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The Millennium Bug
Starring John Charles Meyer, Jessica Simons, Christine Haeberman, Jon Briddell
Directed by Kenneth Cran


It's December 31, 1999, and paranoid father Byron (Jon Briddell) is taking his young daughter Clarissa (Christine Haeberman) and new wife Joany (Jessica Simons) into the woods to avoid any possible problems.  He thinks he's leading them to safety, but he's really leading them to death.

In the woods is a hillbilly family who are looking for new blood to help create a new, non-genetically-deformed offspring.  The leader of the family, Billa (John Charles Meyer) discovers the hapless family, and kidnaps them and brings them to his house, where he intends to marry Clarissa.

That, unfortunately, is the least of their concerns.  Also in the words is a strange crypto bug that comes alive every thousand years, and grows to substantial size.  It's now on the prowl, and is heading straight for the hillbilly house.

The main selling point for this film is that it does absolutely no CGI work whatsoever.  The creature is fully  manned by a guy in a suit.  Miniatures of the house and town were created to show the creature as a huge thing, when it's really a man in a suit. 

This selling point is a great one, because now these creature features rely way too heavily on CGI, and crappy CGI at that (see any SyFy Original film).  What "The Millennium Bug" does is teleports us back to the golden age of creature cinema where the effects are cheesy, the acting is over the top, but it's done in such a way that the viewers enjoy.  The actors know this isn't a serious film, and treats it as such, which the audience can relate to because they also know it's totally beyond the realm of reality. 

Yes, you can tell the guy being sucked into the ground is a dummy.  Yes, you can tell the lady didn't really take an axe to the head.  Yes, you know the creature didn't really chomp down on anyone, but it's still a good old time, with effects Tom Savini would be proud. 

The only downside to the film is that it focuses on the Y2K fear, which was thirteen years earlier, so it's not really as effective as it would've been if it was released in 1999.

My Rating: B-

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