Pun Salad

The truly amusing Amazon.com reports that (as I type), the Bug DVD is a best seller in:

#47 in DVD > Drama > Military & War
#55 in DVD > Special Interests > Home & Garden
#82 in DVD > Mystery & Suspense > Mystery

None of Amazon's other categories are right, either. At Wikipedia, the director (William Friedkin) is quoted:

It's not a genre film, but marketing works in mysterious ways. They have to find a genre for it. "This is a comedy. This is a melodrama. This is a love story. This is a horror film. This is an adventure film." Bug doesn't fit easily into any of those categories.

Ashley Judd plays Juliet Agnes, a drug-abusing boozy floozy with a waitress job at a lesbian bar. She gets silent phone calls from what she assumes is her ex-husband, just out of the slammer. Other weird and startling things happen to her. Then she gets intoduced to Peter who is seemingly quiet and shy, but (nevertheless) gets invited for a post-work party back at the dingy motel where Agnes lives.

Then things get a little weird. Or a lot weird, actually. The movie leaves some ambiguity about what's actually going on, but (without spoiling things too much), things do not end well for Agnes or Peter.

Bug was based on a play, and it shows: most of the scenes play out in that squalid motel room. And there's a lot of talk, talk, talk, with much ambiguity about whether what's being said is true, false, and (if, as is likely, false) whether it's intentional deception or paranoid delusion. It's not very interesting, though.