Killer Bees (1974) – Review

How can you make a low-budget made-for-television movie about killer bees seem attractive to the average television viewer? The answer is simple, cast legendary actress Gloria Swanson to star in the film, and this was the “logical” decision behind Killer Bees, an ABC Movie of the Week that resulted in what is probably one of the more interesting "killer bee movies" to come out during this era.

After an opening bee attack, one that dealt with an annoying travelling salesman who trespassed on the wrong property, we settle into a family drama regarding the returning prodigal son Edward Van Bohlen (Edward Albert) to the family estate, a wine-making business that began three generations ago when Edward’s grandmother Madame Maria Van Bohlen (Gloria Swanson) came to America from Africa with a host of African killer bees to pollinate their vineyard, apparently, their little bee feet bring a nice honey taste to the wine.  The drama is kicked off due to the fact that Edward has returned with a girlfriend in two, Victoria Wells (Kate Jackson), and he later reveals that she is his fiancée, and this raises tensions up a few notches as she is considered an interloper. It should be noted that while this is a movie about killer bees these creatures do not have a lot of screen time, especially considering the film’s short runtime of 75 minutes, and while we get Edward’s brother Dr. Helmut Van Bohlen (Roger Davis) running around doing his best to cover up bee related deaths the bees themselves are more like secondary antagonists, all under the watchful eye of "The Madame" who seems to operate as the hives queen.

 

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mister DeMille.”

We do get the local authority, in the form of Sergeant Jeffreys (John S. Ragin), investigating the deaths, but he quickly learns that the family’s death grip on the town’s economy makes this pretty much impossible and his time on screen is fairly useless and goes nowhere, with Madame Van Bohlen making it clear to the sergeant that her bees are totally harmless, letting them crawl all over her to prove how tame they are, but this only comes across as creepier than it does reassuring. When Madame Van Bohlen dies from a stroke, after learning that "Victoria the Interloper" is carrying Edward’s child, the film does take an interesting turn, with Victoria claiming the bees were possibly responsible for Madame’s death and everyone in the family breaking out laughing as if that was the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. This is a decidedly unsettling moment, especially considering that Edward joins in on the laughing, and Victoria rightly wants to get the hell out of Dodge but her exodus is delayed by Edward’s insistence that he must stay for the funeral. Here is where things finally get interesting, while everyone is at the funeral service, leaving Victoria back at that winery packing her things, a group of bees attack the church while other bees “shepherd” Victoria up into the attic where their main hive is located, and it is there that she is chosen to be their new queen.

 

“The queen is dead, long live the new queen!”

Stray Observations:

• The first victim of the killer bees is some random asshole who, while stopping for gas, decides to climb a fence clearly marked “No Trespassing” just to look at an out-of-season vineyard. This entire scene is so forced and goofy that it’s quite laughable, he may as well have been wearing a “Please Sting Me” sign on his back.
• The family seems to want Edward back home but is not all that welcoming of his fiancée, do they not understand that future heirs kind of require him to marry someone, and there are certainly a lot worse specimens out there than Kate Jackson.
• Victoria runs to the diner to call for help when a lineman is injured in a fall and she has to ask the owner for change to use the payphone, but wouldn’t it make more sense for the owner to simply let her use the business phone? Also, calling 911 wouldn’t require any money in the first place.
• Arriving at the scene of the dead lineman, Dr. Helmut Van Bohlen angrily informs Edward that “Your girlfriend thought this was a police matter” and while he knows the family is all about covering up the “bee problem” how was Victoria to know there was a conspiracy to maintain? These people don’t know how to villain properly.
• The doctor and Edward also take the body back to his practice and I’m pretty sure removing a dead body from the scene of an accident, without notifying the authorities, is a crime.
• The funeral service for Madame Van Bohlen is held the very next day after her death, which has to be the fastest turnaround time in the history of funeral services, and even though Helmut Van Bohlen is also the town coroner I know for a fact that he wouldn’t be allowed to sign a death certificate for a family member.
• For a film about killer bees not much money was spent on the effects, and while the live bees walking all over Gloria Swanson was impressive the optical effects to show them swarming were laughably bad and more distracting than scary.

 

This looks more like someone forgot to clean the camera lens than it does bees attacking.

The film’s twist ending of the bees choosing Victoria as their new queen is definitely disturbing and weird but it definitely takes the plot into the territory of the supernatural and this was something that the filmmakers did not properly set up, we certainly get no explanation as to why Victoria would agree to such an arrangement, so one must assume that the bees “influenced” her somehow and the fact that all the members of Van Bohlen family immediately recognize her as the new queen just brings up more questions than are answered. It’s cool to have a twist ending but it has to be based on a logical progression of events and not just thrown at you seconds before the end credits roll. Overall, Killer Bees gets points for providing a rather interesting take on the killer bee genre, it just failed in the execution.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) – Review

The 1970s were a booming time for eco-horror films, with nature attack films exploding across cinemas worldwide, and no bigger subgenre of this was the killer bee movie, which itself grew out of the fear that the South American strain of the African killer bee would invade the States and kill countless Americans, but that is not what the film Invasion of the Bee Girls promised, this one wasn’t so much an eco-horror movie but a throwback to the mad scientist films of the 1950s.

