Monsters and Matinees: When Flying Things Sting in Real Life, 1970s Bee Films Come to the Rescue

When Flying Things Sting in Real Life, 1970s Bee Films Come to the Rescue

They were cute little honey bees – just one or two fluttering around the walkway by my back stairs. Not an unexpected sight on a warm summer day and, knowing the importance of the pollinators, I left them alone.

I should have looked closer.

A few weeks later there was a swarm – OK, maybe just 6 flying creatures around the same spot – that had me running away like a scared toddler. Texting a photo to a bee expert, it turns out my cute bees were yellow jackets – AKA wasps – and they had been building a home. Not good.

Here’s the thing about yellow jackets: They don’t let go. They are aggressive little buggers that don’t usually lose their stinger like a bee, so they can keep zapping you like one did when it latched on to my foot.

When the attack was over, it hurt – and not only that night, but the next day.  When the pain subsided, it turned into an uncomfortable itch.

Whining to myself for days about how my “attack” by one yellow jacket could cause such pain, I realized I was lucky that I wasn’t stung by two of them.

Or attacked by a swarm.

Worse yet, what if they were the dreaded African killer bees?

This could all happen – I’ve seen the movies.

To feel better about my yellow jacket attack, I watched some classic movies about “flying things that sting” to see just how much worse it could have been.

I started with the giant wasp in Monster from Green Hell (1957) which sounded like a great idea but it wasn’t. The title creature in this lower-than-B-movie film had great potential but was underused.

Instead, we were subjected to long scenes of guys walking and walking on an expedition through Africa. The running time was only 71 minutes, but it felt like three hours. The nondescript white leaders who made the natives carry their gear were so ineffectual that when they finally met the giant wasp, nature had to save them.

I could have kept on a supersize route with the giant honey bee in the fantastic Mysterious Island (1961), but that bee had every right to be angry at the trespassing young lovers. Besides, it didn’t sting them, just built a honeycomb around them. They eventually escaped, so no harm, no foul.

Clearly, I would need to watch the dreaded African killer bees to get some closure.

First, the real story

Often referred to as killer bees, the truth behind the Africanized honey bee started with the type of researcher found in many sci-fi movies: the altruistic scientist trying to do good before things go bad. The hybrid bee was introduced in 1956 in Brazil (hence the link to Brazil in these films) to help produce more honey, especially in hotter climates. When about 26 swarms reportedly escaped, it led to all sorts of doomsday-type scenarios and the misleading moniker of “killer bees.”

From the real world into the reel world, killer bees joined the “nature gone wrong” and environmental disaster movie trend of the 1970s in such films as Killer Bees, Savage Bees (and its sequel Terror Out of the Skies), The Bees and Irwin Allen’s all-star epic The Swarm.

The films do have some basis in reality. The insects will go after noise, so stop screaming. They will swarm victims and aggressively chase them at great distances (just like the yellow jacket that nabbed me). And whatever you do, don’t jump in the water thinking you’ll escape – they will keep attacking and you will drown.

In the movies, the insects have an uncanny ability to arrive in town around a big event like the Rose Bowl Parade in The Bees, Mardi Gras in Savage Bees and a flower festival in The Swarm.

Swarms of bees often will overtake the skies as ominous black clouds. Victims may die by the shear mass of bees covering their body (always an effective sight) or their extra-lethal venom could kill with as little as three bee stings. This is where we must add a reality check: the venom in Africanized bees is no more potent than in other honey bees, but where’s the movie fun in that?

Here’s a quick look at a few of the films.

Killer Bees (1974)

I’m starting here, but this film is not like the others. The bees traveled with the Van Bohlen family from Europe to California decades earlier and have a psychic bond to the matriarch. This “queen of the hive” is played by legendary film actress Gloria Swanson who is referred to as “Madame” by everyone including her family. Edward Albert is the prodigal son who returns home with his fiancée (Kate Jackson) who insists on meeting them despite warnings that they are “European” and reclusive, with their own rules and laws. She should talk to the townsfolk who stay clear of the Van Bohlen family and don’t become involved even when, say, a stranger passing through is killed after his car is engulfed by bees.

It’s one strange family and it’s funny to watch the men who are clearly afraid of Madam who can send a bee to sit on your face with a simple furrow of her brow. A heads-up that Killer Bees, an ABC movie of the week, is clearly a film of the era right down to that frustrating ‘70s ending.

Savage Bees (1976)

Premiering as an NBC movie of the week, Savage Bees was released the year after Jaws and that’s obvious in the plot. A dangerous element (killer bees) is threatening a town at the most inopportune time (Mardi Gras) and officials refused to call off festivities and lose tourist dollars.

A small-town sheriff (Ben Johnson), bereft at finding his dog dead, takes the animal into New Orleans to have an autopsy done. An assistant medical examiner (Michael Parks) discovers the dog’s stomach is filled with bees. The poor dog isn’t the only one: There are two crew members off a boat from Brazil and a child also dead from stings. (This film did not adhere to the cinematic idea that you never kill dogs and children.) Our assistant M.E. calls in a friend from Tulane University (“special guest star” Gretchen Corbett) to help. She has her own set of insect expert friends including Horst Bucholz who has created a newfangled suit that looks like it’s made from cheap aluminum foil.

