EDITOR’S NOTE: Bug was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find any info on the date. Do you know?

Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by William Castle and Thomas Page, based on Page’s novel The Hephaestus Plague, this is the last film Castle would make.

Bradford Dillman spent so much of the 70s at war with nature. Now he’s Professor James Parmiter, whose wife (Joanna Miles) dies spectacularly when one of these fire farting cockroaches gets into her hair and then her ear. He keeps one of the bugs alive and experiments on it. But before you know it, he can talk to the insects and breeds them with other bugs to make them more intelligent than humans. Why would you do this?

Miles was afraid of cockroaches and told Szwarc that she couldn’t do the scene. Castle told them they were harmless and put one on his arm. It then bit him.

Castle wanted a gimmick. First, he thought of putting brushes — like windshield wipers — near the seats that would rub against the audience’s legs to make them feel like bugs were crawling on them. Theater owners turned him down, so he insured the giant cockroach for $1 million.

This sets more than a woman’s head on fire. It also cooks a cat and starts a fire inside the Brady Bunch house.

Unlike every disaster movie, this starts with an earthquake and gets worse from there. Ken Middleham was the man to go to for directing insects, as he also directed Phase IV — this is like that movie, but almost relentlessly stupid, and I say that with pure love — and The Hellstrom Chronicle.

This starts with trucks and people going up in an inferno and ends with Bradford Dillman, a diving helmet and bugs who spell things. It’s so goofy yet so earnest, a movie unaware of how dumb it gets, and those are the best kinds of movies because they’re not dull – and that’s what I look for.