Street Trash (1987) – Review

When it comes to bringing the best of cinematic body horror to the big screen look no further than master filmmaker David Cronenberg, the man behind the likes of Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly, unfortunately, the film we are looking at today was not directed by one of Canada’s greatest filmmakers, instead, by a great Steadicam operator whose singular movie credit as a director featured a bunch of hobos playing hot-potato with a man’s severed penis, "Who is to say that art is dead?"

Aren’t homeless people the worst? Well, at least that’s the impression I believe producer/writer Roy Frumkes’ Street Trash was trying to purvey with this film, in an offering that falls – or should I say drips – into the weird subgenre of horror films known as "melt movies" in a project that Frumkes made quite clear was made with the intent “To democratically offend every group on the planet."  I must say if that was his primary goal I’d say he came very close to achieving it, now, if his goal had been to provide a movie with a coherent plot and well-rounded characters for the viewer to become invested in, and if that was the case he failed miserably, and I mean drastically so. The story, if what we find on display here can be considered as such, deals with a population of homeless people who have taken over a remote corner of a junkyard, with Fred (Mike Lackey) having built himself a home inside a pile of tires and junk – think of the hideout the kids had in the popular Alfred Hitchcock Three Investigators book series but only grosser – while having a hard time connecting with his younger brother Kevin (Mark Sferrazza), who's nursing a crush on beleaguered junkyard employee Wendy (Jane Arakawa), and poor Wendy has to deal with the sexual advances of her slobbish boss Frank (Pat Ryan), the kind of man who probably considers sexual harassment videos as nothing more than “How To” material.

Note: Attempted rape as comedy is a really hard thing to pull off, even if your film is ostensibly a black comedy, and Roy Frumkes and J. Michael Muro fail to bridge this gap and the result is not only tasteless but unfunny.

We also have a psychotic Vietnam vet named Bronson (Vic Noto) who rules the area atop a makeshift throne while occasionally suffering from nasty Vietnam flashbacks, and just in case that wasn’t enough to illustrate just how crazy this man is he also has a knife made from a human femur, but it’s his violent actions towards the more upstanding members of the population that draws the attention of a police detective (Bill Chepil) who has made it his personal mission to bring this monster down. The idea of the police only getting involved once the violence spills over to the “respectable” citizens could have been a nice thematic story element to illustrate the disparity of the classes and how poorly society treats its forgotten members but that is not this movie. This movie has a liquor store owner Ed (M. D'Jango Krunch) discovering an old crate of expired booze called "Tenafly Viper" and one sip of this liquor causes the partaker to melt into a puddle of vibrantly coloured goo.

 

This would make for a great PSA about the dangers of drinking.

As mentioned, Roy Frumkes’ Street Trash is not a plot-driven movie, it's more a collection of nasty vignettes that are occasionally interrupted by truly amazing special make-up effects sequences of some poor slob horribly melting, and there is no startling reveal that "Tenafly Viper" was actually some secret government project to “take care of the homeless situation” or a bi-product of an alien invasion like in Larry Cohen’s The Stuff, what the melting booze is in this film is actually what it appears to be, a liquor that had really gone past its “Best Before Date” and kills anyone who imbibes. It’s these moments of utter glorious grotesqueness that has made this film’s reputation, and make-up effects artist Jennifer Aspinall and Scott Coulter both do fantastic work here, but the rest of the film does live up to this element as most of the running time deals with even more distasteful moments, such as a woman being gang-raped to death by a group of homeless men only to later have her corpse raped by the junkyard owner.

 

Maybe we could have had more melting people and a little less rape.

Stray Observations:

• The word "fuck" is spoken 128 times in this movie but this is neither a Quentin Tarantino nor Martin Scorsese film, so what’s the deal?
• Director J. Michael Muro gives us a lot of nudity to go along with the gore, and we see both female and male full-frontal nudity, so you can call Muro’s film a lot of things, but sexist isn’t one of them. Wait, I take that back, this film is sexist, racist and pretty much any other ist you can think of.
• We see the police medical examiner casually eating his lunch next to a body because that’s a cliché that will never ever die.
• The police can’t seem to pin any crime on the crazed Bronson, despite him murdering a man in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses, including the victim’s wife. Now, I’m not implying the police in this movie are bad at their jobs, what I am saying is that the writer of this film was really bad at his.
• One of the junkyard bums explodes like Mister Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which only made me wish I’d been watching that film instead of this thing.

Note: One of the homeless men who partake of "Tenafly Viper" melts in much the same way as Leon did in Robocop, which came out the very same year as Street Trash.

Clearly, I was not the target audience for this film, I’m still fuzzy on exactly who this movie was made for but if I never encounter any fans of this film during my lifetime I will die happy. My first viewing of this movie was during a 24-hour bad movie marathon and I didn’t like it then and a decade or so later I still find the film to be appalling bad and literally unwatchable at times, yet that is not to say there isn’t anything good to be found in this movie, the cinematography by David Sperling is quite excellent and the aforementioned make-effects are really quite impressive for on what must have been a very low budget, it’s just hard to recommend a film based solely on those elements alone. This is a cult film that seems eager to offend its viewers, almost unabashedly so, but unlike most “good” cult films Steet Trash does not provide the crazy fun one would hope to find in this kind of offering.

The Deadly Bees (1966) – Review

The killer bee subgenre of ecological horror films was kicked off in the 1970s with such films as Killer Bees and Savage Bees, but over in Great Britain, they got a jump on things with a film based on H.F. Heard's 1941 novel "A Taste for Honey," a story that took a Sherlockian approach to the threat of killer bees, where a strongly implied elderly Sherlock Holmes would take on a surrealistic case about three men connected through bees, honey and murder.

