The Nest (1988) Revisited – Horror Movie Review

The episode of Best Horror Movie You Never Saw covering The Nest was Written and Edited by Ric Solomon, Narrated by Kier Gomes, Produced by John Fallon and Tyler Nichols, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

While the early to mid-part of the ’80s was the time of the slasher, the later part of the decade decided to try a lot of new things. You had non-slasher sequels like Phantasm 2, Ghoulies 2, Critters 2, and Poltergeist III. You also had cool one-off properties like Bad Dreams, Dead Heat, and Killer Klowns From Outer Space. 1988 alone brought back the killer bug trope and while Juan Piquer Simon has the more famous gross out insect fest with Slugs, the other one is most certainly in the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw camp. Like Hudson from Aliens feared, let’s go on a bug hunt with 1988’s The Nest (watch it HERE).

When you try and Google or look up The Nest you will end up with the 2020 film of the same name starring Carrie Coon and Jude Law. That movie may be fine and all but not what we are looking for. That movie has a serious lack of meat-eating roaches. The movie we are looking for is the late ’80s gem based on the 1980 book of the same name by Eli Cantor. It was written during the prime of gross-out-cover horror novels and you can find out all about that period by checking out the awesome retrospective novel Paperbacks from Hell. Today’s movie subject was produced and distributed by Concorde Pictures and Julie Corman. Julie is the wife of legendary Roger Corman and Concorde is the LA based studio that he founded in the early 1980s.

The movie follows the same basic plot of the book. A small island town on the east coast has to deal with a cockroach problem that is anything but normal. The movie was written by Robert King, no relation to a certain prolific novelist, and this King has had a very interesting career. This movie was his first theatrical screenplay, and he would go on to write the recent Last Drive In pick Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge. He is also responsible for what may be the most notorious flop in Hollywood history with Cutthroat Island. In addition to those credits, he created the mega hit TV show The Good Wife and other long-lasting series The Good Fight and Evil. On the directing front, we had first timer Terrence H. Winkless. Winkless is anything but a household name with smaller, forgotten movie projects and a handful of TV episodes on various shows but has one specific contribution to horror and it’s a big one. Winkless wrote the screenplay for 1981’s second most popular werewolf movie, The Howling.

The in front of the camera talent is another mixed bag of lesser-known performers but they all do admirable jobs here. In the lead role of Sheriff Tarbell is Frank Luz who you may have seen in non-genre works like Don Juan Demarco and When Harry Met Sally. Here he is the likeable town lawman who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of the Mayor’s daughter. That daughter is played by Lisa Langlois. Langlois had a great run in the early ’80s with horror movies like Happy Birthday to Me and Deadly Eyes with a special shout-out to one of this writers favorites, Class of 1984. Rounding out the cast are Stephen Davies as the eccentric exterminator Homer and Robert Lansing as the Mayor. Lansing is almost certainly the most famous of the cast though it was mainly through TV work. He appeared in over 20 episodes of shows like 87th Precinct, 12 O’Clock High, and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. The cast works really well together and it’s one of the main reasons that the film is so watchable. There is great chemistry between Luz and Langlois as the two leads while Davies’ exterminator Homer is the comic relief of the film while also being one you hope makes it until the end. The Mayor character seems like he is going to be the shady type but he ends up standing up to the film’s real villain and sacrifices himself to save his daughter and the town.

The movie opens up with the local radio station of North Port having technical difficulties as well as the Sheriff awakening to more than a few roaches in his house. He also gets a call about a few missing persons and animals throughout the town. Other things are happening too, all the bindings of the books at the library have gone missing and other people are reporting multiple roaches too. He’s got more important things on his mind however as the town mayors’ daughter is coming home for the mayor’s birthday. This daughter used to be his girlfriend and has been gone for 4 years.

A company called INTEC has helped develop the island with the Mayor and it’s on the way up. The first fifteen minutes of The Nest does it’s best to do some character building. Richard is dating the local diner owner Lillian and her father, a local Junker who’s a little on the crazy side, wants him to marry her. The Mayors wife committed suicide which drove Elizabeth away in the first place and the town has fun, identifiable inhabitants that not only give the movie credibility, but make it feel bigger than the movie presents. It’s about the 15-minute mark when the first attack happens and if you are an animal lover or squeamish towards animal harm, this movie may not be for you. A dog is skinned by a swarm of something, and all that’s left behind as evidence are what looks like droppings of some kind.

