TERROR TIMES THREE: THE BEES

Previously in Tony Isabella’s Bloggy Thing...

Suffering from writer’s block, reader’s block, the flu, a cold and the boogie-woogie blues, Tony Isabella watched three horror movies in a row. He wrote about ThanksKilling yesterday. Today he writes about The Bees (1978}...

The Bees has the feel of a made-for-TV movie about it, but I can’t find any information that confirms my feeling. For a film about the possible end of mankind, it’s surprisingly low-key. However, it was still suspenseful enough to keep me watching.

African killer bees, though, in this movie, they are referred to as South American killer bees, were in the news in the late 1970s.  A number of bee attack movies have been made over the years with the best known being The Swarm (also 1978). Wikipedia reports the rumor that Warner Bros paid a large amount of money to New World Pictures to delay the release of The Bees until after the big-budget Swarm was released. Going from my memories of the late 1970s, the Arthur Herzog novel from which The Swarm was adapted is something like a hundred times better than the movie.

The opening scenes of The Bees take place in the research facility of Angel Tompkins (Sandra Miller) and Claudio Brook (her husband). A poor man and his son break into the facility to steal honey from the hives. They break into the shed which houses the killer bees. The bees get free. The would--be thieves are attacked. The boy is killed. It gets worse.

Sub-plot: Someone in our government has been skimming a big chunk of money from the research budget. This is why the facility lacked proper security.

The locals are up in arms. When the poor man shows up at a project with his dead son in his arms, a riot breaks out. More killer bees are released and many people die, including the unlucky Doc Miller. Because her husband locked her into a storage room to protect her, Sandra survives.

Sandra smuggles a small case of the bees to the United States and John Saxon (playing scientist John Norman). When she’s mugged in an elevator, some of the bees escape and attack the muggers.

Enough of the bees remain in the case for Norman, Sandra and John Carradine (playing Dr. Sigmund Hummel) to study. The doctor is also Sandra’s uncle and speaks with a German accent that is far from the actor’s finest moment. But, hey, it’s John Carradine and I would watch him in a used-car commercial.

SPOILERS AHEAD
SPOILERS AHEAD
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SPOILERS AHEAD
SPOILERS AHEAD

Some greedy CEOs, working with the crooked Senator who’s behind the stolen research funds, start bringing the killer bees to the U.S.A. Killer bees produce more honey and more honey means more money for them. The invisible hand of the Free Market punches them in their smug faces when the killer bees become a major threat to most parts of the country.

Hummel, Norman and Miller figure out a chemical defense against the bees that makes the bees gay and incapable of producing baby killer bees. I am not making this up. Meanwhile, some killer bees exposed to radiation have been getting smarter by the scene.

Hummel gets honored by the government for his work. When he talks to the Senator about the stolen research funds - without knowing of the politician’s involvement - the scientist becomes the target of assassins. Don’t look at me that way. Corporations are people, too, my friends, though, in this case they are murderous people.  Mitt Romney 2016!

The smarter killer bees are posed to wipe out mankind and make the world their own. The heroic Scientists Three figure out how to talk to them. Hummel is killed by the corporate assassins. The bees kind of sort of save Norman and Miller.

The movie ends with Norman and Miller addressing the United Nations and telling them the bees are willing to let humanity share their world, but only if humanity disavows its polluting ways. The U.N. representatives are more inclined to drop bombs on the bees...until the bees crash their gathering.

Surrounded by killer bees who aren’t killing them, the U.N. folks seem to be moving away from the whole “bomb the bees” plan. But, at the movie’s end, we don’t know if bee-kind and mankind will learn to coexist peacefully.

SPOILERS OVER
SPOILERS OVER
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As I said up top, The Bees is fairly low-key but suspenseful none the less. Saxon, Tompkins and Carradine deliver good performances. The writing by director Alfredo and Jack Hill is decent. Penny-pinching Roger Corman and his New World Pictures makes this movie look bigger than its likely budget.

The big finish: The Bees is worth watching. I don’t need to watch it a second time, but I was reasonably entertained by it the first time around. The only side effects from this viewing is that I now want to reread Arthur Herzog’s The Swarm and then watch the movie based on that novel. Godzilla help me!

Thanks for spending part of your online day with me. I’ll be back tomorrow with my review of Santa’s Slay.

© 2015 Tony Isabella