The interesting thing to take note of when watching The Deadly Bees, is that, unlike the later killer bee movies of the 1970s, this one takes on the aspect of an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes murder mystery with the only key ingredient missing being the presence of an astute detective like Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, so instead of a luminescent hound terrorizing the Baskervilles we get a madman with the ability to control killer bees, which one must admit, sounds pretty cool. The film opens with two men from an unnamed ministry commenting on a recent letter from a man claiming to have bred killer bees – these guys could be from Scotland Yard because they are about as useful as the ones found in your typical Sherlock Holmes story – and despite the fact that this letter claims that the writer will start killing people if he is not taken seriously, the senior member of this pair dismisses the author as a crackpot.

 

“But sir, isn’t investigating the threat of murder kind of our job?”

Meanwhile, over at BBC One, pop sensation Vicki Robbins (Suzanna Leigh) collapses from exhaustion during a television broadcast resulting in her doctor (Frank Forsyth) recommending two weeks of rest and relaxation at the residence of an old friend of his, one Mister Ralph Hargrove (Guy Doleman), who has a cottage on Seagull Island which is, of course, where that threatening letter was mailed from. Needless to say, poor Vicki doesn’t get much in the way of rest or relaxation on this "vacation" because before you can say “The game is afoot” she’s up to her ears in murder and is forced to put on her big girl panties to investigate. Unlike your typical Agatha Christie mystery we are not inundated with a lot of suspects, in fact, we really only have two to speak of. First, we have Ralph Hargrove himself, a beekeeper who has a rather strained relationship with his shrewish wife Mary (Catherine Finn), and then there is the rival beekeeper H.W. Manfred (Frank Finlay) who seems quite interested in helping Vicki solve the mystery when the Hargrove dog is killed by bees and then little Mrs. Hargrove is stung to death as well.

 

“No, not the bees!”

Evidence against Ralph Hargrove:

• He’s a rather disgruntled beekeeper and while this is an unsubstantial piece of evidence to be sure, we are looking at bee-related killings.
• Ralph Hargrove hated the dog and kicked it when it was snuffling around the barn, where Hargrove may have been experimenting on his horse. Could the dog have unknowingly discovered a clue?
• The farm is actually owned by Mrs. Hargrove and with her out of the way he not only gets the insurance money but he inherits the farm for himself.
• While Vicki snoops around the Hargrove home we get numerous shots of good ole Ralph skulking about watching her.

 

Nothing suspicious about this guy.

Unfortunately, this is all a red herring and good ole Ralph is nothing more than a crotchety dude who has somehow caught the eye of local barmaid Doris Hawkins (Katy Wild) and nothing more – their “relationship” was obviously introduced to give Ralph more motive to kill his wife but while it’s made clear that Doris is romantically interested in Ralph we don’t see any reciprocated feelings coming from him, he just seems really interested in his bees – what we do have is Manfred constantly feeding the fuel of suspicions to Vicki against Hargrove and her not being able to see that maybe a beekeeper rival, one who claims to control bees via audio-recordings of the death's-head moth, which hypnotizes them, should be a major red flag against Manfred. Oh, did forget to mention that Manfred’s parlour has a panel that opens to reveal an enclosed beehive?

 

“Oh, this? Why that’s just a convenient way to keep my honey fresh.”

Stray Observations:

• This film opens with a performance by the British pop group The Birds and one can only think of the missed opportunity this was for Alfred Hitchcock in not including them in his “Nature Attack” movie.
• That a married middle-aged beekeeper is considered “sexy” by the island’s cute barmaid is about as problematic as someone developing an apiary of trained killer bees.
• This film doesn’t use the expected threat of the African killer bee, instead, it has the villain breeding his own larger and more deadly strain of bee, and though this makes little to no scientific sense this doesn’t stop it from being an interesting take on the killer bee scenario.
• A man on a tiny English island claims he is going to use bees to commit murder yet when a person on that very same island is killed by bees the police chalk it up to coincidence. I guess the idea of interrupting teatime to actually do their jobs would be too much to ask of these officers of the law.
• Vicki is a terrible spy, having been asked to search Hargrove’s desk for incriminating evidence she bumbles around his office, has problems with her camera, and is then forced to make off with the documents.

 

She’s certainly no James Bond or even a Nancy Drew for that matter.

A movie about killer bees by the author of Psycho must have sounded like a winner, with nature’s fury replacing Anthony Perkins in drag, but that wasn’t quite the movie we ended up with, instead, we were subjected to actors flailing around with plastic bees glued to their faces in a strangely familiar Agatha Christie setting. Screenwriter Robert Bloch blamed the film's poor showing on the fact he wrote it for Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff, who had starred in the episode "Sting of Death" for the BBC series The Elgin Hour, which was also based on the novel "A Taste of Honey," and while almost any film could be improved by the inclusion of Lee and Karloff I’m not sure how much better The Deadly Bees would have been with these icons of horror on board. While this film may be missing those horror legends we do get a scantily clad heroine being threatened in her bathroom, something right up Robert Bloch’s alley.

 

All that’s missing is Bernard Herman’s strident violin stings.

