“Nobody is out there.”

Justin’s rating: Shut. Up. Cooper.

Justin’s review: There are many ways that the world might conceivably end. Asteroid? Zombies? Solar flare? Disease? Sure, that’s all well and good, but have you considered… bugs? A bugpocalypse might be so terrifying to behold that nobody wants to think about it or stock up on mountains of Raid spray.

You know who probably spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about this concept? The makers of Infestation, a splatty horror flick that starts off well after plus-sized bugs took over the world and drove humans to the brink of extinction.

It really annoyed me, probably more than it should have, that this movie doesn’t even try to explain where the bugs came from. Or why they’re so big. Or how they sucker-punched the entire world. Or why they’re blind. The creators here wanted to rush ahead to “quirky people vs. big bugs” without putting in the groundwork. I know this is a silly action-horror-thing, but some attempt to create cohesion with a backstory would’ve been appreciated.

Anyway, Cooper (Chris Marquette, Freddy vs. Jason) is a corporate slacker who somehow escapes from being captured by web-spinning flying giant beetles that all of the sudden appeared everywhere and incapacitated people with a loud noise. He teams up with a doctor named Sara (Brooke Nevin) and some other hapless survivors.

Do they stay put? This movie plays by zombie rules, so of course not — they immediately try to make a road trip across bug territory so they can be picked off one by one.

Trying to whip up a comedy/action/horror flick isn’t as easy as making the characters Buffy or Simon Pegg and trying to crack a joke between a gory scene or two. It’s got to be decently funny, decently goopy, and faithful to all of the genres its using. Get the mix wrong, and it just feels off.

It’s hard to explain exactly how, but Infestation clearly struggles to get this mix right. The bugs never seem like a real threat — or a logical possibility — and there’s not nearly as much comedy as I was hoping. Cooper is a shallow loser who doesn’t really rise to the challenge of the apocalypse so much as slump his way through it. The more this story progressed, the more I wanted to slap him with a large fish — a halibut, perhaps — and then walk away.

The others aren’t that much better (the weathergirl is so strangely bad that I wanted her to go right into therapy without pause). The one bright spot in the casting is Twin Peaks’ Ray Wise, who shows up as a hyper-survivalist to make us wonder why he isn’t the lead character.

Infestation isn’t a well-made or well-acted movie at all. There are a couple of interesting bits, such as the insect-people hybrids and some practical bug effects, but it’s not enough for the price of attention. I knew that I didn’t like this by about minute 20, and I’d love to spare you even that much.

Intermission!

• Haha the “made you look” game looks fun
• The bugs are very much attracted to noise
• Jump out of a moving truck, you’re gonna get your leg broke. And then run over.
• Make sure to Feng Shui your hideout. Where did they get all the candles?
• Going right for the dictionary to realize how you’ve been insulted
• Big spider dude is pretty freaky-deaky
• “That thing was my brother.” “I know. I’m sorry. He seemed nice.”
• This movie has SO MANY fat candles
• Double-barrel shotguns can fire five, six times without reloading
• Spider-man, Spider-man, please get out of my den, Spider-man
• Cooper’s dad smearing goop on Cooper because he didn’t get as much on him was funny
• Lucy the spider-poodle!
• “I’m aware it’s a word.”
• “Let me tell you a story. You’re an idiot.”