Try as I might to avoid using a title like "Buggin' Out," or something like that, I secretly capitulate by referring to it in this headline.

Try as I might to avoid using a title like "Buggin' Out," or something like that, I secretly capitulate by referring to it in this headline.

The person that came up with the marketing plan for Bug should be fired, and maybe they already were. Never have I seen a movie so grossly misrepresented to the public. I don't blame folks that went to see it expecting a generic splatter-n-screams horror movie about bugs for leaving the theater feeling cheated and lied to too. I don't blame those folks one bit. And I am very upset that (those) marketer(s) who tricked people into thinking that was what the movie was all about, because it means most folks completely missed a really excellent and psychologically taut movie about inner horror.

Luckily I had heard a couple honest reviews of the movie when it first came out, so I went in expecting to see a film, based on a play, that tells the story of what happens when one man's obsessions flare out of control and engulf the people around him. It is a spine-tingling concoction driven by an incredibly gifted group of actors; the primary trio of Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, and Harry Connick Jr. (who was so deep into his character I only sort of peripherally recognized him).

William Friedkin directs, and while he employs a few camera tricks to unnerve -- a scene where Shannon dresses at a slightly different, and quicker, film speed than the one covering Judd induces a delicious queasiness -- for the most part he depends on minimal set pieces and the terrific script in the hands of the actors. He constructs a piece that does what most translations can't, as it transmits the immediacy of the stage and couches it in the expanded world allowed through film.

Bug truly is a modern horror movie, and I think it should have been presented as such from the very beginning, because it was unfair to trick the public into thinking otherwise. A bait-and-switch, used with such an excellent film, can only disappoint both sides of the creative process; the public is upset with a movie they weren't expecting, and the filmmakers are cheated out of a chane of allowing their excellent vision to stand for itself.