Bloch claims that the Amicus producers put the script in the hands of director Freddie Francis and new writers which resulted in the screenplay being “improved” past recognition, and if he is to be believed this would explain why the whole production seems like an inconsistent tonal mess.  We never really care about the characters or actually feel the threat of the bees in any way and when your movie is about killer bees that’s a pretty big failure.  Not to mention how bad the special effects used to depict the attack were, we're talking so bad that it makes the later made-for-television killer bee movies look like masterpieces of the craft by comparison. Overall, The Deadly Bees is a bizarre Agatha Christie pastiche that was only interesting due to the premise of trained killer bees as tools for murder, sadly, that premise was very underutilized and the end product turned out rather dull.

Day of the Animals (1977) – Review

In the history of “When Animals Attack” movies there is one entry that stands alone, a film with a premise so goofy and wonderful that it could only be improved by a scene of Leslie Nielsen wrestling a bear, and that film is William Girdler’s Day of the Animals, a man against nature story that even rivals his Spielberg rip-off Grizzly, which did not have Leslie Nielsen wrestling a bear, so let us look back to those halcyon days when man was the hunted instead of the hunter.

“For centuries they were hunted for bounty, for fun and food…now it’s their turn!” That was the tagline for William Girdler’s Day of the Animals, his follow-up film to Grizzly, but where that film was simply a Jaws rip-off this entry took the “When Animals Attack” genre to a whole new level as he also tossed in some eco-horror elements with the premise being that the depletion of the ozone layer has caused animals to become highly aggressive toward humans, with an opening crawl explaining that “This motion picture dramatizes what COULD happen in the near future IF we continue to do nothing to stop this damage to Nature’s protective shield for life on this planet” and while that is certainly true the film we get is pretty crazy and is certainly more science fiction than it is science fact, but with a bit of horror thrown in to spice things up.

 

“Ranger Smith, I just hope to keep Leslie Nielsen in check.”

This film may fall into both categories of “When Animals Attack” and “Eco-horror” but its basic structure follows that of what you would find in your typical 1970s disaster movie, where a group of character archetypes are introduced in the most economical manner possible and then through the film's running time the “disaster” would knock off a number of these people along the way, and for this movie, we have Steve Buckner (Christopher George), the film's primary hero, who runs some kind of hiking business where he would take a collection of tenderfoots up into the mountains for a long “survivalist hike” but this time out things don’t go quite as planned as we learn from a news broadcast that scientists have observed that due to the thinning of the ozone layer animals located in areas over 5,000 feet in altitude have become highly aggressive toward humans.  This does not bode well for our group as they are about to be dropped off on top of a mountain, but just who is on the menu?

 

"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip."

First we have Professor MacGregor (Richard Jaeckel) an anthropologist and avid photographer who may as well have covered himself in Kibble as his chance of surviving this thing is almost nil, next is Frank and Mandy Young (Jon Cedar and Susan Backlinie) as a bickering married couple who hope this hike will rejuvenate their marriage, spoiling warning it won’t, then we have divorcee Shirley Goodwyn (Ruth Roman) and her son Johnny (Bobby Porter) to add some family drama to the proceedings, then there is Paul Jenson (Leslie Nielsen) a racist advertising executive, a man who will have you rooting for the killer animals to take him out with extreme prejudice as soon as possible, next is Bob Denning (Andrew Stevens) and his girlfriend Beth Hughes (Kathleen Bracken) as a teenage couple that really should have gone to a Drive-In instead of on this stupid nature hike, next there is Roy Moore (Paul Mantee) a former professional football player sidelined by cancer and Daniel Santee (Michael Ansara) as a Native American who will supply words of wisdom and be all noble and stuff, and finally we have Terry Marsh (Lynda Day George) as an anchorwoman and possible love interest for Buckner.

 

“Should I file the sexual harassment charges now, just to save time?

That’s a lot of characters to juggle and director William Girdler handles it all fairly well, falling back on standard tropes and cliches to save time, and while no one in this film comes across all that well-developed, or at least enough for us to become fully invested in whether they live or die – except Leslie Nielsen’s character who you will want dead from scene one – there is enough here on the page so you can at least tell them apart, which isn’t something that can't be said of most films from this genre and Girdler manages to do it in record time. What makes Day of the Animals stand out from many other eco-horror films is that, unlike such films as Kingdom of the Spiders or the made-for-television Ants! we don’t just get one type of animal turning on mankind, instead, we get quite a variety of species to terrorize our human protagonists, from birds of prey to wolves and big cats, and these creatures working in concert really rachets the tension as we watch these dangerous animals stalking our heroes.

 

“Have anyone of you guys seen a girl in a red hood?"

The animal wranglers and trainers certainly had their work cut out for them as bears and mountain lions are not known to suffer each other's company all that well – why the ozone layer’s depletion would make these disparate animals team up is never explained – and I did love how the one falcon looked to be keeping on eye on the interlopers and almost seemed to be marshalling the forces against them, almost like a winged George Patton, but as terrifying as the idea of being mauled by a wolf or having your eyes gouged out by a vulture the most frightening thing in this movie is the sight of shirtless Leslie Nielsen as he goes stark raving mad and murdering poor Bob, who tried to stop him from raping his girlfriend, in a scene that culminated with Nielsen wrestling a bear during a thunderstorm. This is high cinema folks and Nielsen’s brilliant monologue about "his place in the world" is one of the best moments in the film.

“If there's a God left up there to believe in. My Father who art in Heaven, you made a jackass out of me for years! It’s never been you for me! Melville's god, that's a god I believe in! You see what you want and take it! You take it! And I am going to do just that!”

