“I happened to find a pile of rancid trash in the dumpster behind the 7-11.” “Mmm!”

Justin’s rating: If only I could get rid of my problems that easy

Justin’s review: Here’s some free advice for you: Whenever a movie begins with “Meet the” and ends with a family name, you are almost guaranteed to be in for an abnormal and disturbing trip. This is certainly true with, say, Meet the Feebles, Meet the Hollowheads, or Meet the Applegates. Usually you end up leaving those films wishing you hadn’t met those folks, but that’s the price you pay when you dip into the deep end of cult.

Nestled between Heathers and Hudson Hawk on his filmography, Director Michael Lehmann took at stab at… whatever this is. I dare you to try to categorize Meet the Applegates, because it’s one of those outliers that defies simple classification. I guess you could call it a satire on American consumerism using an absurd premise, a la Coneheads. Or you could just call it “weird and why did you bring this into my house?”

Giant bugs from the Amazonian rainforest come upon a Dick and Jane book as their habitat is torn down. Taking inspiration from this treatise on suburban culture, a family of four bugs shapeshift into human forms (off camera) and move to America to prepare the downfall of humanity as we know it. To do that, they’ll need to pass off as “normal” as possible — there’s your satire, film buffs — so that they can sabotage the nuclear power plant and trigger a meltdown. If and when that happens, the bugs assume that they’ll be the only ones left to inherit the land.

This mission is put in jeopardy as the Applegate clan becomes corrupted by the temptations of middle-class living. Dick (Ed Begley Jr.) has an affair with a non-bug co-worker, Jane (Stockard Channing) takes to armed robbery to support her shopping addiction, Johnny (Robert Jayne) devolves into a pot-smoking metalhead, and Sally (Camille Cooper) is impregnated by a football jock. It goes from bad to worse in record time, and the bug family starts letting their disguises slip as they start cocooning the natives. When their boss — the dreaded Aunt Bea (Dabney Coleman) — shows up, it may be too late to salvage the situation.

These sorts of black comedy satires tend to get gross and offensive pretty quickly, so I was on guard for that. It’s definitely R-rated with its themes, but the more light-hearted tone keeps it from descending into dark places that are best left alone. It’s just hard to reconcile the cheery Americana with incognito bugs eating trash, being sexually assaulted, and dabbling in the seedy underbelly of the suburbs. It’s like this film took a starter class from David Lynch and figured, eh, that’s enough, it’d figure out the rest on the way.

I mean, it’s weird to the bone — even the family dog is a disguised fly — and anyone with a phobia about bugs is probably going to want to skip right by this. But is there anything to say in its defense?

Sure. The puppetry — full and partial bug prostheses — are really well-done, and sometimes the humor and satire are pretty funny. But it’s a very hard recommendation considering how much this movie wildly vacillates between cruelty and cleverness, repugnancy and charm.

Wholesome this isn’t, but what did you expect from shapeshifting bugs trying to bring about the apocalypse? If nothing else, this might be good ammunition to chuck at a cocky friend who won’t stop whining about “all movies being the same these days.”

Intermission!

• The tribal chant that turns out to be “See Dick run” because they’re learning English
• First person bug view
• The family doing homework by watching TV
• Who introduces themselves by saying that they’ve been “voted best hair in the senior class?”
• “You HOMO SAPIEN SCUM!”
• “OK crawlers, rise and mutate!”
• Making out in a grave is not hygenic
• The sonic bug repeller
• Sally’s eyes really bugged out
• The straws in the syrup bottles
• Bugs like drinking Grasshoppers
• “She made me wallow in decadent consumerism.”
• A roach is holding a roach
• Cocoon management is tougher than you’d think
• Spot’s transformation into a mega-fly
• Spot, nooooo!
• Don’t get into a shoving match with a pregnant bug-lady
• Eww, he crushed her egg!
• That’s a lot of basement cocoons
• “We’ll talk hormones later!”
• This church has no problem setting up nooses in the sanctuary