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.