Needless to say, Paul Jenson does not survive his encounter with the bear – I picture many cheering cinemagoers when he gets bear-hugged to death – but William Girdler wasn’t passing moral judgment on his characters but more so the whole human race as the people who die in this film do so in a fairly arbitrary way and one of the most surprising things to me was the death Frank and Mandy Young because in disaster films it’s often the drama and tension of the event that brings a couple back together, kind of like an ecological marriage counsellor, but in this film, Mandy is the first one to go and while poor Frank lasts quite a bit longer, even managing to rescue a wayward traumatized little girl on his travels, he does bite it in the end. And while the Native American contingent of the party survives, strangely enough, it’s not due to his being “one with nature” but more a case of dumb luck. The only obvious survivors from the outset would be Buckner and Terry Marsh, who are both pretty people and the film’s ostensible leads, but I personally think Buckner should have been eaten as his whole business model was very suspect and several of the deaths I lay right at his feet.

 

If only enough of them had survived to file a class action lawsuit.

Stray Observations:

• Actress Susan Backlinie played the doomed Chrissie in Spielberg’s Jaws, so it is fitting that she was the first to die in this other great “When Animals Attack” movie.
• Richard Jaeckel and Christopher George both starred in Grizzly, so you’d think they’d at least know what to expect when animals get all pissed off.
• Despite being of Syrian descent Michael Ansara plays a Native American in this film, which he would do again in William Girdler’s The Manitou.
• Steve Buckner is really bad at his job, not only does he constantly make passes at one of the attractive members of his party, which is altogether creepy, but when Mandy is attacked by a wolf he sends her and Frank off on their own to find help. This is how you get a one-star Yelp review.
• It’s odd that on such an extensive “survival hike” Buckner does not bring along any kind of communication equipment so that he could radio for help if anything were to go wrong, like a hiker twisting an ankle or getting attacked by wolves. Did I mention Buckner was really bad at his job?
• Frank comes across a little girl who is in shock after seeing her parents killed by animals, which could be a nice nod to the little girl in the classic giant ant movie Them!
• That Buckner is really bad at his job can not be disputed but the idea that anyone would decide to split off and follow asshat Jenson anywhere is less believable than various animals working together to kill humans. Humans working together to kill Jenson, that I could believe.
• Buckner suggests that Jenson’s behaviour, like the animals, could be caused by the depleted ozone layer but he was always a jerk and no one else in the group seemed to be affected, so that theory doesn’t hold water.

 

“And don’t call me Shirley!”

Like many films of this type, we get a rather abrupt ending, with the military showing up and stating that “Above 5,000 all animals are dying, human survivors appear to be immune,” which I guess is nice for the humans, and then we here that Environmental Protection Agency is claiming that “The shift in ozone levels continues to correct itself, the virus mutation infecting animal and human life was unable to sustain itself as the Sun’s radiation decreases to normal levels” and that is a pretty big load of technobabble bullshit and doesn't make a lick of sense. Are we to believe that the depleted ozone layer caused a mutated virus and then it just went away, is that really how you want to end your movie? I know you have to wrap up your movie in some way but I haven’t heard such a ham-fisted piece of expository dialogue since Simon Oakland explained away Anthony Perkins’ deal at the end of Psycho.

 

Alfred Hitchcock's film certainly could have used a Hazmat team.

That said, William Girdler’s Day of the Animals is a fun example of the "When Animals Attack" subgenre and the assembled cast all did their best with the film's ludicrous premise and the cardboard-thin characters they were given, it also has a very good score by Lalo Schifrin and you certainly can't fault the filmmakers for trumpeting a real environmental issue while also packaging it all up as an exciting eco-horror flick – sadly, our current climate issue doesn't seem to be "correcting itself" – but all in all, this is an entertaining entry and makes for a nice double bill with Grizzly.

Note: The animal attack sequences were wonderfully executed by the animal trainers and the editing for these scenes was quite horrifying at times, unfortunately, the one piece of optical work during Mandy’s encounter with some nasty birds was pretty bad and quite out of place and should have been left on the editing room floor.

Fantastic Voyage (1966) – Review

When it comes to science fiction films the topic of making something huge is almost a genre unto itself, whether it be radioactively enlarged ants or amazing colossal men there were a lot of movies about things being embiggened but as for making things made small, well, we have Richard Matheson’s powerful novel The Incredible Shrinking Man, the goofy Disney film Honey I Shrunk the Kids and the cool sci-fi comedy Innerspace, to name a few, yet it is still a very underutilized subgenre of science fiction, thus today we will take look back at one of the better entries in that very small field.

Richard Fleischer’s science fiction classic Fantastic Voyage is one of the great works of speculative fiction, the ability to miniaturize people and inject them into the human body is pretty fantastic hence the film's name, but it’s also a product of the Cold War mentality of the 1960s and the film’s opening scenes could easily feel at home in a James Bond movie. The plot of the movie is kicked off with the arrival of scientist Dr. Jan Benes (Jean De Val) who has solved the problem of a miniaturized object remaining small for an indefinite period of time, while both the United States and the Soviet Union had cracked the miniaturization process the subjects could remain small for only one hour and Dr. Jan Benes had been working behind the Iron Curtain to solve this problem.  With help of agent Charles Grant (Stephen Boyd), he escapes to the West only to be immediately targeted for assassination and while the attempt fails it does leave the man comatose with a blood clot in his brain that no surgery can remove, that is, from the outside. Good thing they have this miniaturization technology on hand or he would be in big trouble. One could call this an amazing piece of plot convenience but that is just splitting hairs.

