Valley of the Mutant Locusts
Colt Denton (Dan Cortese - The Lottery), an entomologist, originally worked for his girlfriend, Vicky's (Julie Benz - The Long Shot), father and his business partner where they invested millions in breeding a highly powerful swarm of desert locusts which can wipe out other parasites. These days Colt works for himself and is helping farmers care for their crops without the use of dangerous chemicals. But when some of his customers turn up dead as does a whole load of cattle he helps the USDA to investigate as he discovers their deaths are connected to desert locusts. Now Colt and Vicky must find a way from stopping this 21st century plague of locusts from destroying mankind.
Let me tell you straight away that "Locusts: The 8th Plague" runs to the usual formula that this sort of movie runs to; we have corrupt business owners, a mutated killer creature, a former scientist who once worked for the corrupt business and his girlfriend who try to prevent a major disaster from happening. This even draws on "Jurassic Park" as the scientists engineered the locusts so that they can't breed. The trouble is that because this keeps to the formula that the actual storyline fails to entertain.
What that means is that "Locusts: The 8th Plague" needs to rely on the special effects and the character/ actor appeal to keep you involved. Now whilst this doesn't feature the most convincing of effects the combination of almost tornado like swarms of locusts with some danger signalling music works well to create a touch of atmosphere. As for the characters, well they are ordinary, slimly written and so are not that interesting or convincing. But the combination of Dan Cortese and Julie Benz is at least visually appealing.
What this all boils down to is that "Locusts: The 8th Plague" is by far not the worst movie I have ever watched yet at the same time it is as weak as many fans of this sort of movie would expect with a formula driven storyline and less than spectacular special effects.
