Director: Alfredo Zacarias
Cast: John Saxon, John Carradine, Angel Tompkins, Claudio Brook, Alicia Encinas
Screenplay: Alfredo Zacarias
92 mins. Rated PG.

“No, not the bees! Not the bees! Aaaaahhhhh!
Oh, they’re in my eyes! My eyes! Aaaaahhhhh!”
-The Wicker Man, 2006

When large amounts of South American killer bees are smuggled into the United States, they eventually mutate into swarms of intelligent and deadly bugs that begin terrorizing US cities. In order to combat this threat, a team of scientists, including John Norman (John Saxon, A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Sandra Miller (Angel Tompkins, Amazon Women on the Moon), attempt to neutralize the insects before the country is completely overrun.

People ask me how I deal with having to watch bad movies, and I always tell them that I can’t have an opinion on anything until I see it, so I don’t worry about watching bad movies because they aren’t bad before I see them. That stays true with a film that has an abysmal 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It just isn’t anything I think about before going in, and that allows me to see a movie like The Bees and come away fairly positive on the experience. It’s a dumb movie, but it’s also consistently entertaining. In fact, I would say that its biggest strength is that it feels like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening but it never takes itself too seriously. It’s dealing with environmental problems, and there are, intentionally or not, parallels with colonization, but the bones of this movie are never playing it too seriously, which was a problem with the Shyamalan film.

John Saxon is a great leading man, and it’s rare to see him just playing an altogether heroic type, and he has great chemistry with Angel Tompkins. The two of them actually make the events of this silly premise work within the context of the narrative, which is pretty admirable, especially when you think about the fact that they chose to shoot each scene twice (once in English and once in Spanish) in order to make the dubbing look better. Hell, the scene is silly, but they even try to negotiate peace with the bees, and it kind of works.

Make no mistake: this is not universal praise. There are a few face-palm moments that are just too freaking stupid. The most egregious ones occur early in the film, where the dangerous swarms of bees are being contained in an easily escapable area with only a screen door keeping them in, or the following morning when the villagers attack the scientists there to study and stop the threat.

Honestly, we could do a lot worse than The Bees. With a strong, albeit obvious, environmental message, enjoyable leads, and more than a few fun set pieces, including a final warning to the UN. Warner Bros actually paid New World Pictures to delay the film so that they could release The Swarm first, so there’s proof that even in the 70s, strangely similar plots appeared in films released in the same year, so don’t complain that Hollywood only recently ran out of ideas. This is the kind of film that works despite so many of its flaws.

3/5
-Kyle A. Goethe