always suck, and this is no exception.  Giant roaches?  Err not exactly.  Despite the poster, the movie doesn't deliver anything of the sort, instead you got hordes... well clumps of roaches that terrorize a small island town.  It's always a small isolated town in horror flicks isn't it? 

Average McBoringCop

The Nest is a slow burn sadly, and a movie of this type really needs to get off the ground running cause I really have no interest in any of these awful characters.  Everyone in this island town is some weird overacted character, and it's truly dreadful.  Everyone is also just nasty, disgusting behaviour, and the cafe the movie keeps using as a backdrop for so many scenes is a nonstop series of health code violations.  Maybe this is the point they were trying to make with the setting as to something that attracts roaches?  A joke is made about how leaving food out attracts roaches and everyone in this little town is apparently a slob too.  At least I hope the nasty look was intentional for this movie. 

Don't you dare harm kitty!  DON'T YOU DARE!

So our movie follows the adventures of the local town sheriff played by Franc Luz.  He's a total bore of a character in a sea of silly over acting characters.  We also get introduced to a sort of love triangle with the sheriff that you will not give a damn about.  Way too much time is spent on these waste of space characters when I came for a giant killer roach movie.  After all the important character development for all these characters who you will never remember the names of, we finally start getting into some monster mayhem. Naturally some innocent animals become victims to the roaches from hell to start it off.  Poor animals always get it first in these bug movies don't they?  The movie loses major points also for having some evil fuckers using a poor cat as bait to catch the roaches.  Seriously we get another character come in midway who as soon as you see her come off the plane, you know she's evil.  I mean the bitch even has a haircut that makes her look evil, and then she smiles as she sacrifices a kitty to the meat eating roaches.  

Kitchen nightmares

By the time we finally get to the roaches, it's quite underwhelming as it's really just a bunch of regular roaches.  Of course they can strip meat off peoples bones within seconds, it's still not exactly impressive.  Even as the movie progresses and the roach mayhem grows, it's typically just little clumps of roaches and in most cases it's baffling how anyone is actually getting killed by these things when they are so easy to simply walk away from.  And in many scenes the character do just that, as they see roaches and they just leave.  These things are not swarming and tackling anyone, the threat is pretty ridiculous overall with several of the kills being against immobile people.  The movie doesn't have the budget to have some giant roach swarm menace, so here is some roaches here and there, but they make lots of noise so there must be lots of them!  What about the giant roaches?  Everything is scarier when you supersize the bugs in these movies, so clearly we are going to get some of that right?  Well sort of.... at some point.  Where do the roaches come from?  Well an evil corporation's experiments duh, and the movie brings up the corporation all the time as it's so important to the plot, but the movie will never actually show us anything except some signs plastered around town about the company.  You kind of expect a showdown in a giant corporate setting or evil labs, but the movie can only afford the inside of a lighthouse apparently for most of the evil company shenanigans.  Roaches were experimented on and now they are super roaches.  That is the gist of the plot, but who cares as I was just happy to get some chaos as the roaches start terrorizing the towns population.

 Roach Man!

Chaos erupts, roaches are everywhere (kinda), some people die cause they are stupid and don't just run away.  The movie doesn't skimp on the gore at least as people are torn apart by these tiny things.  And if watching this wasn't painful enough, we get a scene of roaches attacking the previously mentioned disgusting cafe to the tune 'La Cucaracha'.  The movie is just plain stupid, and when the roach mayhem is at it's height, the movie goes all out and starts introducing us to roach hybrids!  Cats turned into mutant roach cat things, man roaches, and so on.  You get all kinds of crazy creatures near the end suddenly who really don't seem to pose any threat either as they are all shitty puppets that move slower than a Romero zombie.  All of this nonsense builds up to the climatic battle with the giant roach queen thing in the hive cave place.  The queen is some crazy monster that looks like something out of The Thing and nothing like a roach.  The Nest is a pretty crummy killer bug movie that is also a total bore.  Even shlock like Ticks gave us b-movie cheese (and Clint Howard) which you can enjoy for it's tongue in cheek nature, but this is just such a deadpan slog.  The movie is played too seriously while it lacks any actors worth a damn, a budget, and any fun.  If you want to watch a good bad bug flick then check out the crazy killer snail movie Slugs instead or something actually good like the classic Arachnophobia.  If it's roaches you must have, then see Mimic, which has actual giant roaches and is also a decent a movie to boot.