Bug
by: William Friedkin
Bug
William Friedkin
Lionsgate
By James Calemine
Kentucky girl Ashley Judd was recently nominated for a Saturn Award for this film. Judd plays a lonely waitress living in a deteriorating motel room who meets a disturbed war veteran infested with microscopic bugs during his duty in the middle east. Soon they find a bug infestation and events take a dark turn for the worse.
William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Excorcist, The Thin Blue Line) directs this unnerving story. Harry Connick, Jr. plays Judd’s stalking ex-con, ex-husband in this violent psycho-thriller. Oklahoma native Leon Russell’s “This Masquerade” plays in the soundtrack (along with Susan Tedeschi’s “I Feel In Love" and Donny Ray Ford’s “Cowboy Boots”) as a song on the midnight radio.
An uneasy current runs through this film—based on the Tracy Letts play--that touches on technology…military experiments…menacing chemicals…death machines and weird conspiracies float through this film like a poisonous infection waiting to strike society. Judd shines in this creepy thriller as Bug somehow gets under your skin…