Takeshi-K
This was the last of the disaster films produced by crowd panic expert Irwin Allen, his most famous being The Towering Inferno. When I was watching this again recently I realized the plot was almost identical to Outbreak, the mid nineties disaster film centered around disease control experts dealing with much the same issue; namely how do you contain the risk to public health while gun ho military nuts want to just nuke everything instead? In the end this film splits the difference. I do like how it points out how keenly important bees are to human existence.The acting is good. Michael Caine is his usual gravelly best, while Katherine Ross is the one weak point although to be fair, she didn't have much of a role to work with. Her character should have been the moral force fighting against military insanity. This subplot is handled by Caine's character. I wonder if his agent forced a change there. Either way it renders Ross' character into being just the walk on love interest, although admittedly this was made in the seventies so what else do you expect for that time period. Speaking of which the swarm of African bees eventually start being called "The Africans" continually. The Africans are coming to get us etc. A tad uncomfortable to hear. Owing to the time it was made too, its pace may be slower for today's taste. It also includes notable aging stars; Slim Pickens (the yahooing nutcase riding the bomb down in Dr. Strangelove), Henry Ford, Jose Ferrer, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain and legendary centarian Olivia de Havilland.
mianom
I wanted to jam pencils into my ears and rip my eyeballs out. Amazingly bad screenplay. Incredibly bad acting. Two hours of my life, lost forever. How could so many top-drawer actors have agreed to be in this mess? Don't actors read screenplays anymore? Was this even scary in 1978?
classicsoncall
When those African killer bees finally do make their way North to the States, I bet nobody will be laughing then! How long has it been now? I recall hearing about them decades ago, what's taking them so long? Well in a way, the premise of the story has an element of believability to it, but when it comes to battling the little suckers, the whole thing gets rather absurd. Seriously, what was the deal with the poison pellets being dropped from those helicopters - how was that supposed to do anything? Were they supposed to knock out the bees as they fell from the sky, or were the little buggers supposed to die eating them? It just didn't make any sense to me.And wait a minute now, Dr. Walter Krim (Henry Fonda) injects himself with the equivalent of six bee stings when just three will prove fatal? And then waits sixty seconds to give the poison a fair chance before going for the antidote? That was just a bit too bizarre to contemplate, but no more so I guess, than a whole host of famous film stars showing up in this disaster travesty.I hope director Irwin Allen wasn't thinking sequel here because the ending was just a bit too sophomoric to have killed off all of the pesky little critters. You know there had to be a few bees that would have gotten away from that oily inferno to close out the story. Sequel or no though, once was enough for me. I won't get stung again.
Robert J. Maxwell
Lots of stars, major and minor, can't lift this shoddy piece if commercial garbage out of the dismissible category. But it DOES have one thing in common with "Hamlet" in that almost everybody of importance dies.It's not really fun watching watery-eyed Henry Fonda inject himself with a bee venom antidote and see his EKG rise to "really sssspooky rates." And it's positively embarrassing to see Ben Johnson talk about love to a plump Olivia De Havilland, who resurrects her Melanie accent from "Gone With The Wind." We can cover the special effects with the observation that everyone dies in slow motion and that buildings, trains, and automobile blow up.The structure of the tale is awful. Every attempt to kill the monster swarm is ineffective until, at the very end, Michael Caine as the requisite scientist springs a new weapon out of nowhere. And what a weapon. Now, I'm no apiarologist or apiariatrist. I'd be the first to admit it. But I'd bet the house my ex wife got that bees don't have a mating call, not being moose. Some kind of scent, a pheromone, might get my attention but this movie loses its organoleptic thread when it introduces portable hummers.It should be shown in all film appreciation classes as a bad example.
AD
