The Bees (1978) – Review

If any genre cried out for the hands of legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman it has to be that of the killer bee movie, a genre that was notorious for its low-budget offerings as being made on the cheap was a hallmark of both this particular subgenre of eco-horror and Roger Corman himself, and so the threat of the Africanized honey bee was a perfect fit for the people at Corman’s New World Pictures and this resulted in a movie where the world is treated to the great John Saxon facing off against this terrifying insect menace.

While the “Animals Attack” genre of horror has produced such classics as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws the overall output from this particular subgenre has been less than inspiring in terms of quality, many of them being terrible made-for-television movies suffering from micro-budgets, but with Alfredo Zacarías The Bees, we get an entry that is not just astoundingly terrible but is outright bonkers as well. This film’s plot deals with the work of scientist Dr. Franklyn Miller (Claudio Brook) who had been employed by the United Nations to discover a way to make the Africanized South American bee less aggressive yet still as productive, but when a honey thief and his son stir up the hive they are attacked and things get a bit tense. The child is killed, which is enough to enrage the locals to form a torch-wielding mob, and this results in the murder of Miller, enraging the bees further, with only the doctor’s wife, Sandra Miller (Angel Tompkins), and their assistant Julio Cesar (Julio César Imbert) as the only survivors.

He died as he lived, covered in bees.

Sandra smuggles some of the remaining bees back to America and takes them to the apartment of Dr. John Norman (John Saxon), who is the assistant of Dr. Sigmund Hummel (John Carradine) and is Uncle Siggy to Sandra, and these three characters make up the film’s heroic trio as they try and come to terms with the threat of the killer bees, with Uncle Siggy coming up with a pheromone that causes the drones to become confused and mate with each other instead of the queen. Such scientific silliness is but the least of this film’s offerings as we also have evil capitalists smuggling in more African killer bees because they need all that sweet Royal Jelly for their products, of course, things don’t go as planned and their smuggler, the aforementioned Julio, has a little problem with his method of smuggling – keeping the bees in a money belt – that results in him being stung to death and the bees escaping into the United States.

“You see kids, this is what happens when immigration is left unchecked.”

It’s at this point the film becomes your standard disaster movie, with stock footage used to depict the military trying to deal with the killer bee crisis – paratroopers with flame throwers being my favourite technique – but it’s the pheromone developed by Uncle Siggy that seems to do the trick, eliminating all the killer bee swarms and soon Norman is getting a thank you call for President Jimmy Carter and Uncle Siggy is receiving an award from the undersecretary of agriculture Brennan (George Belanger).  Unfortunately, during the meeting with Brennan, the naïve Siggy points out that he has discovered that someone in the Department of Agriculture has been embezzling money from Doctor Miller’s UN-sponsored research and when Brennan asks “Does anyone else know about this?” Siggy stupidly says, only he and his niece know of this transgression, which if you know your movie tropes is pretty much the equivalent of signing your own death sentence, because, surprise surprise, Brennan is the embezzler and he’s been working with the evil capitalists all along.

“Call 1-800-Contract Killers for all your murdering needs.”

One would think that the threat of swarms of killer bees terrorizing the United States would be enough for any film but not this one, as not only do we get evil capitalist and corrupt politicians to spice things up but when Uncle Siggy is killed it’s revealed that the bees have mutated even further and have become super intelligent – Siggy had been trying to communicate with them prior to his murder – and when Siggy is killed by a pair of idiot hitmen the bees seek out and murder Brennan because…revenge? And no, I don’t know why or how the bees gained such a friendship with Siggy or why his murder would spur them onto a revenge agenda, but after killing the undersecretary they go on a “rampage” across the States which eventually leads to Norman addressing the United Nations. In Norman’s speech he states that nature has always tried to protect itself against any imbalance and mankind’s current careless nature “By our destruction of the environment and the pollution of the atmosphere” which has resulted in the Earth creating this new mutated strain of killer bee, he goes onto say that “Furthermore, this species has established meaningful and serious communications with my colleague Mrs. Miller and myself.” Needless to say, this doesn’t go over well with the members of the United Nations, with one man calling him bonkers, but undeterred, Norman goes on to state that “They have communicated a warning that if we don’t stop abusing their environment, they will eliminate mankind from it completely.”

“I for one welcome our new bee overlords.”

Stray Observations:

• Norman calls the death of Doctor Miller “A tragic accident” but can a person being bashed on the head by an angry mob and then left to the mercy of the killer bees be considered an accident?
• Two muggers try and steal Sandra’s make-up case only to find it full of killer bees in a scene that is so random and bizarre, and the fact that it really has no payoff makes it even weirder.
• Call me crazy, but smuggling killer bees via a money belt around your waist seems about the dumbest possible method. That the smuggler is stung to death is a testament to Darwinism.
• Some random old dude in a park gives a couple of kids five dollars to collect some bees in a paper bag, apparently bee stings help with his rheumatism, and this clearly illustrates what your average kid will do for a couple of bucks.
• When Norman ships out a stronger batch of the pheromone a group of bees go on a suicide mission, laying their little bodies across the road so that the van carrying the new threat skids out of control and resulting in the pheromones burning up in the crash, and it’s at this point that the film gloriously goes off the rails.
• Just how nasty do the bees get? Well, at one point they invade the bedroom of our heroes and construct a hive on the ceiling – don’t ask me how that was performed unnoticed – and initiate the strangest cock-block of all time.

“If you wanted our help, couldn’t you have at least called ahead?”

That Alfredo Zacarias’s The Bees is a terrible movie cannot be disputed, from its corny and poorly written dialogue to its completely irrational script this thing is bad and I mean really bad, certainly not helped by seeing the great John Carradine waving around his horribly arthritic hands while speaking in a dreadful German accent, and while John Saxon does his best to bring some gravitas to what is a pretty insane role the movie then shoves in love story angle that is so ham-fisted and hokey that it’s hard to become invested in anything. Then there is the fact that the budget was unable to make any of the bee swarms look even remotely convincing, utilizing cheap optical processing to superimpose the bees on whatever stock footage they could find – mind you, the bees attacking the Rose Parade was inspired – but between the abysmal script, the piss-poor effects, and a jazz score by Richard Gillis that appears to have wandered in from a different movie, there isn’t a lot to recommend from this film, other than that whole insane plot twist where the bees become our insect overlords is so insane you kind of have to respect it.

Note: Warner Brothers paid New World Pictures to postpone the release of this film so that it would not coincide with the theatrical release of their killer bee film, The Swarm, a film that was also bad but on a much larger canvas.