Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) – Review

The 1970s were a booming time for eco-horror films, with nature attack films exploding across cinemas worldwide, and no bigger subgenre of this was the killer bee movie, which itself grew out of the fear that the South American strain of the African killer bee would invade the States and kill countless Americans, but that is not what the film Invasion of the Bee Girls promised, this one wasn’t so much an eco-horror movie but a throwback to the mad scientist films of the 1950s.

There will be no swarms of killer bees in this movie, in fact, the amount of screen time dedicated to bees is probably only about four or five minutes tops, but what we do get with Invasion of the Bee Girls is a healthy amount of gratuitous nudity and a rising body count of death via sexual exhaustion, which already puts this movie above the likes of Irwin Allen’s The Swarm when it comes to interesting plot mechanics. The particular plot in this movie surrounds the investigations of State Department agent Neil Agar (William Smith) is dispatched to Peckham, California to investigate the death of a bacteriologist working at the government-sponsored Brandt Research, who apparently died of congestive heart failure caused by sexual exhaustion.

“I found traces of Viagra and bee pollen in his system.”

We are clearly not supposed to wonder why a government agency is investigating a death that doesn’t look at all like foul play – we get some bullshit about the man not having a heart condition prior to his death but that doesn’t justify sending a G-Man to inspect – and before you know it Agar is running around Brandt like an inept hall monitor in the hopes of stumbling onto a clue, a clue to a crime he doesn’t even know actually exists.  Though to be fair, after his arrival more and more sex-related deaths start to occur but that doesn’t negate the bullshit surrounding his overall involvement nor why he is teaming up with the laboratory’s head librarian, Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri), other than this movie clearly needing him to have a “love” interest to keep us interested, and while these two are doing their worst impression of Nick and Nora Charles we have entomologist Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford) running around seducing and or orchestrating the deaths of several male occupants of Peckham.

“She’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye.”

Brandt’s leading sex researcher, Henry Murger (Wright King) has some suspicions as to what’s going on but his fellow colleagues are definitely not on board with his solution of having the entire town practice sexual abstinence, and none of them seems at all concerned that a woman previously known sexually as “The Iceberg” is suddenly asking balding middle-aged scientists for a sexual tryst – this is not to say I would turn down Anitra Ford but I don’t live in a town where eight people have already mysteriously died from sexual exhaustion – and super agent Ager is so slow on the uptake that I bet if she started singing “Killer Queen” he still wouldn’t have figured out she was involved.  But what exactly is she actually up to? Turns out that the good Doctor has been experimenting with mutations and has somehow turned herself, and several other women in the community, into some form of human queen bee hybrid who have a compelling need to mate, unfortunately, this mating is one hundred percent fatal to their male partners, but hey, they all seemed to die happy, so that’s fine, right?

Like any decent movie dealing with insect antagonists, we get the compound eye POV shot.

Does any of this make a lick of sense? Is Julie running around with a gamma camera trying to uncover who is or who is not a queen bee as ridiculous as it sounds? Absolutely, nor are we to ask such pesky questions as to how the military instituted a quarantine based on the flimsy evidence on hand or why the local law enforcement seems to consist solely of Captain Peters (Cliff Osmond), who maybe has one deputy but he vanished so quickly one can only assume he was sexed to death. Of course, these kinds of questions are not important as this film’s entire plot is just a framework to which softcore porn scenes can be hung, with all the gratuitous nudity that implies, and in that area Invasion of the Bee Girls does not disappoint as the cast mostly consists of very attractive and bountiful women stripping naked at the drop of a hat, and even if the goofy transformation scenes involve a naked woman being lathered with goo it’s still fun to watch.

This is my kind of mad science.

Stray Observations:

• The State Department sends Neil Agar to investigate the death of a scientist at a government-sponsored research facility, but being the fact that the State Department negotiates treaties and agreements with foreign entities one must ask “What does the death of an American scientist have to do with foreign policy?”
• At a press conference Doctor Murger states that he has a theory behind all the sex-related deaths but is not ready to reveal what that is just yet, which pretty much sentences him to death at the hands of the Bee Girls. People should learn that you either publicly tell what you know or keep it on the down low as anything else will get you killed.
• Agar saves Julie from being gang-raped in a scene that is so random and out of place that it feels like it wandered in from a different movie.
• If someone puts six or more packets of sugar into their coffee that’s a huge red flag that they are, in fact, part insect. That’s just science folks.
• Because someone commented that “People are dropping like flies” Agar decides to look into the possibility of there being an insect angle to the deaths, and while he’s right this does not excuse the fact that this was an insane leap in logic. You have to admit, he is one crackerjack investigator.

“You’re wearing sunglasses inside to hide your compound eyes, aren’t you?”

What may surprise you is that Invasion of the Bee Girls was written by Nicholas Meyer, the man who directed arguably the best Star Trek movie to date, but how much of the finished product has anything to do with his original script remains unknown because while Meyer was visiting his parents the screenplay was drastically altered by the producers, so altered in fact that he wanted his name to be removed from the credits, but as this was his first film his agent were able to convince him that even a weird film such as this on a resume was better than nothing. And while this movie is without a doubt one of the silliest softcore porn science fiction films out there it was competently directed by Dennis Sanders and the production value on display was pretty solid – I will admit that the transformation laboratory was kind of cool – and Charles Bernstein’s score had the perfect 70s vibe right down to the classic “wacka wacka” guitar riffs and it really helped hold the film together. Basically, Invasion of the Bee Girls delivers exactly what it promised, a high-concept science fiction film with a lot of tits and ass, and by “high concept” I mean the producers were probably high during the making of this thing.