There will be no swarms of killer bees in this movie, in fact, the amount of screen time dedicated to bees is probably only about four or five minutes tops, but what we do get with Invasion of the Bee Girls is a healthy amount of gratuitous nudity and a rising body count of death via sexual exhaustion, which already puts this movie above the likes of Irwin Allen’s The Swarm when it comes to interesting plot mechanics. The particular plot in this movie surrounds the investigations of State Department agent Neil Agar (William Smith) is dispatched to Peckham, California to investigate the death of a bacteriologist working at the government-sponsored Brandt Research, who apparently died of congestive heart failure caused by sexual exhaustion.

 

“I found traces of Viagra and bee pollen in his system.”

We are clearly not supposed to wonder why a government agency is investigating a death that doesn’t look at all like foul play – we get some bullshit about the man not having a heart condition prior to his death but that doesn’t justify sending a G-Man to inspect – and before you know it Agar is running around Brandt like an inept hall monitor in the hopes of stumbling onto a clue, a clue to a crime he doesn’t even know actually exists.  Though to be fair, after his arrival more and more sex-related deaths start to occur but that doesn’t negate the bullshit surrounding his overall involvement nor why he is teaming up with the laboratory's head librarian, Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri), other than this movie clearly needing him to have a “love” interest to keep us interested, and while these two are doing their worst impression of Nick and Nora Charles we have entomologist Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford) running around seducing and or orchestrating the deaths of several male occupants of Peckham.

 

"She's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye."

Brandt's leading sex researcher, Henry Murger (Wright King) has some suspicions as to what's going on but his fellow colleagues are definitely not on board with his solution of having the entire town practice sexual abstinence, and none of them seems at all concerned that a woman previously known sexually as “The Iceberg” is suddenly asking balding middle-aged scientists for a sexual tryst – this is not to say I would turn down Anitra Ford but I don’t live in a town where eight people have already mysteriously died from sexual exhaustion – and super agent Ager is so slow on the uptake that I bet if she started singing “Killer Queen” he still wouldn’t have figured out she was involved.  But what exactly is she actually up to? Turns out that the good Doctor has been experimenting with mutations and has somehow turned herself, and several other women in the community, into some form of human queen bee hybrid who have a compelling need to mate, unfortunately, this mating is one hundred percent fatal to their male partners, but hey, they all seemed to die happy, so that's fine, right?

 

Like any decent movie dealing with insect antagonists, we get the compound eye POV shot.

Does any of this make a lick of sense? Is Julie running around with a gamma camera trying to uncover who is or who is not a queen bee as ridiculous as it sounds? Absolutely, nor are we to ask such pesky questions as to how the military instituted a quarantine based on the flimsy evidence on hand or why the local law enforcement seems to consist solely of Captain Peters (Cliff Osmond), who maybe has one deputy but he vanished so quickly one can only assume he was sexed to death. Of course, these kinds of questions are not important as this film’s entire plot is just a framework to which softcore porn scenes can be hung, with all the gratuitous nudity that implies, and in that area Invasion of the Bee Girls does not disappoint as the cast mostly consists of very attractive and bountiful women stripping naked at the drop of a hat, and even if the goofy transformation scenes involve a naked woman being lathered with goo it's still fun to watch.

 

This is my kind of mad science.

Stray Observations:

• The State Department sends Neil Agar to investigate the death of a scientist at a government-sponsored research facility, but being the fact that the State Department negotiates treaties and agreements with foreign entities one must ask “What does the death of an American scientist have to do with foreign policy?”
• At a press conference Doctor Murger states that he has a theory behind all the sex-related deaths but is not ready to reveal what that is just yet, which pretty much sentences him to death at the hands of the Bee Girls. People should learn that you either publicly tell what you know or keep it on the down low as anything else will get you killed.
• Agar saves Julie from being gang-raped in a scene that is so random and out of place that it feels like it wandered in from a different movie.
• If someone puts six or more packets of sugar into their coffee that’s a huge red flag that they are, in fact, part insect. That’s just science folks.
• Because someone commented that “People are dropping like flies” Agar decides to look into the possibility of there being an insect angle to the deaths, and while he’s right this does not excuse the fact that this was an insane leap in logic. You have to admit, he is one crackerjack investigator.

 

“You’re wearing sunglasses inside to hide your compound eyes, aren’t you?”

What may surprise you is that Invasion of the Bee Girls was written by Nicholas Meyer, the man who directed arguably the best Star Trek movie to date, but how much of the finished product has anything to do with his original script remains unknown because while Meyer was visiting his parents the screenplay was drastically altered by the producers, so altered in fact that he wanted his name to be removed from the credits, but as this was his first film his agent were able to convince him that even a weird film such as this on a resume was better than nothing. And while this movie is without a doubt one of the silliest softcore porn science fiction films out there it was competently directed by Dennis Sanders and the production value on display was pretty solid – I will admit that the transformation laboratory was kind of cool – and Charles Bernstein’s score had the perfect 70s vibe right down to the classic “wacka wacka” guitar riffs and it really helped hold the film together. Basically, Invasion of the Bee Girls delivers exactly what it promised, a high-concept science fiction film with a lot of tits and ass, and by "high concept" I mean the producers were probably high during the making of this thing.

Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi: Their Universal Team-ups (1934 – 1939)

When it comes to horror icons people often think of the likes of Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger but back in the 1930s it wasn’t a set of particular monsters who fueled the imagination of millions of moviegoers across America but two legendary actors, who themselves created two of the all-time most iconic monsters in Dracula and Frankenstein, but they were both far more than blood-sucking or neck-bolt wearing monsters so let's take a quick look at those few times these horror legends teamed up to scare audiences around the world.

 

The Black Cat (1943)

This brilliant pre-Code horror film pits the iconic Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi against each other in their first screen pairing, with Karloff playing the personification of Lucifer while Lugosi a man obsessed with revenge, but not only does this film star two screen legends it's also a movie that deals with Satanism, necrophilia, torture and even incest, which were not subject matters normally seen in Hollywood movies of the time.

The Black Cat is one seriously dark piece of filmmaking, with director Edgar G. Ulmer and cinematographer John J. Mescall creating a world of creepy atmosphere and building dread, with two hapless honeymooners caught in the crossfire of an old feud between bitter enemies that threatens ritualistic rape and human sacrifice. This is a truly horrifying tale and one can't help but be appalled by Karloff's menacing Satanist, especially when he admires his hallway of preserved corpses, and then you sympathize with Lugosi's emotionally tortured psychiatrist, a man who is pushed to the brink of madness. Over the years Lugosi and Karloff teamed up in eight films but The Black Cat is easily their greatest partnership as both actors give fantastic performances in a movie that pushed the limits as to what kind of horror could be brought to the screen.

Note: We get a bit of text stating that this film was "Suggested by the book by Edgar Allen Poe" but other than both stories containing a black cat there are absolutely no similarities between this movie and what Poe had written.

 

The Raven (1935)

In this film, Béla Lugosi gives a bravura performance as a mad doctor whose obsession with the works of Edgar Allen Poe is twisted and turned when his fixation on a woman he saved on the operating table becomes murderous. This movie has everything you'd hope to see in a Universal Horror Picture as we get a stormy night, secret passages, hidden rooms, and a mad doctor and his disfigured servant who target a lovely damsel in distress. What's not to love?

Well, it's sad to say that Karloff got top billing over Lugosi in this outing, as well as getting twice the salary when Karloff was clearly a secondary character as the whole movie centers around Lugosi's Poe-obsessed madman. Karloff does give an excellent performance as an escaped convict that Lugosi mutilates into becoming his reluctant murder accomplice, but he doesn't even enter the movie until almost the halfway point, also, the make-up effects by legendary Jack Pierce are not particularly impressive. Overall, this is a quick and fun horror outing with Béla Lugosi's mad doctor being incredibly fun to watch, and who doesn't want a Poe-inspired torture chamber in their basement?

 

The Invisible Ray (1936)

In Universal's The Invisible Ray we find Karloff giving a rather understated and subdued performance as this film's villain, he's almost a tragic figure if not for the fact that even before things go wrong he was already "a bit off" but when his character finds a meteorite composed of an element known as "Radium X" his jealousy and paranoia is ramped up to eleven and the body count rises accordingly. This is the third pairing of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, with Karloff in the starring role and Lugosi in a more supportive position this time out, but even in this supporting role Bela Lugosi is a master craftsman and as in The Black Cat he is playing a much more sympathetic character than what horror fans were used to seeing him play.

What makes The Invisible Ray interesting is that in 1936 the new heads of Universal were starting to steer the studio away from horror films and this entry is a perfect example of this because, while the movie opens up with a Gothic castle located up in the Carpathian mountains, the tone quickly shifts more into the realm of science fiction and the horror elements are downplayed quite a bit - Karloff's glowing hands and face are not quite as terrifying as his Monster from Frankenstein - and the overall feel of the film is more thriller/mystery with Karloff being driven mad by his exposure to "Radium X" and initiating a revenge plot against those he believes have slighted him. The end result of all this was a rather poignant tale of "mad science" and the destruction of man by his own emotional baggage. The Invisible Ray is a solid little number that illustrates just how good both Karloff and Lugosi were.

 

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

The plot of Son of Frankenstein is a tad contrived, not even quite fitting the events of the previous film, but it more than makes up for that failing by giving us one of Bela Lugosi’s best performances, his portrayal of the revenge-fueled Ygor being the highlight of the picture and it raised the bar for all future mad science assistants to come. We also have some nice fiery face-offs between Basil Rathbone’s mad scientist and Lionel Atwill’s indomitable police inspector to liven things up, sadly, poor Boris Karloff is the one cast member with a rather thankless role as the monster, having been relegated to a mute creature, and he seems to be nothing more than an extension of Ygor’s rage. Now, there are a couple of moments dealing with the monster and his relationship with young Peter, but the film doesn’t seem to have to explore the monster’s softer side.

Director Rowland V. Lee handled the grim mood while also providing some nice moments of dark humour that help some of the story’s nonsense go down a little easier, and cinematographer George Robinson did his best to give the film a nice dark expressionist feel to it, much like the horror entries by Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, and while this film pales in comparison to what James Whale provided viewers in the previous outings this is still a decent Universal Monster movie and is considered by many to be the "the last of the great Frankenstein films" before the genre descended into self-parody.

