I’m delighted to inform you that there was only disappointment this time around, no provisos to save the day, no reassessment to make me change my original views. This truly is a terrible picture. Possibly the worst to involve Michael Caine, who was no slouch when it came to making inadvisable choices. Just as with The Island (1980) which on paper appeared a slam-dunk hit coming as it did in the wake of Jaws (1975) and The Deep (1977), based on Peter Benchley bestsellers, this looked like a no-brainer, another Irwin Allen disaster picture following on from mega-hits The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1975).
It’s tempting to blame it on the bees. The special effects creating the sky-borne swarm makes them look like nothing more than a strange smudge on the screen. And the bodies or cars or helicopters smothered in millions of static bees score pretty low, actually, on the scare-o-meter, nothing like a giant shark on the loose. Anyone caught in the swarm has to go into some kind of slow-motion dance that fails to shake them off.
Sure we’ve got a runaway train coming off the tracks and sliding down a hill, but the action quotient is surprisingly pretty low. The opportunity, a la The Birds (1963), to lay low a town is ignored and after a few peremptory shots of bees causing havoc we’re stuck with TV reports. Even giant bees, caused by hallucination, might cause an audience to vaguely squirm but it doesn’t replicate the gut-wrenching terror of a killer shark or the tension of a burning skyscraper.
The cast spend most of their time in exposition mode, or arguing with each other as to whose exposition is better. We know a heck of a lot more about the bees, and why they’re on the rampage, some nonsense about alarm horns replicating the sound of bees mating, than we do about any of the characters.
There’s a smidgeon of romance between Dr Bradford Crane (Michael Caine) and Capt Dr Helena Anderson (Katharine Ross) but it doesn’t get beyond the teenage (“am I walking too fast for you?). And there’s a truly terrible attempt at romantic comedy as old codgers Felix (Ben Johnson) and Clarence (Fred MacMurray) fight over school marm Maureen (Olivia De Havilland) who looks as if she’d like to crack their heads together.
A young boy is caught up in the melee and a pregnant woman, and I was looking out for the statutory nun, a strange omission is a disaster narrative.
The only effective bit of the movie is the opening when a squad of soldiers all Hazchem-med up descend on a deserted missile base and find the entire garrison – apart from a half-dozen – lying dead on the floor. That Dr Crane happens to be passing by leads to a stupid subplot where Major General Slater (Richard Widmark) and sidekick Major Baker (Bradford Dillman) take the suspicion option and look for an excuse to bang up the academic.
This initially went on general release in a curtailed version running just short of two hours rather than the original 155-minute cut which you can now catch, as I did, on YouTube.
You can’t blame Michael Caine (The Island, 1980) for this mess and he would have acquitted himself well if there had been any actual acting to be done outside of the exposition and arguing with the major general. His best scene is when he gently carries crippled mentor Dr Krim (Henry Fonda) into his wheelchair. Katharine Ross (Hellfighters, 1968) has such a restrained screen persona half the time you think she’s going to burst into tears.
Uber-producer Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno) had decided by this point that he could dispense with a name director and take on that chore himself. But I doubt if anyone could have made a better job given they were stuck with bees and a terrible script by Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night, 1967).
A true stinker.
The Magnificent 60s 