CICADA! (2018)

CICADA! (2018)

Tagline: Don't be afraid-uh.

(Comedy, Bad CGI, Terrible Acting) [R]

Note: This movie was never given an MPAA rating, but it would likely get an [R]. 

You wear a tinfoil hat and you can get away with just about anything.

In this one, a bunch of giant mutant blood-sucking cicadas about the size of small dogs, attack Los Angeles, and now everyone has to deal with it. The story mostly revolves around a nerdy scientist, a disgraced baseball player, and small bar owner, and a stripper that just quit her job because of rude customers.  

First off, this movie is distributed by WILD EYE RELEASING and if you read a lot of my reviews you already know what you are in for. WILD EYE RELEASING is one of the worst when it comes to film distribution. This means there are some worse ones out there, but WILD EYE is seemingly trying to hang out right at the bottom of the barrel. If you had an audition for acting and just had 100 random people show up to try to get into a movie, this would be the studio that picked the worst 20 or 30 auditions and sent everyone else home. 

I think my biggest issue with this flick is the fact that we actually get some really poorly made giant cicada models, but most of this film is riddled with CGI that looks like it was lifted from the early ’90s and then pixelated down into oblivion to make it even worse looking than that. I am not going to say it is BIRDEMIC bad, but it’s just really terribly bad. We also get an amazingly bad script that by itself must have taken some real effort to get as efficiently terrible as it is.  

As far as the cast Cindy was played by Cassandra Hein. I haven’t seen any of her 3 other films, but she does have a short film she directed coming out.  Jeffrey Ryan Kent played Johnny Bash and is probably the worst thing about this whole movie. His acting is annoyingly bad. It doesn’t look like he’s done much with acting or directing since this movie came out in 2018.  Beau Crawford plays Randy and he is in the same boat as Jeffrey. His acting was a little better, but he also hasn’t done anything in film since this movie came out. Rounding out the main cast we have Mike Nielsen who plays Nelson Phillips. Like everyone else but Cassandra, he also is not in film since this thing came out. So well… that doesn’t sound good. 

In a comedy, you can get away with a lot of bad effects and terrible acting as long as some of the humor lands, and some of the humor does land, but not very much. There is one anti-trans joke in this so if that type of thing offends you then maybe skip this one. Just as a heads up, seeing this movie is not going to bring anything great to your life no matter where you stand on anything, so just be aware of all that. I will say this flick accomplishes exactly what it set out to accomplish. It gives us a cheap flick with a cool-looking misleading poster, throws in some nudity, and sci-fi comments that don’t make any sense at all. In one scene were are told that the bugs are basically bombs, and can explode if they hit something fast enough because “sugar” is flammable? Then when the bugs are getting shot, they don’t explode into fire, they just explode into guts. This thing just doesn’t make any sense and it’s not supposed to be, but geez…at least try for an ounce of consistency.

As far as the pacing this movie is pretty uneven and the direction is rough as heck. I did like the score though. Also, some of the "making of" credits scenes are actually better than the actual movie. I can’t recommend this, but as far as B-movie’s go it has its moments. This one gets a 3 out of 7, but don’t say you weren’t warned, for a lot of people this is going to be a 2 (Barely Watchable) or worse.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF OW MY NECK PRODUCTIONS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.