 

Black Friday (1940)

Modern viewers should be warned that Universal's Black Friday is not about the sales promotion that takes place the Friday after American Thanksgiving, though that is a horror story in its own right, in fact, this film was originally to be called Friday the Thirteenth but other than the flashback story beginning on that day the film really has nothing with that unlucky day, this is a brain transplant movie with Boris Karloff as a mad scientist, well, more obsessed than mad, who puts the brain of gangster inside the body of his dying friend.

This science-fiction oddity doesn't make a lot of sense, with Karloff plopping the brain of a gangster in the skull of his best friend in the hopes of both proving his surgical technique is viable while also hopefully learning where the gangster had hidden the $500 hundred thousand dollars that his gangster pals were after. And what's so crazy about all that? Well, as the movie goes along we have what can best be described as a "body sharing " movie, with Karloff's friend, a kindly English professor, somehow being both the professor and the gangster, with the two struggling for control. Now, I'm no doctor but I'm betting that a person who undergoes a brain transplant is not going to have the memories of both participants. Needless to say, things get kind of silly from there for whenever the Professor takes a nap he then wakes up with the gangster persona in control and goes on a revenge killing spree. As I said, it doesn't make much sense.

What also doesn't make sense is this film being billed as a starring vehicle for Karloff and Bela Lugosi when it's actually a film starring Stanley Ridges in the dual role of the professor and the gangster, with Karloff playing the second banana and Lugosi being relegated to third banana as one of the gangster's criminal partners. Karloff was originally intended to play the pivotal dual role but he felt he was too old to pull off the tough gangster routine and so he took the part of the mad doctor, this resulted in Lugosi, who was to have played the doctor, now being pushed down the cast list to that of supporting thug. That all said, Stanley Ridges does a fine job in the dual role and Karloff and Lugosi both give excellent performances, but the film's ludicrous premise and false marketing make this one a hard entry to recommend to fans of either Karloff or Lugosi.

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973) – Review

In 1983 Stephen King released a short novel called “Cycle of the Werewolf” which was about a boy who believed there was a werewolf in his community while others decidedly did not, and this book was later turned into a film called Silver Bullet, and while that premise may be familiar to many fans of horror very few realize that a decade earlier Nathan H. Juran had directed a movie with a similar werewolf themed story, sadly, he wasn’t working off of something written by the Master of Horror, instead, he had a script that belonged in the made-for-television arena and that’s if we’re being generous.

The movie opens with Robert Bridgestone (Kerwin Mathews), a divorced father, taking his son Richie (Scott Sealey) to the family mountain cabin where during a moonlit hike through the woods they are attacked by a werewolf and during the struggle, Robert is bitten, but the monster falls backwards into a ravine and is impaled on a wooden fence, causing him to revert back to his human form, this allows Robert to go into full-on denial as to what he had encountered and this attitude is the basic thrust for the rest of the film. Poor Richie will exclaim to anyone within earshot that his father is a werewolf – though it does take him a surprisingly long time to figure out the werewolf in his dad’s clothes is actually his father – and of course, no one believes him, but what is really odd is that upon returning home to his mother, Sandy Bridgestone (Elaine Devry), she not only blows off his accusations she sends Robert to see Richie’s psychiatrist, Doctor Marderosian (George Gaynes), who is the one who suggests that Robert should take his son back to the cabin, predicting that when Richie returned to the scene of the crime, claiming this will cause Richie to lose interest in werewolves.

 

In fact, it almost causes the kid to become a midnight snack.

Instead of losing interest, the poor kid is witness to several brutal murders, but when the penny finally drops that his dad is the killer he immediately helps hide this fact from the police, which is all kinds of messed up as the werewolf had been repeatedly trying to kill him. Even more off-putting is that when the once again human Robert drops Richie off at his mother’s the kid cries to his mom “I don’t want to be with him anymore. I’m scared of dad” and sure, this wouldn’t make the average mother assume that their ex was now a werewolf but that’s still a big red flag that possible child abuse was going on, but her solution is for the three of them to return to the cabin together. Yeah, nothing heals wounds like returning to the scene of the crime. Unsurprisingly, the moon rises and good ole Robert goes on an animalistic rampage, and Sandy continues to prove that denial is not just a river in Egypt as she not only refuses to believe that her ex is a werewolf but that there is a werewolf at all.

 

Did she think this was an aggressive Forest Ranger?

The bulk of the film deals with Richie trying to get anyone to believe him but everyone, including the prerequisite useless Sheriff (Robert J. Wilke), insists that this is all the work of his overactive imagination, and this railing at the heavens gets old pretty fast as there is enough evidence that all the “strange killings” are not done being committed by some rogue wolf or bear, not unless bears are known for running cars off roads and pushing campers down hills. The only people who seem attuned to the evil surrounding these events are a group of hippie Jesus freaks who have set up a half-assed commune in the woods, whose wild-eyed leader (Bob Homel) makes a prayer circle into a pentagram that somehow becomes a werewolf barrier, but prayers are not enough to stop this ravenous monster and they are only spared destruction by the rays of the morning sun.

 

Am I a bad person for wanting to see these hippies torn asunder?

