Bite Me!

'Bite Me!' was great fun watching, I enjoyed every minute if it! Every character is achieving the opposite of what he/she intends to, that is the formula of the comedy effect. The manager of the club tries to organize everything, but gets mad over the whole chaos instead. Buzz the Exterminator loves insects too much to hurt them. The dancers are too tired to dance. And the lady who wants to ruin the manager becomes an attraction of his club instead. Well, for a short time at least. Only the bugs are good at what they are doing: bite! Even if the side-effects are remarkable...

While everyone else would have used a guy in a suit to play the bug monster guy, Brett Piper used stop-animation for that, too, which is an amazing piece of work. Coincidentally, I made some stop-animation student films in the 1980s myself on 8mm film and know how much time, patience and care a few seconds of such a scene take, which is why hardly anyone still uses that technique anymore. Fortunately, exploitation flicks sometimes have a lot more to offer than just the female anatomy bits and buckets of blood. Not that I'm about to complain about either of these two, though... It's bug for the buck.

Every now and then I like watching silly crap. And this movie succeeds in being what it wants to be: Total silly nonsense. Add a little fun stop-motion effects (mutant sex-drive-increasing ticks crawling around everywhere and a human-sized mutant tick-man at the end) and quite a lot of nekkid boobies (provided by Misty Mundae, amongst others), and you could say this one is somewhat of a fun watch. But the acting often is so abominable that it hurts. In the end, all that remains is a movie that isn't going anywhere, but you can have a fun time just staying at the main location of this movie (being a titty-bar infested by the aforementioned critters). Near the end the movie gives more than one nod to older giant monster classics (and this doesn't exactly mean that there is a big climax with a giant monster reeking havoc or anything - just see it and you'll understand).

I enjoy watching cheesy horror movies. The more far-fetched and badly filmed they are, usually the more entertaining. Bite Me was my first and last "Shock-o-Rama" experience. The story had promise (bio-engineered marijuana, giant bugs, and strippers) but the acting is below porno-level, the effects (especially the bugs) look like they were done in Paintshop, and the story contains so many shower scenes and so much idiot dialog that getting through the entire movie was exhausting. Never watch this movie, and if this is an example of Shock-o-Rama's material, stay away from Shock-o-Rama. If you're looking for a good cheesy horror movie, check out "Demons at the Door" or "Corpses are Forever".

A romp. A fun-filled, low budget campy horror movie that is an entertaining way to spend a rainy afternoon. More original that many more expensive movies, I became an instant fan of Mr. Piper.

Never tries to be more than it is but still manages to surpass many films in it's genre, and even some movies that they spent big bucks on.

Misty Mundae, what can you say. The kind of wholesome looking innocent that we would all love to do soft porn with. I really wasn't aware of her "other work" until after seeing this film. Quite versatile, and, uh, talented.

The characters were, by necessity, not multi-dimensional (though a few would be great in 3-D), but they were fun and interesting, in an intentionally cartoonish sort of way.

When it comes to cheap horror/exploitation quickies, writer-director Brett Piper is about as good as it gets. His films tend to be hokey and trashy but they always have a real sense of humor and a unique feel that sets them above the competition. He's one of very few low-budget schlock filmmakers who can pull off deliberately campy dialogue in a way that can make you smirk along with him instead of rolling your eyes in embarrassment, the reaction most horror-comedies tend to get. As was the case with much of his previous work, BITE ME! Is very silly and unrealistic but is fun to watch because of a playful attitude and a witty awareness of its own lack of class. A crate of chemically treated marijuana is delivered to the surly manager of a pathetically seedy, out-of-the-way strip club with a juvenile dinosaur theme. The abrasive manager is a funny character who reminded me of Moe Syszlak from THE SIMPSONS. Stop-motion animated mutant spiders the size of cell phones come crawling out and start attacking his funny, talentless would-be exotic dancers, growing bigger as they suck blood and leaving their victims pumped up with a venom that has a cocaine-like effect. We never find out anything much about the little beasts or their exact origin, but the goofy cast's hysterical reactions to them make for pretty entertaining viewing. Most of the acting is pretty terrible, but the cast seem to be having so much fun with the sleazy material that it's easy to get caught up in the shenanigans. A dimwitted exterminator who reminded me of Otto the bus driver on THE SIMPSONS only makes things worse when he sprays the creatures with pesticide, which makes them instantly grow to even larger sizes. The only character whose presence constantly threatens to spoil the fun is a deranged, screaming, violent DEA agent played by an actor who is too young for the role and whose ridiculous characterization goes embarrassingly overboard in the direction of parody anyway. With the help of some substandard CGI work combined with substandard stop-motion, he eventually morphs into a great looking humanoid spider monster with extra pairs of pincer-equipped arms and huge bug eyes. It's an imaginative creature and makes for a good climactic battle sequence in spite of the shabby (some would say endearingly shabby) effects work. Nothing in BITE ME! Is ever believable, from the skinny little butt-kicking tough girls to the silly mafia type chick with the "New Yawk" accent to the dopey strip club patrons and their cheesy fight scenes, but realism clearly wasn't the point here. If you can put your brain on hold for an hour and a half, you ought to have some fun with this one, much like its participants so obviously did. It's dumb, yes, but it's what would be described sy some as "a hoot".