I love a good, simple, blessedly cheesy SyFy creature feature flick, back when cable tv was around you could tune in any night of the week, settle in for the midnight hours and watch all kinds of monsters, ghouls, aliens and cryptid nightmares terrorize small towns. Whenever I get the chance these days I grab them on DVD where I can find them for sheer nostalgic value and Larva is a great example of that. Set in blessed small town Americana, we meet a farmer (the great William Forsythe) who is having trouble with his cows getting sick and dying of some mysterious and very deadly parasite. He contacts the environmental board who sends a representative (Vincent Ventresca) who discovers that the animals are falling prey to a brand new subspecies that is aggressive and altogether catastrophic to the region, especially when it starts infecting humans and we are treated to an impressive array of gut busting, chest bursting, skull exploding gore as these beasties grow from their larval state and bust loose from human hosts into these weird leathery winged, tooth ‘n fang adorned monsters that fly, crawl through tight spaces and kill with speed and ferocity. There’s a neat subplot about the dangers of outsourcing agricultural and livestock resources to big experimental corporations that don’t follow the rules until nature bites back which is a nice touch too. Forsythe is terrific as the stoic, capable farmer who keeps an arsenal of ‘just in case’ weaponry in his barn for occasions such as these and gets to blast many a monster to smithereens. The effects are terrific in the close quarters gore department and perfectly serviceable as far as visuals of the full grown creatures go and overall this is exactly the kind of good, splattery, brainless fun you’d expect from stuff like this. Good times.
-Nate Hill
Podcasting Them Softly 