There have been quite a variety of werewolves over the years, from the two-legged Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man type to the four-legged variation found in An American Werewolf in London, but in most depictions, a person is transformed into a mindless ravenous monster but Robert’s “wolf man” is a very unique werewolf as not only does it taking home body parts as doggy treats, even using a shovel to bury them for later, and while he has no memory of his acts as a werewolf the wolf half clearly has memories of what happens during the day as he murders Dr. Marderosian, who pretty much accused Robert as being marked by evil earlier in the day, and that kind of forethought is definitely not something routinely exhibited by a person afflicted with lycanthropy.

 

Later he will tear apart a snooty Maître d' and an IRS auditor.

Stray Observations:

• This movie could have been called “Werewolf by Day for Night” what with all the scenes supposedly taking place at night that clearly shot during the day.
• It’s never explained why Robert is in complete denial over the fact that he was attacked by something not completely human, and those day-for-night shots certainly didn’t help hide that the dude was obviously hairy and fanged.
• Before being bitten by a werewolf Robert was a different kind of animal, one of the chauvinistic pig varieties, angry at his ex-wife and sounding off with such wonderful bon mots as “That’s why you’re my ex-wife “Women of the World unite” and all that garbage” so yeah, he’s a real class act.
• While discussing Richie’s werewolf delusions Dr. Marderosian holds up a pre-Columbian fertility statue, which has nothing whatsoever to do with lycanthropy or the myths surrounding native shapeshifters. I’m betting his degree in psychology was from a correspondence course he found in a comic book.
• As werewolves go Robert’s lycanthropic other half is strangely into vehicular manslaughter as his first victims involve him causing two vehicles to crash and later him pushing a trailer down a hill.
• The werewolf takes the head of one of his victims from the scene of the crime, using a leather satchel to carry it away, presumably to eat later, which makes this the ultimate Doggy Bag.
• A note to future filmmakers, if your werewolf looks “family-friendly” enough to appear on an episode of The Addams Family you’ve made a tactical mistake.

 

Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf is scarier than this thing.

I should point out that while the title of this movie is clever, an obvious take on the Aesop fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf, it’s also a bit disingenuous because in that fable the kid lied about there being a wolf which led to the villagers ignoring him when an actual wolf did show up, but in this movie, our young protagonist is not lying and is ignored simply because people don’t tend to believe kids when they go on an on about werewolves, basically, the moral of this story is that adults are jerks and deserve to be eaten by werewolves. While it was nice to see director Nathan H. Juran once again teaming up with Kerwin Matthews, having worked with him earlier in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jack the Giant Killer, the film rests on the tiny shoulders of Scott Sealey and he is, most definitely, not up to the task and the movie suffers greatly because of this, not that Elaine Devry as his mother is much better but it’s crucial for the film’s protagonist to be solid and identifiable for us to become invested in his fate and young Sealey isn’t that.

Note: When the film ends with the implication that the kid may have been infected with lycanthropy, we can only pray a sequel never happens.

This is far from the worst werewolf film out there, several of the Howling sequels have a far better claim to that title, but the script to The Boy Who Cried Werewolf is rather lazy and unengaging, with the characters ranging from unbelievably stupid to the outright annoying, and the screenplay was certainly not aided by a very weak looking werewolf that relied on lap-dissolves of a still photograph to pull off the transformation sequences. This was Nathan H. Juran’s last movie and while it’s better than his Attack of the 50ft Woman it’s also not as memorably bad as that offering, thus it is a hard one to recommend to anyone other than the werewolf movie completists.

When Worlds Collide (1951) – Review

The disaster movie has been a staple of cinema for quite some time, with RKO’s 1933 disaster epic Deluge being one of the earliest examples of a genre that is still going on strong today, but in 1951 legendary movie producer George Pal put his stamp on the genre with his film When Worlds Collide, a film that established many of the characters and tropes that would become hallmarks of the disaster movie, a film we hope will not be as prophetic as his science fiction classic Destination Moon.

Based on the 1933 science fiction novel of the same name, co-written by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, this George Pal science fiction classic tells the tale of the coming destruction of the Earth by way of a rogue star and its orbiting planet, a story that can best be described as Space Noah’s Ark. The plot kicks off when astronomer Dr. Emery Bronson (Hayden Rorke) discovers that a rogue star named Bellus, accompanied by an Earth-sized planet named Zyra, is on a collision course with Earth. Pilot David Randall (Richard Derr) is tasked with couriering top-secret photographs of the celestial threat to Dr. Cole Hendron (Larry Keating) to have these findings verified, and when this is done the news is bad, turns out that the end of the world is about eight months away. Unfortunately, The United Nations and other scientists scoff at these claims and laugh at his proposal to build rockets to transport a lucky few to the hopefully habitable Zyra. With the world doomed a couple of wealthy humanitarians step in to aid Hendron’s “folly” and soon a rocketship is under construction.

Note: We are told that the spaceship must be completed in eight months but this film takes place when space travel was still all theoretical, so going from theory to practice in under a year isn’t science fiction it’s pure fantasy. Even today it takes upwards of a decade to go from blueprint stage to a launchable rocket.