 

Enter one of the world’s coolest submarines.

But who will we get to take on such a dangerous mission? General Carter (Edmond O’Brien), one of the officers in charge of Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces (CMDF) brings in Charles Grant to be his inside man for security purposes, mostly to keep an eye on Dr. Peter Duval (Arthur Kennedy) a top-class brain surgeon and also a prime suspect as a potential surgical assassin.  I myself found his pontificating on God and man’s place in the universe a little troubling, ranting on about“The medieval philosophers were right. Man is the center of the universe. We stand in the middle of infinity between outer and inner space, and there's no limit to either.”  Yeah, that seems to be a reasonable attitude for a scientist.

 

Is that the kind of guy you want wielding a laser scalpel inside someone’s brain?

Aiding him is his technical assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch) and while at first she appears to be nothing more than a nice bit of eye candy the film treats her with a surprising amount of respect and she’s portrayed as a very smart and strong character, not something found among the female characters of earlier science fiction outings who were mostly in charge of getting coffee for the male scientists.  She definitely is wearing more clothes than she did in One Million Years B.C. which came out the same year as Fantastic Voyage and this film also earns bonus points for not tossing in a romantic subplot between her and Stephen Boyd, though to be fair, with only one hour to get in and out of the patient’s body I guess there wasn’t much time for romance.

 

You have to respect a woman with a laser rifle.

Rounding out the crew is Captain Bill Owens (William Redfield) a U.S. Navy officer who designed the Proteus for his branch's research and is now tasked with piloting his craft where no man has gone before, and finally, we have Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasence) a medical officer at CMDF and the one supposedly in command of the mission and his job is to point out to Grant if Duval is doing anything other than trying to save the patient, which is hilarious considering the “big reveal” later on that Michaels is actually the enemy agent.  That Grant never picks up on this has me questioning his skills as a security officer or a government agent. Once our heroes are miniaturized the story pretty much unfolds in real-time, taking up almost exactly one hour of the movie's running time, which really adds to the suspense as problem after problem arises to thwart their journey to the blood clot. While the intrepid crew of the Proteus manages to overcome each and every obstacle they encounter, from shorted-out equipment to running out of oxygen and even sabotage, it is Michaels who is the first one to demand that they call off the mission. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want them to succeed.

 

It's as if trusting Blofeld was a bad idea.

Stray Observations:

• “But I don’t want to be miniaturized” is probably the most realistic statement in this movie and said by our stalwart key hero and he’s basically pressganged onto this mission.
• Meer seconds into the mission Dr. Michaels has a panic attack due to claustrophobia, caused by an accident when he was a child, so I guess background checks just didn’t happen for this mission?
• The crew leave via the optic never, which is close to where the blood clot was located, so why didn’t they enter that way in the first place?
• We are told that the ship's speed is about fifteen knots, which is just over seventeen miles per hour, and at that speed, it would take the Proteus just over a quarter of a second to go from head to toe of a man, which would have made this a much shorter movie.
• The Proteus crew fill their tanks with air from the patient’s lungs but that air would consist of normally sized molecules that their miniaturized bodies would be unable to use.
• Our heroes escape through the optic nerve in the nick of time but they leave behind the Proteus, which should then expand and explode the patient into bloody bits all over the operating room.  Oopsy-Daisy!
• At one point they have to navigate through the heart so the surgical team has to electrically jolt the heart to stop it, allowing Proteus a small window of time to make its way through, but wouldn't such a jolt affect the sub?

 

That this didn’t completely fry the Proteus and its occupants is a miracle.

While some of the biology and science on display is, at best, a tad questionable this does not stop the Fantastic Voyage from being an incredibly fun and engaging adventure film, I particularly liked that even though Grant was a little obtuse when it came to uncovering the saboteur he wasn’t just the tough guy, he more often than not actually came up with a solution for whatever crisis they were dealing with, and Stephen Boyd made for a solid leading man and Donald Pleasence is always a treat, whether her be a crusading doctor or duplicitous villain, that said, the real star of Fantastic Voyage was the visual effects and in that area, this film does not disappoint.

 

Marvel at these amazing practical effects shots

Early in the decade, 20th Century Fox released the science fiction adventure Journey to the Bottom of the Sea, which featured a state-of-the-art submarine on a perilous mission on a tight timetable and it to had a saboteur onboard, which are clearly plot elements to Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage with the key difference being a journey into inner space and not into the undersea world, funnily enough, director Richard Fleischer helmed the other classic submarine film, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, making him the perfect choice for this sci-fi outing. What all three of those films have in common is stunning visuals provided by special effects wizards L.B. Abbott and Art Cruickshank and with their demanding work, the voyage through the human body became a trip of true beauty and rightfully earned Cruickshank an Academy Award.

Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage is a high-concept science fiction film that can be considered a key heralding to such films as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running as did its best to take the subject matter and the genre seriously, and while some viewers may have some trouble suspending disbelief when pertaining to the science, which to be fair does get a bit wonky at times, but I dare anyone to not enjoy this suspense-filled science fiction thriller that grabs you from scene one and rockets along to its exciting conclusion, I mean who cannot appreciate a film where Raquel Welch struggles against antibodies and Donald Pleasence is eaten by white blood cells? If such people are out there they have my pity.

