A movie so devilishly overlooked, it's criminal
John Sturges’s 1965 bio-terror movie appears ripe for an update, writes Craig McPherson
In an era when Hollywood seems bereft of ideas to the point where the interval between remakes has been shortened to absurdity — The Hulk, The Thing (for the 3rd time) Footloose, Escape From New York — and studios are strip-mining TV shows for ideas, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that John Sturges’s 1965 bio-terror film The Satan Bug has not only failed to attract attention from story-starved movie-makers, but hasn’t even been deemed worthy of release on DVD.
Dubbed a thinking man’s James Bond thriller by critics, the film was decades ahead of its time in terms of its subject matter, particularly in its eerily prophetic vision of a domestic American terrorist cell, with the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma still three decades away. Based on Alistair MacLean’s novel of the same name, it tells the story of a US military lab that is compromised by infiltrators who abscond with vials of two different germ-warfare agents; Botulinus and the aforementioned Satan Bug, the properties of each being deadly and deadlier.
In keeping with the growing anti-war sentiment of the era, the terrorists are driven by the motive of blackmailing world governments to dismantle their weapons programs or face annihilation by the unleashing of the bugs. The choices are grim, with a small quantity of Botulinus having the ability to destroy a large city in a matter of hours before being rendered inert by the air. It pales in lethality, however, to The Satan Bug, which has the ability to destroy all life on earth over a matter of weeks if unleashed.
Sturges — whose body of work included The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Ice Station Zebra, Marooned and The Eagle Has Landed — was considered the go-to director for big-budget action flicks of his day. While not as over the top and in your face as Michael Bay, Sturges wasn’t a director known for his subtlety, which makes The Satan Bug even more of an oddity. Curiously eschewing major stars, Sturges, along with screenwriters MacLean, James Clavell and Edward Anhalt, deliver a story devoid of gadgetry and swashbuckling espionage, instead portraying government agents intent on tracking down the vials as being everyday folk who must get by on their wits and intelligence. It also depicts everyone from lowly security guards to police detectives as being integral contributors to the government’s investigation, something not often seen in espionage and action movies which like to invest their focus on the protagonist.
While not alone in terms of films which have foreshadowed grandiose terror strikes on American soil (1998’s The Siege depicted an attack on New York City three years prior to 9/11), The Satan Bug tapped into a theme that was still a generation away from becoming reality. As such, its no surprise the movie performed dismally at the box office and ushered it into the pantheon of forgotten gems, making it all the more perplexing that it hasn’t been flagged for an update. Even viewing the original is no small feat. The last issue was on VHS, although strangely the film was deemed a candidate for transfer to the ancient Laser Disc format when that first came out. In the interim, until the Hollywood remake machine rediscovers this classic, we’ll all have to make due with obtusely recent reboots and do-overs.