George Pal had initially intended this to be a lavish production, on the scale of his adaptation of War of the Worlds, but he was slowly forced to scale back his plans and the end result was a disaster epic without the epic quality he had hoped for. Without the required money to depict world-ending events, as he would have liked, Pal had to fill the screen time with something else, unfortunately, that something else turned out to be a love triangle between Dr. Hendron’s lovely daughter Joyce (Barbara Rush), her current boyfriend Dr. Tony Drake (Peter Hansen) and the newly arrived David Randall, and to say that this insipid romance gets a little trying at times would be an understatement of Biblical proportions. Lucky for us, this love subplot is briefly interrupted when Zyra passes by the Earth and we are treated to some of that world-ending disaster we were promised, which comes in the form of some cool models; such as a volcano erupting, waves crashing through the streets of New York City via a fairly well-done optical matte, and finally a very nice painting of a flooded world.

 

“It’s the end of the world as we know it.”

Stray Observations:

• The movie opens with a quote from the Book of Genesis about how God saw how corrupt mankind had become and then told Noah “I will destroy them with the Earth.” I guess the screenwriters forgot what happened at end of that story, God told Noah that he would not waste the Earth or destroy man by another deluge, so going by this movie, God is clearly not one to keep his word.
• Bellus is described in the film as a giant star but if that were the case the Earth would have been destroyed by its heat long before it collided with our planet.
• Governments set up evacuation plans to get people away from the coast, to save them from the destruction caused by Zyra’s passing, which seems kind of a waste of time and energy considering the entire planet will be destroyed nineteen days later, basically, this is a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
• Drake does this “noble” gesture of telling Randall that Frey has a "heart condition" that may kill him during liftoff, convincing Randall that he is needed as the co-pilot as a safety measure, but isn’t the need for a co-pilot a standard thing, heart condition be damned.
• The volcano we see erupting will appear in two other George Pal films, The Time Machine and Atlantis, the Lost Continent.
• The most disturbing element of this movie is the fact that though passengers are selected by lottery the available pool consists solely of white men and women, couldn’t Hendron and company find a single African American or Asian person qualified to work on the rocket?

 

Honkies in Space!

This not-so-subtle doomsday parable has some truly excellent moments, even the low-budgeted disaster moments have their charm, and the dynamic between our altruistic heroes and the slimy billionaire capitalist Sydney Stanton (John Hoyt), who buys a seat on the rocketship because when you’re rich dying isn’t an option, explores the fact that the civility of mankind is just a thin veneer that can be stripped away if things get bad enough, and this dynamic was definitely more interesting than the lame love triangle that was stuffed into the plot, but what is really sad is that George Pal had planned to make a film based on Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie’s sequel, "After Worlds Collide," but due to the failure of Pal’s film Conquest of Space this never happened. One element of this sequel does survive is in the last shot of our heroes stepping off onto this brave new world, which due to budget constraints was actually only a colour sketch by Chesley Bonestell rather than a finished matte painting, but in that painting, there are visible artificial structures in the distance that hint at the alien civilization our heroes would have encountered if the sequel had been greenlit.

 

This may look like a Chuck Jones landscape but it's still gorgeous.

George Pal’s When Worlds Collide may not be as good as his earlier science fiction classic Destination Moon but along with director Rudolph Maté they did manage to put together a disaster film that aficionados should not let slip by, because even though its limited budget restricted their ability to give the audiences a real showstopper when it came to depicting global destruction there is still enough on tap to include this in the list of classic 1950s space adventure films.

It Happened at Lakewood Manor (1977) – Review

With the success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the “Nature Attacks” genre literally exploded in the 1970s, with moviegoers seeing the likes of William Girdler’s Grizzly and Joe Dante’s Piranha flooding the theatres and drive-ins, but even the small-screen was not safe from the influence of this nature gone wild explosion and thus people who tuned in one particular ABC’s Friday Night Movie were treated to a threat more relentless than a great white shark and even more aggressive than a school of piranhas, something that has been a scourge to picnickers since the dawn of time….ANTS!

Originally aired under the title It Happened at Lakewood Manor, which one must admit is a rather strange title for a movie about killer ants and so the film was eventually re-titled Ants! for the home video market and has remained as such ever since.  Though this new title was not a huge improvement over the original it was definitely more succinct and didn’t make the film sound like it was an Agatha Christie murder mystery, of course, the plot of this movie does have mystery elements to it, with various characters running around trying to figure out who or what is killing the guests of Lakewood Manor, but we the audience are entirely aware from the outset that the perpetrators are our little insect friends.

 

You don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to solve this mystery.

This is your basic “Eco-Horror” movie and as such, it followed the formula adopted by the disaster genre, where an eclectic group of people would find themselves thrown together in a fraught filled situation dealing with the “Creature of the Day” and in the case of It Happened at Lakewood Manor we get a nice cross-section of movie actors and television actors to fill those parts. First off, we have construction foreman Mike Carr (Robert Foxworth) and his best mate Vince (Bernie Casey) who are part of the crew doing work at the classic resort hotel, Lakewood Manor, then we have the hotels matriarch and owner Ethel Adams (Myrna Loy) and her daughter Valerie (Lynda Day George), who is trying to get her mother to retire and sell the place to real estate magnate Anthony Fleming (Gerald Gordon), and because the film needs a human villain as well as those pesky ants, Fleming is also a sleazy jerk who wants to tear down the classy hotel so that he can put up a profitable casino, so his life expectancy is about zero.  To spice up the "plot" we also have Flemming's partner/mistress Gloria Henderson (Suzanne Somers) so that the army of ants could have something pretty to eat.