Lillian’s father is the first to fall victim, although we don’t see the flesh-eating bugs just yet. This could have been a call back to the novel as the movie shows a POV shot that could be giant roaches like in the book. Talk of the dog has already spread through town when a Doctor Hubbard flies into the town. While the bugs are the biggest threat in the movie, Hubbard is the true villain. She has a psychotic attachment to the bugs, even allowing them to bite her. At a later point in the film, she willingly tries to sacrifice other humans to both keep INTECS secret and study the creatures further.

Hubbard tests her theory and lures in some of the roaches with a live cat that doesn’t end well for the feline. The movie moves along with meat from the grocery stores disappearing, more bug calls coming into Homer to take care of, and the Mayor realizes that he needs to evacuate the island. That company INTEC that keeps getting mentioned and owns a piece of private property on the island made a pretty huge mistake. They engineered a cockroach to eat other species of cockroaches and then die off after just one generation only they didn’t die off, have a craving for blood and meat, and are resistant to normal pesticides. The dose needed to kill them off would also be extremely deadly to humans.

Homer and Richard get told that Hubbard was kicked out of MIT for illegal experiments and people within the town start dropping like flies. Cooks and old ladies alike are eaten alive by gangs of roving roaches. This is when you start to see the actual roaches and like with most movies that used real bugs, it became a problem. The studio used over 2000 flying cockroaches from a company called World of Animals but didn’t contact the American Humane Society. This became a problem when the bugs spread to other parts of the studio and became an infestation. Had they contacted the Humane Society prior, they could have avoided the bugs hanging around for years after the film wrapped.

In true Corman style, the movie re used assets and even footage from a previous Corman movie with both the scene of Homers house exploding and the pickup truck doing the same were lifted from the Doug McClure and Vic Morrow movie Humanoids from the Deep. Even the poster has a Corman flavor to it with a picture of a giant cockroach assaulting a woman in a bra and panties. While there isn’t a giant cockroach, there is a queen that is a mix between human and bug. The town population starts to dwindle as bodies are found and more roaches appear throughout.

While the movie tries to pad the body count, the last 20 minutes are where the movie really pics up in both tension and spectacle. The Mayor has an agreement that If the lighthouse isn’t activated by 5am then the whole island is to be sprayed with the cockroach killing compound that, oh yeah, also happens to be extremely deadly to humans. Homer and Richard confront Hubbard while Elizabeth is trapped in her dad’s house with just her father and thousands of uninvited friends. The cat Hubbard used to lure the roaches out earlier in the movie has somehow mutated into a hybrid of both the cat and mandibles of the roach. It has increased power and speed while also being incredibly gross.

If the roaches can do this to a cat, surely, they can do it to other creatures and that’s exactly what we get to see when the Mayor emerges from the bathroom a few minutes after saving his daughter. She goes to embrace him, and he falls apart into a man roach hybrid that is truly something to behold. While the movie isn’t afraid to use gore to show off the roach’s appetite, it turns into a practical effects laden gorefest that horror hounds need to see. James Navarra handles the effects and it’s a shame he only worked on 5 total movies as his stuff works really well here and his creativity could have expanded into a lot of different avenues. The only other real glimpse of what he had to offer was in 976-Evil shortly after this movie came out.

The theory about the queen is proven to be correct but instead of just a giant roach, it’s a Lovecraftian horror that shows off its power by ripping Hubbard’s arm off followed by taking off the top third of her head. Unlike many of the other, more tragic deaths in the movie, Hubbard’s death is the most gruesome and a cause for cheer. The island survivors are able to both turn on the lighthouse and blow up the queen monster, but we see a lone roach on Richards shoe. This is a horror movie after all so the studio wanted to leave the door open just a little bit for a sequel.

That sequel would never come however as the movie didn’t do as well as expected. In fact, there are seemingly no box office records other than the fact that it opened the same weekend as Friday the 13th VII: The New Blood which happened to be the 10th highest grossing movie of that year. The movie got middling reviews and had very little physical media presence before our friends at Shout Factory gave it a DVD/Blu-ray combo in 2013. That remains the best way to watch this little gem and we recommend you check it out as it may be the best horror movie you never saw about flesh eating roaches.

A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!