Bug (1975)

I hope you didn’t get your fill of cockroaches from the last entry, because here’s even more of them! Bug comes with two major distinctions off the top: it’s the fourth movie I’ve written about with animal and/or plant photography from Ken Middleham, master of the artful micro-creature shot since at least The Hellstrom Chronicle, and it’s the final film produced (and co-written) by William Castle , master of the gimmick horror movie since at least The Tingler. Middleham’s contributions are front-and-centre, with the same sort of creative creepy crawly camerawork that you saw in Phase IV, which had been released the previous year. The contributions of Castle are maybe not as obvious—when I think of his classic movies, I think of things with a bit more macabre joviality to them than what you see in this; it also lacks one of his signature theatrical gimmicks, although he claimed to have taken out a one million dollar life insurance policy for the movie’s “lead cockroach”, and apparently tried to find some way to give random audience members the sensation of things crawling on their legs. On the other hand, Castle has always had fairly eclectic tastes when it came to thrillers, and this is a very eclectic movie, the sum of many different clashing ideas that produces something truly and memorably strange.

The White Buffalo (1977)

The western and the monster movie go together pretty well, don’t they? The former idolizes a time of frontiers, unexplored wilderness, a constant need to push outwards into the unknown out a personal desire for glory and riches, with a penchant for lawless violence—so this would be a perfect place for a mysterious creature to show up and wreck the place, especially since those old settlements weren’t exactly sturdy. We didn’t know the North American landscape back then—not fully—and it was primarily a world of stark environments, thick untamed forests and canyons, no gigantic all-encompassing European-style civilization to be found. This is a world that seemed teeming with unexpected terrors (and the indigenous mythologies, no matter the region, have plenty) that hadn’t been crowded out.

I’m sure there must be others that find a way to combine the two, even outside the anything-goes madness of the weird west subgenre, but the only semi-notable I’ve found is this one, a strange film from a strange time in American cinema. It was well past the western’s prime, and is also a generally modest special effects movie from just before the era of special effects blockbusters; as far as I can tell it is largely forgotten, save probably for completists of the Charles Bronson filmography (or for any of the largely overqualified cast of this.) But really, a western Moby-Dick starring Charles Bronson? I knew I had to see this one eventually.