The Bees (1978) – Review

If any genre cried out for the hands of legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman it has to be that of the killer bee movie, a genre that was notorious for its low-budget offerings as being made on the cheap was a hallmark of both this particular subgenre of eco-horror and Roger Corman himself, and so the threat of the Africanized honey bee was a perfect fit for the people at Corman's New World Pictures and this resulted in a movie where the world is treated to the great John Saxon facing off against this terrifying insect menace.

While the “Animals Attack” genre of horror has produced such classics as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws the overall output from this particular subgenre has been less than inspiring in terms of quality, many of them being terrible made-for-television movies suffering from micro-budgets, but with Alfredo Zacarías The Bees, we get an entry that is not just astoundingly terrible but is outright bonkers as well. This film’s plot deals with the work of scientist Dr. Franklyn Miller (Claudio Brook) who had been employed by the United Nations to discover a way to make the Africanized South American bee less aggressive yet still as productive, but when a honey thief and his son stir up the hive they are attacked and things get a bit tense. The child is killed, which is enough to enrage the locals to form a torch-wielding mob, and this results in the murder of Miller, enraging the bees further, with only the doctor’s wife, Sandra Miller (Angel Tompkins), and their assistant Julio Cesar (Julio César Imbert) as the only survivors.

 

He died as he lived, covered in bees.

Sandra smuggles some of the remaining bees back to America and takes them to the apartment of Dr. John Norman (John Saxon), who is the assistant of Dr. Sigmund Hummel (John Carradine) and is Uncle Siggy to Sandra, and these three characters make up the film’s heroic trio as they try and come to terms with the threat of the killer bees, with Uncle Siggy coming up with a pheromone that causes the drones to become confused and mate with each other instead of the queen. Such scientific silliness is but the least of this film’s offerings as we also have evil capitalists smuggling in more African killer bees because they need all that sweet Royal Jelly for their products, of course, things don’t go as planned and their smuggler, the aforementioned Julio, has a little problem with his method of smuggling – keeping the bees in a money belt – that results in him being stung to death and the bees escaping into the United States.

 

“You see kids, this is what happens when immigration is left unchecked.”

It’s at this point the film becomes your standard disaster movie, with stock footage used to depict the military trying to deal with the killer bee crisis – paratroopers with flame throwers being my favourite technique – but it’s the pheromone developed by Uncle Siggy that seems to do the trick, eliminating all the killer bee swarms and soon Norman is getting a thank you call for President Jimmy Carter and Uncle Siggy is receiving an award from the undersecretary of agriculture Brennan (George Belanger).  Unfortunately, during the meeting with Brennan, the naïve Siggy points out that he has discovered that someone in the Department of Agriculture has been embezzling money from Doctor Miller’s UN-sponsored research and when Brennan asks “Does anyone else know about this?” Siggy stupidly says, only he and his niece know of this transgression, which if you know your movie tropes is pretty much the equivalent of signing your own death sentence, because, surprise surprise, Brennan is the embezzler and he's been working with the evil capitalists all along.

 

“Call 1-800-Contract Killers for all your murdering needs.”

One would think that the threat of swarms of killer bees terrorizing the United States would be enough for any film but not this one, as not only do we get evil capitalist and corrupt politicians to spice things up but when Uncle Siggy is killed it’s revealed that the bees have mutated even further and have become super intelligent – Siggy had been trying to communicate with them prior to his murder – and when Siggy is killed by a pair of idiot hitmen the bees seek out and murder Brennan because…revenge? And no, I don’t know why or how the bees gained such a friendship with Siggy or why his murder would spur them onto a revenge agenda, but after killing the undersecretary they go on a “rampage” across the States which eventually leads to Norman addressing the United Nations. In Norman’s speech he states that nature has always tried to protect itself against any imbalance and mankind’s current careless nature “By our destruction of the environment and the pollution of the atmosphere” which has resulted in the Earth creating this new mutated strain of killer bee, he goes onto say that “Furthermore, this species has established meaningful and serious communications with my colleague Mrs. Miller and myself.” Needless to say, this doesn’t go over well with the members of the United Nations, with one man calling him bonkers, but undeterred, Norman goes on to state that “They have communicated a warning that if we don’t stop abusing their environment, they will eliminate mankind from it completely.”

 

“I for one welcome our new bee overlords.”

Stray Observations:

• Norman calls the death of Doctor Miller “A tragic accident” but can a person being bashed on the head by an angry mob and then left to the mercy of the killer bees be considered an accident?
• Two muggers try and steal Sandra’s make-up case only to find it full of killer bees in a scene that is so random and bizarre, and the fact that it really has no payoff makes it even weirder.
• Call me crazy, but smuggling killer bees via a money belt around your waist seems about the dumbest possible method. That the smuggler is stung to death is a testament to Darwinism.
• Some random old dude in a park gives a couple of kids five dollars to collect some bees in a paper bag, apparently bee stings help with his rheumatism, and this clearly illustrates what your average kid will do for a couple of bucks.
• When Norman ships out a stronger batch of the pheromone a group of bees go on a suicide mission, laying their little bodies across the road so that the van carrying the new threat skids out of control and resulting in the pheromones burning up in the crash, and it’s at this point that the film gloriously goes off the rails.
• Just how nasty do the bees get? Well, at one point they invade the bedroom of our heroes and construct a hive on the ceiling – don’t ask me how that was performed unnoticed – and initiate the strangest cock-block of all time.

 

“If you wanted our help, couldn’t you have at least called ahead?”

