The Swarm (1978) Very few producer-directors could ever make the same claim to fame as the multi-media shlockmeister Irwin Allen.......
In that he kick-started the disaster movie genre (with 1972's 'Poseidon Adventure'), then brought the genre to its absolute delirious heights (with 1974's "The Towering Inferno")........
.........and then single-handedly killed off the disaster movie craze altogether with a consecutive trio of terrible, embarrassing and unintentionally funny bombs......1979's "Beyond The Poseidon Adventure", 1980's "When Time Ran Out" and the most ludicrous of the bunch, the little timeless item we'll cover today.
Never was Allen's complete lack of talent as a film director more apparent than in his blundering supervision of "The Swarm", which was essentially nothing but a cheesy sci-fi/horror film with delusions of grandeur.
All the the major stars in the film (Michael Caine, Richard Widmark, Bradford Dillman, Henry Fonda, Richard Chamberlin, Katherine Ross, Olivia DeHavilland) look uncomfortable and humiliated.
As well they should be.
We can't fault Allen for wanting to make his swarm of African killer bees extra lethal (all it takes are 2 or 3 stings and you're toast)......since every disaster movie worth a damn craves an impressive body count.
But all his human characters are rendered as cardboard idiots......especially Caine and Widmark, They play ,respectively, an Entemologist who's angrier than the bees and his hated adversary an irascible Army General who wants to wage all-out Bee war.
In one priceless moment that sums up the whole film, Widmark believes the bees will return to the scene of their last attack to help liberate their captured comrades......(we began to imagine the theme from "The Great Escape" playing through this scene.....)
As for the bees, bless their pissed-off little hearts, they hate everybody equally and they manage to wipe out hundreds of extras and practically the entire cast, buzz-bombing into planes, trains, and automobiles.
At some point, Allen didn't think his cartoonishly animated swarms were scary enough, so he threw in, you guessed it......a big fat giant bee that the sting victims start seeing while they're trippin' from a bad case of Bee PTSD. That jumbo buzz-baby gives a far more convincing performance than any other members of the cast
And let's hear it for the uncredited people who snipped off the stingers of 800,000 bees so the little winged hordes could freely crawl over all over the actors. (We only wish those sting-snippers had gotten their names listed in the credits.....maybe under 'Special Defects Courtesy Of.....')
There's little else to say about "The Swarm", other than its sturdy, propulsive Jerry Goldsmith score.......and the strangely sweet elderly romantic triangle going on between Olivia DeHavilland, old cowboy Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray. (You'll almost wish these three had their own little movie to themselves.....with no bees)
But these characters, like everyone and everything else in Irwin Allen's disaster-verse, are nothing but disposable props waiting around to pump up the death toll.
In the course of filming, the poor actors noticed their clothing dotted with yellow spots, which turned out were bee bowel movements. No doubt mortified by their starring roles, the bees took a crap on their human cast mates.
Well, everyone's a critic. Having read the script, the bees probably wondered who they'd have to shit on to get out of the movie.
Irwin Allen went on to those other wretched productions that ended both his film career and the genre that he rode into the ground.......but at least he ended "The Swarm"s credit crawl with a reminder that honeybees are really wonderful and vital to our survival on planet Earth.
So true.......but we think the bees had the right idea leaving those yellow dots on everyone involved in this movie. Zero stars (0).
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