THE EXTERMINATORS

Those madcap bug-wielding assassins from Pest Control (1996) are back, and this time the stakes are even higher and the humor even lower.

Six years after faking their deaths to escape the wrath of Miguel DeJesus Riviera, the drug lord whose brother they had killed, Bob Dillon and Klaus Müller one day hear a too-good-to-be-true offer from Joshua Treadwell, of Blue Sky Capital Partners, LLC, to fund their genetic research into all-natural extermination—that is, superbugs with an insatiable appetite for killing other bugs—by developing a cadre of counterterrorist bugs that are willing to kill people. Apart from its innate looniness, the only downside of Treadwell’s offer is that his ability to track down Bob and Klaus means that their cover is blown, which gives them one more reason to relocate from Oregon to L.A. one step ahead of the wave of contract killers the surviving Riviera has loosed on them. Once the exterminators are safely ensconced in La-La Land, there’ll be after-Oscar parties, double-crosses by double agents, brushes with other assassins and of course hordes of killer bugs whose victims rapidly spiral into the hundreds. Along the way, Fitzhugh (Radio Activity, 2004, etc.) finds time to skewer such ripe targets as the CIA, network-news broadcasts, Hollywood pitch sessions, talk-radio blowhards and millenialist Christians.

Despite the high body count, the knockabout drive-in movie plotting and scattershot satire (think Godzilla with a laugh track) are all in good fun. Don’t believe a word of it when you hear once again that the heroes have died.