As their torrid love affair with trashy reality shows winds down, the major television networks find themselves struggling to keep up with the Jonses, meaning the once marginalized cable outlets. As ABC’s Desperate Housewives and Lost successfully compete with HBO’s well-produced and edgy drama fare, CBS is hoping to snatch a piece of SCI-FI Channel’s pie with its own effects-driven killer bug movie. Locusts debuts Sunday, April 24 at 9/8c.
Locusts stars Lucy Lawless (TV’s Zena: Warrior Princess) as Dr. Maddy Rierdon, a USDA voracious insect expert who discovers that a cataclysmic infestation is the product of a colleague’s experiment to breed super-sized locusts that can reproduce at ten times the natural rate. Working with a special government task force, our heroine races against the clock to save the United States from being devoured by the insatiable critters. The film also stars Dylan Neal (SCI-FI Channel’s Chupacabra: Dark Seas, Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers), John Heard (White Chicks, Pollock) and Mike Farrell (TV’s M.A.S.H, Superman: The Animated Series).
TV effects veteran Craig Weiss serves as visual effects supervisor on the creepy-crawly pic, which arrives just in time for the Passover observance. As depicted in DreamWorks animated feature, The Prince of Egypt, a swarm of locusts was one of the plagues visited upon the people of Egypt before the Israelites were freed from bondage.
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