2 gibbles out of 5

Director: David Winning

After watching Black Swarm, if I told you that director David Winning had worked on a Power Rangers movie, would you be surprised?  Probably not.

Black Swarm is watchable.  That sounds like a brush off, but many films are not watchable.  Winning has also helmed several not-in-theater monster movie affairs, and Swarm shows a competence with the concept.  But, much like a lot of 90s DTV that have CGI’d covers promising wackiness that never quite rears its head on film, Winning follows a tried and true lower budget formula of promising a lot and showing us little.  Thankfully, what is shown doesn’t look that bad.

So there are some scary wasps who are turning people into zombies.  There.  That’s your one line pitch.  Exterminator Sebastien Roberts is just about to leave his hometown when these wasps start causing crazy stingy deaths.  Thankfully, he has some kind of bug background beyond extermination that makes him the foremost expert on dealing with the critters, along with scientist Robert Englund.  There’s some developments with Roberts’ twin brother’s wife having come back to town after her husband has died… and maybe she was actually in love with Twin #1 who is still alive, so that’s good.  There’s some twists regarding where the wasps came from.

But overall, if you’ve been down this ‘creep of the week’ style film before, you know what to expect: a couple deaths, a couple plot threads, a loose romantic storyline, and probably an explosion toward the end.  If that sounds like a generic description of any movie, that’s what Black Swarm suffers from.  It doesn’t really define itself very well.  I respect that Winning applied his budget properly and our brief gore effects (in the form of the zombies or their pre-zombie death scenes) look fine and our buggy swarm – something that looks dodgy even in big budget movies – actually works, and matches the crisp color gloss of the production.  But there were moments when I felt like I had missed some kind of plot development and so would rewind ten minutes or so and… nope, I’ve been watching the whole time.

Englund is always fun to watch in regular roles, and the cast does a good job of playing each of their mostly 1-dimensional characters true to form.  Nothing sticks out – either bad or good – making Black Swarm fairly forgettable, but easy to watch.

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