Bite Me!

Where to start on this one? It is a "horror" film that aspires for camp, and never takes itself seriously. At all. Nothing is worse than a movie that aims for camp and misses. This one misses, but not by a wide mark. It almost makes it. The bug effects are cheesy, and the filmmakers know it. (I still found them creepy, but I am a major arachnophobe. To anyone else, they're just kind of bad.) I considered this to basically be a T & A movie with the comic horror grafted on to have something going on between nude scenes. The T & A aspect of the film was much better than I thought it would be. First, since the setting is a strip club, much of the nudity is of strippers on stage, which is one of the least erotic ways to portray female skin. But it really was better than you would think, partly because they weren't really playing it "straight" in these scenes, but sort of playing it for chuckles. Second, as anyone who reads a lot my reviews would know, (NOTE: I would find it shocking, and a bit disturbing, if there were any such person) I have been on a long anti-silicone crusade. Ladies, those big stiff, spherical mounds of minerals are UGLY!!! Most or all of the boobies on display here are natural-looking and beautiful. Yes, they may not be DDD's, but IMHO, are a hundred times prettier than, say, Julie Strain's. Misty Mundae is really pretty and sweet-looking, if not the best actress in the world. And especially pretty was Erika Smith. I'd like to see both of them get chances in better movies. The three main male characters were silly, attempted campy, way-over-the-top, messes. If you're going to check this one out, do so for the pretty girls, not the horror or the camp. You'll be much less disappointed.

this film is rubbish... campy is OK, but bad campy is a sin. the thing that makes this film really unforgivable is the attitude of it's star misty mundae who seems whiny and spoiled on her interview. you would think she had talent if you saw her interview. some have said that the nudity at least redeems the film, however the nudity is C rate also. the film just sucks and it totally misses the mark. the director seems like he doesn't have any artistic feel for even making a bad film, which i guess there is an art to everything. furthermore, the actresses come across very ignorant in there blind backing of the film with statements like "yeah i hate CG it looks so bad, stop animation is so much more real"... get off it you are giving indie films a bad rep and making us look dumb. i think they might not even know what CG is they just where told to say that. ps the stop animation is called antiquated for a reason.

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".

'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).