 

Three’s Company but Ten Thousand is a bit much.

Rounding out the cast of characters is hotel employee Richard (Barry Van Dyke), who sneaks a cute backpacker (Karen Lamm) into the hotel so that he can have a little romance, this diversion does go along with the film’s other romance subplot between Robert Foxworth and Lynda Day George’s characters, and then there is poor Tommy (Moosie Dier), a young guest whose dumpster diving leads to an unfortunate encounter with the film's killer ants. The film kicks off with two construction workers who stumble upon a swarm of ants in a closed section of the construction site, but they are accidentally buried alive before anyone notices their distress was caused by ants, and when little Tommy runs screaming towards the hotel’s pool, all covered in ants, his attackers are washed away before anyone is the wiser, thus once again the culprits remain unnoticed. It's when the cook is found dead in the kitchen that two Board of Health inspectors arrive, Peggy Kenter (Anita Gillette) and Mr. White (Steve Franken), who were called in to investigate these mysterious deaths. We then get a bit of tension when Mike tries to explain his belief that a disturbed colony of ants is the cause of all their problems, but those around him universally mock his idea, and how does our hero react to being ridiculed for his theory? Why, he simply gets in his bulldozer and starts to tear up the ground around where the colony first lived, which results in all of those pissed-off ants moving on mass straight to the hotel.

 

I love it when the hero is directly responsible for making things worse.

Stray Observations:

• Real estate douchebag Anthony Fleming is upset that Gloria booked them separate rooms on their business trip. Ahh, the 70s, when sexual harassment in the workplace was just the cost of doing business.
• After three “attacks” foreman Mike Carr starts getting a weird suspicion, telling his friend, “I’m beginning to think, whatever it is, it’s mad because we disturbed it.” This sounds more like they uncovered an ancient burial mound, and were dealing with angry spirits than it does a pest control problem.
• I’m not sure what health codes surround ant infestation, but Lakewood Manor’s cook seems really unconcerned with what I would call an alarming number of ants in his kitchen. I'm surprised Health Inspectors hadn't closed this place down ages ago.
• For the first half of the movie, we get numerous shots of the ants swarming around the sink and on the kitchen floor but when Mike claims ants are responsible for the deaths he is mocked for this theory by the health inspector, and when they go to the kitchen to look for evidence not a single ant can be found. Did the ants realize they’d committed murder and went into hiding?
• A kid looking for Coke bottles to get the deposit money, to help his divorced mother, leads to a rather sticky situation with the killer ants, in a scene I like to categorize as "Things I'd never do for money."

 

This movie works best as a PSA against dumpster diving.

When one sets down to pen a script dealing with the “Animals Attack” subgenre the first thing you must ask yourself is “Can my antagonist be a credible threat?” sadly, in this area, It Happened at Lakewood Manor failed spectacularly. At one point in the film, we are given the explanation for the deadliness of the ants, something to do with them being exposed to a variety of toxic pesticides which has somehow turned them into tiny killers, but we are still dealing with itsy-bitsy ants and even with their poisonous bites it takes over fifty bites to bring a person down, which leads to the most laughable aspect of the entire movie, that of being trapped in the hotel by this “massive colony” when all it would take to escape is to walk over them while wearing shoes. We are not talking about the giant mutated creatures from Empire of the Ants, those large insects were a credible threat, because the ants in this film only succeed when the people we are dealing with are totally oblivious to the fact that they are standing amongst a swarm of ants, and the only real threat to the overall populace is when a Coast Guard helicopter arrives and its prop-wash blows the ants at the idiot crowd that came to watch those other idiots trapped in the hotel.

Note: The classic science fiction/horror film Them! is still the go-to film regarding killer ants and remains one of the best examples of the atomic monster genre, clearly, this film really needed someone like James Arness shooting at a giant ant to make it all work.

I will credit the actors in this film for doing their best to look terrified, but as a viewer, there isn’t much in the way of scares to make this thing even remotely count as a horror film – it never exceeds beyond making your flesh crawl watching all the little ants scamper across bare flesh – and the environmentalist angle is pretty weak as well, with the scientist at the end claiming that this cannot happen again due to the unique environmental conditions at the hotel estate, which was vital to the existence of the ant's nest, making the whole event seem like a non-entity and the film’s conclusion a big letdown. Overall, as a made-for-television movie of the late 70s, It Happened at Lakewood Manor is an interesting entry but to modern viewers, it’s probably a little too tepid and slow-going, especially when you consider the fact that censors at the time would not allow anything even remotely graphic on screen, and while the cast all gave credible performances the premise itself was far from credible and the end result was more of a novelty than a movie.

Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977) – Review

The late 70s certainly brought to cinemas a dearth of “eco-horror” movies because if it wasn’t ants ruining your picnic then it was our eight-legged friends crashing the party, and not only did 1977 witness the horrors of The Kingdom of the Spiders, starring the great William Shatner it also bore witness to a made-for-television titled Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, a film that pitted Claude Akins and Pat Hingle against a particular nasty arachnid invasion.