Bees will arrive, people will scream and make themselves targets and attempts to quell the attacks will fail. It leads to an odd, yet strangely interesting denouement of a bee-covered Volkswagen Beetle slowly driven to the Louisiana Superdome as a last hope. As strange as that sounds, the sequence builds tension, even if it is undercut by the overwrought sobbing inside the Beetle.

Its sequel, Terror Out of the Skies (78) features two bee experts played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Tovah Feldshuh and a pilot (Dan Haggerty) who face the vengeance of the savage bees.

The Bees (1978)

To call The Bees uneven is an understatement. We open in a genetic research station in Brazil where a desperate father and his young son try to  steal honey bees to make honey and money for the family. Of course, they stumble into the wrong place and are attacked by a nasty swarm that gets loose. In retribution, an angry mob descends on the facility to kill the “devil bees,” and well, you know who wins that battle.

Cut to the United States, where a dashing John Saxon is addressing a group of important men about the development of hybrid bees that create more honey yet are less aggressive. In a scene recalling Roger Corman’s 1959 film The Wasp Woman (The Bees was financed by Corman’s New World Picture), one business is interested but not for charitable reasons. A cosmetic company wants to create money-making beauty treatments from the queen bee’s “royal jelly” and will go to extremes – including hiring hit men – to get it.

The man they hire to sneak bees into the United States via a “bee belt” around his waist is stung to death on a flight to California. Welcome to the U.S., killer bees.

Leading the charge to save the world are Saxon plus a wheelchair-bound scientist called Uncle Ziggy (played by an elderly John Carradine) who talks to the bees, and his lovely and smart niece (Angel Tompkins).

There is an incredibly effective scene – perhaps one of the best in all the bee films – with the bees are covering every surface of a bedroom quickly shared by Saxon and the niece. It becomes even more horrifying as the bees cover the couple as they try to get out of the room.

Unfortunately, things go off the deep end when Saxon, channeling Uncle Ziggy, starts talking to the bees and then communicates their message to the United Nations that humans need to share the world – or else. I can’t help thinking that ultimatum was meant to be the plot of a sequel that was never made.

The Swarm (1978)

Film folklore has it that the release of The Bees was delayed a few months (money may have exchanged hands) so The Swarm could hit the big screen first with its all-star cast that includes five Oscar winners.

In short: bees attack a military installation in Texas right before the big flower show in a nearby small town, but the insects have their stingers set for a much bigger quarry in Houston and beyond.

Now I’m not going to sugar coat The Swarm. With a big budget, a major studio behind it and A-list stars, there was a lot expected from this film that was a follow-up to Irwin Allen’s blockbuster disaster films The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Instead, it was universally maligned by critics and was a box-office failure.

Forget all of that. Sit back and enjoy the impressive star power. Every time a door opens there’s another big name (and I mean that literally, as many doors will open to reveal the next big star): Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, Fred MacMurray (in his last film role), Lee Grant, Patty Duke, Jose Ferrer (don’t blink or you’ll miss him) and a sweet turn by Slim Pickens as a distraught father.

The main problem – outside of bad dialogue – is that The Swarm is overly long. It has three distinct segments – an attack on the military base, an attack on the town and the surge on greater Texas and perhaps the world – that each could have stood as their own film. I watched the original 116-minute release (not the 155-minute home video version), and at least 25% of the film could have been trimmed without losing anything.

The film opens with music by Jerry Goldsmith resembling buzzing bees lending a nice tension as the military arrives at a Texas bunker to discover soldiers mysteriously dead. There’s also a doctor (Katharine Ross) who saved six others and a stranger with a shaky reason for being at the base. That’s Michael Caine as a world-renowned etymologist who has been predicting – and preparing for – a bee invasion. The military guys (led by Richard Widmark as the general) and Bradford Dillon (as a major) won’t believe him despite the fact that helicopters are downed by swarms and people die while they bicker.

As the nearby town of Marysville is preparing for its annual flower festival (bee swarms and flowers – what could go wrong?), a husband and wife are engulfed by bees and killed when picnicking with their young son who escapes. While these bees cover their victims from head to toe, they don’t leave any marks, but if you survive, you will hallucinate giant bees.

To add a human element is the odd golden years triangle of the school principal played by Olivia de Havilland, the bowtie wearing town mayor/pharmacist (Fred MacMurray) and a retired newcomer (Ben Johnson). It’s sweet, but kind of sad, too.

Meanwhile, the military and scientists continue to shout over who gets to kill the bees and how. But nothing helps for long, even the highly destructive military alternatives that are far more dangerous to people and the planet than bees. (Those bees are laughing at the guys with flame throwers who burn down buildings and leave the bees unscathed.)

We know they’ll figure something out, but it takes so long to get there. Still, watching bees cover people like a blanket, swarm military officers and blow up a nuclear reactor did the trick for me. The next time I get stung by a single yellow jacket, I’ll think of those scenes from The Swarm and remember how lucky I was with my one sting.

– Toni Ruberto for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Toni’s Monsters and Matinees articles here.

Toni Ruberto, born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., is an editor and writer at The Buffalo News. She shares her love for classic movies in her blog, Watching Forever and is a writer and board member of the Classic Movie Blog Association. Toni was the president of the former Buffalo chapter of TCM Backlot and led the offshoot group, Buffalo Classic Movie Buffs. She is proud to have put Buffalo and its glorious old movie palaces in the spotlight as the inaugural winner of the TCM in Your Hometown contest. You can find Toni on Twitter at @toniruberto.