That Alfredo Zacarias’s The Bees is a terrible movie cannot be disputed, from its corny and poorly written dialogue to its completely irrational script this thing is bad and I mean really bad, certainly not helped by seeing the great John Carradine waving around his horribly arthritic hands while speaking in a dreadful German accent, and while John Saxon does his best to bring some gravitas to what is a pretty insane role the movie then shoves in love story angle that is so ham-fisted and hokey that it’s hard to become invested in anything. Then there is the fact that the budget was unable to make any of the bee swarms look even remotely convincing, utilizing cheap optical processing to superimpose the bees on whatever stock footage they could find – mind you, the bees attacking the Rose Parade was inspired – but between the abysmal script, the piss-poor effects, and a jazz score by Richard Gillis that appears to have wandered in from a different movie, there isn’t a lot to recommend from this film, other than that whole insane plot twist where the bees become our insect overlords is so insane you kind of have to respect it.

 

 Note: Warner Brothers paid New World Pictures to postpone the release of this film so that it would not coincide with the theatrical release of their killer bee film, The Swarm, a film that was also bad but on a much larger canvas.

Terror Out of the Sky (1978) – Review

When it came to made-for-television movies in the 70s the idea of sequels was not yet a big thing, they were mostly one-off events things for the major networks, but the success of the 1976 made-for-television movie The Savage Bees, prompted NBC to take another swing at the killer bee genre with an aptly titled film called Terror Out of the Sky.

This sequel takes place roughly two years after the events of The Savage Bees, a film where our plucky heroine Jeannie Devereux (Tavoh Feldshuh) had valiantly driven her Volkswagen bug covered in killer bees into the New Orleans Superdome to chill them out, but since that stressful moment she has ditched her old boyfriend and traded up for Grizzly Addams, or as he’s called in this movie Nick Willis (Dan Haggerty), a stalwart pilot whose current job is trying to get Jeannie to take a vacation in the hope that some time off would help with her night terrors caused by the events of the previous movie. Meanwhile, over at the National Bee Center, her boss David Martin (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) is trying to secure government funding to ensure that there will always be a strong hive capable of fending off any further incursion of those more aggressive South American strains of killer bee, but budgetary concerns quickly take a backseat when their hives are infiltrated by the surviving queen killer bee from the previous movie.

 

“Hey dude, I think there’s something on your back.”

One of the center’s employees is killed by the bees and before a pathologist even exclaims “Oh my God. His mouth. It's full of BEES!” we know things are going to get worse, which is why David begs Jeannie to cancel her overdue vacation and help with the crisis, much to the chagrin and anger of boyfriend Grizzly Adams, but things are made even more complicated when they learn that three deadly queens have been shipped out to parts unknown and it’s up to our heroes to track them down before the United States of America becomes the United States of Insectopia. Then to add to their list of problems the 4th of July weekend prevents David and Jeannie from being able to book flights to chase down those errant queens and so we get the very awkward moment of Jeannie asking Grizzly Adams if he can fly them around, and because the writers didn’t think that was enough of a complication we also have to deal with David declaring his love for Jeannie as if this film needed a love triangle along with the threat of killer bees. Who will win Jeannie’s love, will it be the gruff but sensitive pilot or Jeannie’s sixty-year-old boss? As this is a movie about killer bees the odds are that the loser won’t make it to the end credits.

 

“Will you BEE my Valentine?”

Stray Observations:

• It’s weird to only bring back one character from the original film and then recast the part with a different actress, with Tavoh Feldshuh replacing Gretchen Corbett in the part of Jeannie Devereux.
• Jeannie Devereux suffers from increasingly worsening nightmares about being smothered by bees, yet she still works for the National Bee Center, to the point where she believes she will eventually die in her sleep. I’m not sure if that is extreme pluck on her part or sheer stupidity.
• The first victim of the new swarm of killer bees is an employee of the National Bee Center, who somehow didn’t find it concerning that hundreds of bees had amassed all over his body, worse is the fact that he wasn’t even wearing beekeeper safety garb.
• Not only is David Martin Jeannie’s boss but he was also her college professor back in the day, which just adds to the repugnance of him using the killer bee crisis to seduce her away from Grizzly Adams.
• This movie takes place during the 4th of July weekend yet at no point does anyone declare they can’t close the beaches or some such nonsense, so guess the film gets points for avoiding that cliche.
• As to Jeannie’s mental health, well, she enlists a group of boy scouts to search for the killer bees in the nearby woods which has to be one of the worst examples of child endangerment I’ve seen in a movie, but I guess this insane decision we can chalk up to her PTSD.
• Jeannie then has all the boy scouts run to a school bus for shelter, which seems like a good idea, but then she lays on the horn to draw the bees away from idiot adults and to the bus, once again endangering the lives of the kids.

 

“Won't somebody please think of the children?”

I will give the bee wranglers and actors all the credit in the world for dealing with actual bees, no crappy optical work is used here as was the case in Killer Bees and The Swarm, but the character dynamics in this film are godawful and the forced love triangle only makes things worse and by the end of the movie I was pretty much on the side of the bees, but worst of all is the fact that the film also fails to deliver much in the way of thrilling killer bee moments as we get a final kill count of only three people and one dog. In The Savage Bees they only killed off seven people so I'm starting to wonder if the network censors had something to do with the limited death toll, and while the boy scout/school bus third act crisis was rather tense, with a bunch of sweaty kids trying to keep the bees from getting in, it was harmed due the fact that the situation pretty much the fault of the protagonist herself, which is not a good thing. With a score by William Goldstein, that sounded like it was written for a soap opera, and an almost complete lack of compelling action there isn't a lot here for genre fans to sink their teeth into.

