Black Swarm: Just when I thought zombies couldn't get more boring...

Alrighty, then. Black Swarm can't decide if it wants to be a bug infestation flick, or a zombie flick, so it tried, unsuccessfully, to combine the two. yawn.

I'm probably being overly critical of this movie. Zombie tales have always left me cold, and when I sat down to watch Black Swarm I was extremely tired. When I'm tired I am very difficult to please.

Be that as it may, lazy writing five minutes into the script turned me off, and it just continued through the entire, agonizing, two hours. It was supposed to be important to know that the man you see killed off in the opening sequence has an identical twin. So how do they make sure you're aware of this? They show headlines in newspapers proclaiming that a twin is killed in a freak accident. Not a man, or a worker, but a twin. I can't think of any newspaper, even in a small town, that would resort to such a headline, except in bad cinema.

You'd think that this would be crucial to the plot, since they made such a big deal about it. It's only crucial to the thinly woven, melodramatic relationship among two of the main characters. I was expecting perhaps a genetic code plot twist. Something. Anything more than a high school romantic triangle that would never happen in real life. This was just a tired, useless, plot device. Again, yawn.

So what's at the heart of this movie? Wasps have been engineered by the government. These wasps are going around laying eggs in the citizens of a small town and turning them into drones (a.k.a. zombies). These wasps are vicious, territorial, unstoppable. Great. Wonderful. I don't care. Just get me to the end so I can see a surviving wasp crawl from a nest, warning me there will be a sequel.

The only good thing about Black Swarm is Robert Englund. Period. He's too good for a movie like this. He delivers his lines like the professional he is. He deserves so much better. At least when he did Python, that was a movie with the right amount of camp and humor to believe he took that role for the fun of it. Black Swarm should have been fun, but it was horrifying in all the wrong ways. Not even showing an Elm Street sign in the middle of the film, a blatant nod to Robert Englund's infamous role, could save this.

Next time I have a wasp nest in my yarn, I may just leave it alone instead of removing it. Wasps have suffered enough already by being 'featured' in this waste of time.