"You're doing what? Are you mad? You mean you want us to conduct peace negotiations with bugs?!"
The Bees, a 1978 flick about (what else?) killer Africanized honey bees wreaking havoc, checks several boxes for this year's Unseen Terror marathon: it's a "natural" horror movie, it's a blind buy from Monster Mania Con, and it's a Vinegar Syndrome release. The latter is perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the flick, because I'm starting to realize just how good their marketing department is. They have an astonishing catalog full of feature-length films that run the gamut from horror to vintage erotica. They also do a great job with restoring a lot of these rather obscure releases to make them look better than even the filmmakers behind said movies ever thought they could. They also have a tendency to pick up a LOT of rubbish, and while they can strike gold once in a while by nabbing stuff like Christmas Evil, Lust in the Dust (both acquired at different Monster Manias), and Hell Comes to Frogtown, but if you peruse their list of titles on their website.....well, as they say, different strokes for different folks.
The most interesting aspects to The Bees are firstly the cast, with acting greats John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Enter the Dragon) and the late, great John Carradine being instantly recognizable. The latter in particular is sporting a rather goofy German(?) accent which makes him sound like the long lost brother of the fella who used to do the narrations for Disney's nature documentaries of the 1950s. Saxon makes for a reasonably decent hero, but man does his romance with costar Angel Tompkins feel so unbelievably awkward. I've never felt so weirded out watching a straight couple make out. The other interesting tidbit about The Bees is the fact that it was released during the same year as the next big Irwin Allen (of The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure fame) picture: the often-maligned The Swarm. That particular movie also deals with people being terrorized by killer bees, but it ended up beating The Bees to the box office after Warner Bros. paid distributor New World Pictures to push back the release date. Kind of a crappy move, but I'm not terribly surprised that New World mastermind Roger Corman let that happen.
I have yet to sit down and watch The Swarm though, so I won't have much of a chance to make many comparisons between these two pictures. What struck me the most after The Bees had ended was how it's on the verge of being a "so bad it's good" flick, but it never quite reaches that status. For every unintentional laugh that it delivers, it also ends up being far more boring than ANY feature with murderous insects in it should be. It starts off as a hilariously terrible, campy mess, with wacky jazz and disco beats that pop in and out of the soundtrack while people run around freaking out like Kermit the Frog if he was stuck in the "beehive tetherball" scene from Jackass 3. But that's about the gist of every sequence involving the bee attacks, and save for some ludicrous "kitchen sink" moments during the final twenty-or-so minutes, nothing really changes or shocks. If you're searching for violent deaths, you might be disappointed. Director Alfredo Zacarias, who was brought on to replace original writer/director Jack Hill (Coffy, Spider Baby), was reportedly not a big fan of gory cinema, and felt like the idea of them crawling into every hole and orifice or dying from asphyxiation was scarier than just seeing a gratuitous bloodbath. While I can see where he's coming from, it does make a large chunk of The Bees feel like it's just dragging on with nothing overtly memorable occurring until the aforementioned final act. Your sanity starts to slip when nothing interesting is happening on screen, especially when you hear a constant buzzing noise that leads to zilch.
Speaking of sanity, I guess I'll get to my final thoughts: if you gather enough friends who can provide liquid courage or at least help fill the room with uproarious laughter, then you could have a very fun time with The Bees (watching it alone and being stone cold sober can be a chore). It's a decent accompanying piece to last year's entry The Corpse Grinders (also released by Vinegar Syndrome), and full of just the right amount of stupid schlock to keep you from (mostly) falling asleep. And despite some of the complaints that I had in the first paragraph, the Blu-Ray from Vinegar Syndrome sure looks nice, even if it's a relatively bare bones release. In fact, the only extras consist of the trailer and a video interview with director Alfredo Zacarias, who despite not having a particularly memorable career, comes across as a genuinely good guy who has nothing but nice things to say about his cast and crew, while also going out of his way to mention things such as swearing that he would be responsible for a very sick John Carradine (who was finding it hard to get work around this time) should anything happen during production, and that John Saxon was a consummate professional who helped him get through any mental obstacles that were dragging him down. Sweet.
Tomorrow, we're stepping away from this possible prequel to My Girl and going back to the home of good old-fashioned blood and guts: Italy!
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