 

"Maybe we should just let the bees have America and move to Sweden?"

Overall, Terror Out of the Sky comes across as a weak carbon copy of the previous film, with a Volkswagen bug being swapped out for a school bus, and the lack of likable characters definitely lessens one’s ability to worry about who will or will not survive to the end of the movie. This may not be the worst killer bee movie out there but it’s certainly not all that engaging or entertaining.

The Savage Bees (1976) – Review

The killer bee “nature attack” sub-genre may have been kicked off with the ABC Movie-of-the-Week Killer Bees, starring Gloria Swanson and Kate Jackson, but it was The Savage Bees, airing as NBC Night at the Movie, that really got the ball rolling and its success is probably partly responsible for all the killer ant and spider movies that cropped up on everyone’s television sets during the late 70s.

The popularity of the killer bee movie stemmed from all the talk about the dangers of killer bee swarms heading north towards the United States, this worry was due to the fact that these tiny creatures were an aggressive crossbreed between various European honeybees and the East African lowland honeybee and when this hybrid was introduced to Brazil, in an effort to increase honey production, some twenty-six swarms escaped quarantine and spread throughout South America and up into the United States. Needless to say, this generated a somewhat justified fear and led to this wonderful “nature attack” sub-genre with the film The Savage Bees being one of the best examples.

 

Our enemy, the bee.

This particular venture begins like many of its kind with a mystery, and in this case, it is the arrival of a banana boat from Brazil that is surprisingly absent of crew – could this be the work of killer bees or perhaps a sea monster – but the movie proper gets truly underway when local Louisiana Sheriff McKew (Ben Johnson) finds his faithful hound dead in a field, sure that his beloved pet was poisoned by villains he brings the carcass to deputy medical examiner Dr. Jeff DuRand (Michael Parks) for an impromptu autopsy and when the dog’s stomach is revealed to be full of bees Jeff turns to his estranged flame Jeannie Devereaux (Gretchen Corbett), who is an entomologist, and she is able to determine that they are dealing with the African strain of killer bees. Back at the McKew’s parish things are heating up as not only is there a missing little black girl and a local farmer to worry about there is also political fallout to complicate things.

 

“These foreign bees are taking our jobs!”

Like many films in this genre, when the protagonists try to get help from government officials they are greeted with skepticism and outright obstruction, in the case of The Savage Bees that comes in the form of Deputy Mayor Pelligrino (James Best) who starts out sounding helpful until he starts to dance the “Washington Sidestep,” wanting to ensure that he is not held accountable for any potential fall out from this bee crisis, and so it becomes perfectly that if they want anything done they’ll have to do it themselves. So, with no backing from the government, it’s up to our small band of plucky heroes, with the aid of South American killer bee expert Dr. Jorge Meuller (Horst Buchholz), to come up with a plan to stop the swarm before more lives are lost.  Sadly, things don’t go all that smoothly and the body count does rises, usually due to someone acting like a complete idiot, and the killer bees continue to make themselves an even bigger nuisance until the final showdown at the Superdome, where the bees get a fatal cold shoulder.

 

Jeannie should get pulled over for distracted driving.

Stray Observations:

• The Brazilian banana boat arriving with a dead crew and its even deadlier cargo could be an homage to the Russian sailing ship The Demeter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
• In the “Nature Attacks” made-for-television movie Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, the eight-legged beasties were unknowingly smuggled aboard a small plane bound for the United States, so I’m not sure why bees here felt the need to travel steerage when they are quite capable of flying to the States on their own.
• This story follows the well-known unwritten movie law that if events of the film take place in and around New Orleans it must be Mardi Gras.
• We get the classic Jaws trope of “We can’t close the beaches, it’s the Fourth of July” with officials here wanting to wait till after Mardi Gras to deal with the killer bee threat.
• I’m assuming that reason we never see the bees attack the Mardi Gras parades had to do with the film’s limited budget.
• The killer bees hate the colours red and black, so they attack Jeannie’s red Volkswagen with unbridled fury, lucky for our heroes nothing else distracted these bees from their trip to death.

 

Herbie the Love Bug this is not.

The 70s penitent for eco-horror often utilized pollution of some sort of the reason for whatever current creature was posing a threat, like the killer ants from It Happened at Lakewood Manor made deadly by toxic pesticides, but in The Savages Bees these killer swarms are just doing what comes naturally and they are only a threat to North America becomes some idiot thought crossbreeding aggressive killer bees would yield more honey – face it, people, capitalism sucks – and there is no real villain here – other than stupid politicians – as the bees have no real malevolency to them, it’s just there very nature that terrifies us, and what makes The Savage Bees a better entry in the “Nature Attacks” genre than the earlier film Killer Bees is that the bee attacks on display here are quite terrifying, even diving into water will not save you from these persistent killers.

 

Standing still and crying will also not help.

What makes The Savage Bees work is that Guerdon Trueblood’s screenplay is populated by likable and relatable characters and unlike, say in the case of Irwin Allen’s The Swarm, we aren’t rooting for the bees to win. Michael Parks and Gretchen Corbett have great chemistry and Ben Johnson provides a nice stalwart counterpart to our young heroes, and the dialogue between the three has believable moments of humour which gives the trio a good sense of camaraderie, which when you are fighting killer bees is a must, which when you are fighting killer bees is a must. Overall, as a made-for-television movie, this is an above-average effort and with a minimal budget producer/director Bruce Geller was able to pull off a rather effective man vs nature film, making this one well worth tracking down.