The Millennium Bug
Not since 1999 have we—not the editorial we but rather “we” being humanity, all of earth—been faced with our pending doom so directy. While there have been a myriad of nearly-neigh doomsday sayers, 2012 ranks up there with Y2K for infiltrating our psyches and popular culture alike. Remember how, while we were stockpiling canned Heinz beans and potable water on the eve of the new millennium, Will Smith was rapping about it? Roughly a decade later, instead of Googling how to survive 2012 we can rent the major motion picture, starring the man everyone would want in their survivalist camp, John Cusak (tip: learn how to fly an Antonov 500 aircraft and always listen to Woody Harrelson).
It’s in this spirit that the Projection Booth will be screening The Millennium Bug, a horror/sci-fi feature by Kenneth Crane. On the eve of the end, Byron, Joany, and Clarissa Haskin head up into the woods to avoid the millennium hysteria in peace. Clearly no one in the family saw The Hills Have Eyes, Death Weekend, or Wrong Turn as the woods, inevitably, are filled with rabid hillbillies putting the Haskin family in a far worse predicament than staying in, getting drunk, and going to bed in the new millennium ever would have. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Soon, however, the rednecks turn out to be the least—or at least the smaller—problem when, yes, the millennium bug rises.
The fusion of the mutant/hick horror theme with the monstrous bug invasion adds a B-movie thematic to what is already a B (or C?) film, channeling the likes of Invasion of the Giant Spiders or Wasp Woman. Corn syrup and suspicious looking green splatter abound, but, at the very least, the film might remind us all that since we didn’t die in 1999 there’s a very good chance we won’t in 2012. Maybe.