Entry 80: The Nest (1988)

The Nest (1988)

Dir: Terence H. Winkless

"The terror has hatched."

When pharmaceutically-enhanced killer cockroaches invade a small coastal town, Sheriff Franc Luz (Ghost Town) teams up with his estranged lover (Lisa Langlois from Class of 1984) and an alcoholic, chain-smoking, Hawaiian shirt-wearing exterminator (Stephen Davies, Inserts, Lords of the Deep) to stop them.  The roaches are the result of experiments conducted by sexy, crazy scientist Terri Treas (from the Alien Nation television series), who gets turned on when the bugs begin munching on her hand.  Because this flick dips it's toes into Jaws territory, corrupt mayor Robert Lansing (Empire of the Ants, TVs Automan) tries to cover everything up.  The roaches gestate inside cocoons that look like giant, slimy, engorged scrotums and can take on the characteristics of whatever they consume, so we get a cat-roach and Lansing mutates into a Cronenberg-inspired man-roach.  There's a battle with roaches in a diner using all manner of kitchen implements and a climactic showdown with the 8-foot tall, multi-headed roach queen in the caves beneath the town.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this 50s creature-feature throwback is a helluva lot of fun, and much better than most of the other films Corman's Concorde was putting out at the time.  There are some great, surprising gore effects (a cat being eaten from the inside out, roaches forcing themselves down the throat of a bedridden fat woman and Lansing's aforementioned transformation are particular highlights), solid performances by a cast of genre vets and character actors and director Winkless maintains a lightly humorous tone that never veers into overt slapstick.  Give this one a look!  As an aside, Guillermo del Toro's film Mimic uses some suspiciously similar plot elements to this film (right down to the origin of/purpose for the mutated roaches), albeit played completely straight...