FANTASIA OBSCURA: Does Michael Caine’s Killer Bee Movie Deserve Its Bad Buzz?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, the bad buzz is definitely deserved…
The Swarm (1978)
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
Directed by: Irwin Allen
By 1978, Irwin Allen had come a long way since doing a TV pilot that originally was a theatrical film.
With his return to theaters producing The Poseidon Adventure, Allen started a cycle of films that earned him the title of “the Master of Disaster.” He perfected a formula of getting as much recognized talent together as possible, then putting them into a situation where all of them were in danger and many of them would die. (The characters, not the talent; Allen was no Ruggero Deodato, after all…).
It worked well for him in such films as Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, both of those winning technical and song Oscars. It also allowed him to get back onto the tube part time with two made-for-TV films for NBC, Flood! and Fire!
Come 1978, however, the “disaster” that was this production proved itself immune to mastery…
We get right into it during the credits, which are superimposed over scenes of a US Air Force response team showing up at an ICBM base that went offline. The team finds dead missile men all around the base, but no obvious signs of an attack. Believing the situation under control, team leader Major Baker (Bradford Dillman) radios his supervisor, General Slater (Richard Widmark) that it’s safe for him to come and inspect the site.
To their surprise, as Slater starts to look around, his team discovers the very alive, very British, and very brown-on-brown attired Doctor Brad Crane (Michael Caine), who informs the airmen that they lost a missile base to a swarm of Africanized honey bees, aka “killer bees” that Crane had been tracking. He is sort of vouched for by the base’s physician, Captain Helena Anderson (Katharine Ross), who at the least confirms that Crane didn’t attack the base himself.
He tells them that he is an expert on the insects, and that he has authority from the President’s science advisor to be anywhere he needs to to deal with the crisis. The Air Force wants him locked up, but humor him by contacting Washington; the government’s reaction is to place Doctor Crane in charge of all operations to go after the bees, and to serve under Crane.
Which, under certain other circumstances, might not cause the viewer to refuse to believe that someone claiming to be a doctor with a British accent to get a military unit to be put under his command. However, Michael Caine is not sporting a twelve-foot-long scarf, and the USAF is no U.N.I.T., so we just can’t go forward with this, sorry…
But forward we hurtle, as the general sends a recon helicopter group to encounter the enemy, where we have our first contact. And no, it doesn’t go well for us mammals, sorry…
From there, things get worse for the humans. We watch the small town of Marysville, TX, get overwhelmed by the bees. We see the bees march (fly?) onto a nuclear plant in Armsworth, TX, and manage to make the plant blow up, taking the town with it, and then it’s on the Houston itself…
It’s a relentless plod for the bees as they mercilessly take us out, while we watch helplessly the schmaltz Allen lenses:
Even some of the biggest names in Hollywood that were willing to cash a check from Allen could not sell this. Yes, that is Olivia de Havilland in that clip, playing a school principal in Marysville unable to save her students. She’s soon a goner, as are the two men competing for her affection, retiree Felix Austin (Ben Johnson) and town mayor Clarence Tuttle (Fred MacMurray in his last role). Also shuffling off this mortal coil are Crane’s colleagues called in for the fight, Doctors Krim (Henry Fonda) and Hubbard (Richard Chamberlain). Popping in and out of the pic in roles underwritten for them are Patty Duke as a woman who gives birth during the onslaught, Lee Grant as a reporter offering superfluous scene settings, Jose Ferrer as the administrator of the doomed nuke plant, and Slim Pickins who has only one (actually kind of touching) scene, as a rancher who reclaims the body of his son, a missile man felled by the bees before the film started.
And these are just the principals who had head shots put on the bottom of the poster, as noted in the close-up here. There are way, way too many people who were in this film who either die horribly or run stupidly from the menace, and none of them fare any better with the script from Arthur Herzog and Stirling Silliphant (based on Herzog’s novel) than the main cast does.
Mind you, the humans aren’t the only ones made to act out of character. While Africanized bees are certainly something to worry about, they ultimately proved to not be as deadly as their rep made them to be. And accounts of their attacks, including a recent one in Lake Forest, CA, show them to be quite painful but not as devilish as this film painted them when they finally did get to the United States.
It really feels like when this was put together, there was no thought for what to give the human actors to do. It’s explosions! It’s carnage! It’s exposition THROUGH SHOUTING OVER EACH OTHER! It’s jumping too quickly to the next scene! It’s barely linear! It’s. An. F. N. Mess!
By the time we finally get towards the end run of the film, when much of the cast and most of the state of Texas are dead, the viewer just doesn’t care anymore. It feels like a waste of time to have tried to follow this for this long, and all one feels is a sense of waste incompetently put together.
With a reported $12M budget (around $98M in today’s dollars) that earned back only 58% of its budget at the box office, “waste” is certainly the key word here. Every shot of film, you can see the money that went into it before it all got pissed on. Allen supposed had on hand 100 bee wranglers, and 800,000 bees whose stingers were removed in order to allow the cast and crew to work with the bees without getting stung. At least when they were, it wasn’t the insects that they got stung by…
Off-screen, the biggest victim of the bees was Allen. The film was the first of his pictures he delivered to Warner Brothers after taking his production company to Fox, and it was not a good start to their working relationship. After The Swarm, Allen’s next two projects, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out…, did even worse business. Allen was out of the disaster biz and theatrical films altogether, and the disaster film genre itself pretty well lays dormant until Independence Day.
There may be “so bad it’s good” reasons to want to sit through this film, a continual contender on many “worst films” list, but really? With so much poor content to sit through, much of it many minutes shorter, why do that to yourself? Watching the film is an act of nihilism that threatens to kill whatever love you have of movies or storytelling in general.
By the end of the film, the only thing that could have made this seem even halfway worthwhile would have been Doctor Crane running for his TARDIS with a chosen survivor as a companion, dematerializing with the promise, the next time we’d see him, it’d be a much better story…
NEXT TIME: It’s always fascinating to see a master at work, even if he doesn’t have a lot to draw on…
