Director/Screenplay – Kyle Rankin, Producers – Jeff Balis, Bruce Davey, Rhoades Rader & T.J. Sakesegawa, Photography – Thomas Ackerman, Music – Steven Gutheinz, Visual Effects – Dilated Pixels (Supervisor – Efram Potelle), Practical Creature Effects Supervisor – Jerry Constantine, Special Effects Supervisor – Svetozar Karatanchev, Production Design – Kess Bonnett. Production Company – Icon Productions/Heavy Duty Entertainment.
Cast
Christopher Marquette (Cooper), Brooke Nevin (Sara), Kinsey Packard (Cindy), Ray Wise (Ethan), E. Quincy Sloan (Hugo), Wesley Thompson (Albert), Linda Park (Leechee), Deborah Geffner (Maureen), Jim Cody Williams (Jed), Bru Muller (Roger), Atanas Srebrev (Wildeyes), Dale Simonton (Ed)
Plot
Cooper has been gotten a job at a company due to his father’s connections but acts a constant clown and takes nothing seriously. He is about to be fired by his boss Maureen when something happens. Cooper comes around in a cocoon and tears his way out to find it is now some days later. He frees Maureen and others in the office to find the city is now overrun by giant insects. Cooper frees Maureen’s daughter Sara from her car outside only to see Maureen snatched by a flying insect. Cooper frees several others from cocoons and they set out to make it to the safety of Cooper’s father’s survival bunker, all the while trying to avoid the giant insect menace that has overrun the world.
Director Kyle Rankin first appeared with the screenplay for Reindeer Games (1996), not to be confused with the later John Frankenheimer film. He made his directorial debut as co-director of The Battle of Shaker Heights (2003), which was the film selected in the Project Greenlight tv series competition promoted by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to highlight up and coming filmmakers. Infestation was Rankin’s second film as director/writer and he next went on to make Nuclear Family (2012), the witty zombie comedy Night of the Living Deb (2015), The Witch Files (2018) and Run Hide Fight (2020). The surprise about such a deliberately cheesy film as Infestation – a B movie if there ever as one – is that it is backed by Icon Productions, the production company of none other than Mel Gibson.
It is hard to tell if Infestation is a B+ budget film or, given Icon’s involvement, an A- one. Whichever the case, it does have some surprisingly good giant bug effects. There are some appealingly grotesque images of spider-human hybrids where the bugs have overtaken the entire body of a person, while at one point we even get the image of a spider-poodle. No explanation is ever offered for what the bugs are or where they come from – whether it is an Alien Invasion or whether the bugs have emerged from somewhere else – everyone just wakes up in cocoons a few days later and the bugs have overrun society.
Infestation is made with a sense of humour. The emphasis is on the characters more so than the bugs for the greater part, where all prove a bunch of endearingly inept schmucks. As such, Christopher Marquette proves a likeable loser – he gets to come across as a jerk for much of the film, particularly the early sections, but you also warm up to him and he proves undeniably likeable. There is a good deal of running banter between he and Brooke Nevin throughout. Equally Ray Wise provides entertaining support when he turns up as Christopher Marquette’s father in the latter sections of the film.