In the glut of “Animals Amok” movies it’s clear that there is one species that really seems to have it in for mankind and that would be our friendly neighbourhood spider – or tarantulas depending on which particular species is being portrayed in any given film – and today we will be looking at Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, another animal invasion film that takes place in a small town. Director Stuart Hagman, a not very prolific filmmaker, helmed this little gem that starts off with a pair of money-hungry pilots, Buddy (Tom Atkins) and Fred (Howard Hesseman), who in an attempt to smuggle a load of coffee beans from Ecuador into the United States end up bringing eight-legged death to a small community. Things start off rocky, with them having to bribe some corrupt federal police and being forced to agree to smuggle a trio of “illegals” so as to pay the bribe, but greedy cops are the least of their problems as the Ecuadoran labourers who loaded the coffee on board their plane did seem to notice all the spiders climbing all over their produce.

 

“Make sure those spiders have their passports ready.”

To make matters worse, the plane runs into very bad weather which results in the two pilots ignoring the paniced screams of their three “passengers” who are having very close encounters with the spiders, but as if that is not bad enough the script tosses in some engine problems to spice things up and soon our entrepreneurs are forced to make an emergency landing as they pass over the orange-producing town of Finleyville, California. It’s at this point in the movie that we are introduced to our main cast of characters, who all rush out to aid the downed aircraft and the injured pilots. We have Cindy Beck (Deborah Winters) and her fiancé Joe Harmon (Charles Frank), she runs the town’s small airfield but I haven’t a clue what Joe does – other than running around acting like the hero of the picture, his actual position in this town remains very unclear – and along with them is Cindy’s little brother Matthew (Matthew Laborteaux) whose part in this film is to be annoying enough that when he eventually gets killed you’re not too upset about it. Then there is fire department chief Bert Springer (Claude Akins) and the town's physician, Dr. Hodgins (Pat Hingle), who quickly becomes concerned when people around town start dropping dead. The film does briefly present the deaths as a mystery, with Doc Hodgins suspecting it is a contagion of some kind, but it is quickly revealed to be an invasion of killer spiders and soon our band of heroes is off and running to not only save the town but this year’s orange crop as well.

 

“This was no boating accident.”

Because a deadly invasion of spiders isn’t enough conflict the film also provides us with some bonus human drama, first off, we have the prerequisite asshole politician in the form of Mayor Douglas (Bert Remsen) who threatens jail time to anybody who breathes word one about the “spider problem” because it could jeopardize them getting the oranges shipped out on schedule, but an even bigger asshole Rich Finley (Charles Siebert) who is not only having an affair with the wife of the town’s police chief but he also means to make some money off of the spider threat with a little arson – he owns the warehouse the spiders congregate at and if it were to burn down while “fighting the spiders” he’d collect the insurance money – and that he has a completely unironic death should be a surprise to no one. The film eventually staggers to its conclusion when our cast learns that the buzzing sounds of wasps, the spider’s natural enemy, will cause the eight-legged freaks to become paralyzed with fear – Note: This is not actually a thing – which allows our heroes to run in and scoop up the little bastards and dump them in buckets full of alcohol.

 

“Thrill to the excitement of shovelling paralyzed spiders!”

Stray Observations:

• Despite the title of this film being Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo the arachnids in question are actually Brazilian wandering spiders – aka banana spiders.
• An entomologist does correctly identifies them as the Brazilian wandering spider and though he accurately states that “This is the most aggressive and venomous spider in the world!” the only real danger in the way of fatalities would be to that of small children, not full-grown adults.
• We only see a handful of venomous spiders leave the plane crash site but thousands of them infiltrate the warehouse that is storing the town’s oranges, which begs the question “Just how fast can these spiders reproduce?”
• The plane crashed four miles from the warehouse, but the spiders head on a direct line for it, did these deadly arachnids have a map of the area so they knew where to go for good eating?
• Like any post-Jaws film, this “Animals Amok” entry also includes a mayor who wants to ignore the dangers for the sake of the town’s economy, though instead of “We can’t close the beaches, it’s the Fourth of July” we get this idiot mayor worrying about the town’s orange shipment.
• The made-for-television movie Ants! – released the same year – also has a young boy bitten by the title creature but unlike in that film the makers of Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo had the balls to kill off the kid.

 

At least the sheriff in this film doesn’t get slapped by the kid’s mother.

There is something intrinsically disconcerting about spiders, with their relentless crawling legs to their multi-faceted eyes their very existence sets many people on edge, and thus films like Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo already have a leg up when it comes to scaring the audience because fear of arachnids is pretty much baked into our DNA, and thus director Stuart Hagman didn’t have to work too hard to give viewers the heebie-jeebies.

Overall, the film is a very well-constructed eco-horror flick that nicely built on its suspense and tension throughout its running time, helped along by a cast that included both veteran movie stars and up-and-coming television actors, all buoyed up nicely by an excellent jazzy score by composer Mundell Lowe. The spiders themselves don’t do much other than look creepy, which is a job they excel at, and while the plot doesn’t so much resolve itself as it does run out of steam – shovelling spiders into pails isn’t all that dramatic – but nevertheless Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is an effective entry in the “Nature Amok” genre and well worth checking out.