The Swarm
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Movie Reviews of The Swarm
Movie Review: "Will history blame me or the bees?"
Summary: 2 Stars
There's delusion on an epic scale on display in Irwin Allen's infamous The Swarm. It's not the worst of his oeuvre by a long way - Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out are both much, much worse - but it's become the poster child for all the absurdities of the disaster genre at it's hokeyest. But then capsized ships with atom bombs aboard or volcanoes threatening hotel complexes can't compare to killer bees destroying nuclear power plants and causing train wrecks on the Richter Scale of movie absurdity. And it's a curiously second- and third-hand construction too - structurally Stirling Silliphant's script is surprisingly similar to his script for In the Heat of the Night. Okay, there weren't any bees in that one, but from the beginning where big city cop Sidney Poitier is discovered at a murder scene and immediately treated as a suspect by hard-case racist cop Rod Steiger until he gradually learns to respect his expertise, it's being used as a template, with sunflower seed munching entomologist Michael Caine discovered in a missile silo full of dead bodies by hard-case xenophobic general Richard Widmark, who immediately suspects him of their deaths until he gradually learns to respect his expertise (how can you not love a film where Bradford Dillman asks "Can we count on a scientist who prays?" only for Widmark to respond "I wouldn't count on one that didn't"?).
But this isn't a film about trust or even narrative, it's about miscast and affordable stars getting stung to death in slow-motion by what look like bits of oatmeal painted black and fired at them by air-cannons. It's a film about hallucinating patients being menaced by imaginary giant bees. It's a film about military complexes with lots of flashing lights. It's a film about bad acting in the face of insurmountably inane dialogue ("Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?" "I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence." and "Billions of dollars have been spent to make these nuclear plants safe. Fail-safe! The odds against anything going wrong are astronomical, Doctor!" "I appreciate that, Doctor. But let me ask you. In all your fail-safe techniques, is there a provision for an attack by killer bees?" are just the tip of the iceberg). It's about bad fashion sense - this being the 70s, the decade that taste forgot, amid a preponderance of trouser flairs there are a lot of earth tones and oranges amid the costumes, so it's entirely possible that the bees simply mistook the actors for flowers waiting to be pollinated. And it's all done with a gloriously straight face and even, on a few rare occasions, some technical competence - Irwin Allen may have loved schmaltz, but he had a great visual sense when dealing with military hardware and there are some genuinely impressive shots in the picture when he gets to play with the toys. Unfortunately his handling of the actors is much more mechanical, with the old guard (Widmark, Olivia DeHavilland, Henry Fonda, Ben Johnson) faring better than poor old Caine and Katherine Ross. And, like many bad films, it's topped off by a superb score, one of Jerry Goldsmith's very best from his golden period. Much more fun than it's good to admit, the proposed remake has a lot to live up to.
Warners' DVD is pretty good - the extended two-and-a-half hour cut in 2.35:1 widescreen from the old laserdisc release with a 1978 22-minute TV featurette on the making of the film plus the original trailer - but the sound, while acceptable, lacks much range.
Movie Review: "Oh my God! Bees! Millions of bees!"
Summary: 2 Stars
This review is for the 156 minute version.
I rented this thinking it was the one with the bees in the Superdome, but no that was THE SAVAGE BEES. Instead I got 2 1/2 hours of Michael Caine looking like he wanted to kill himself for taking this movie. It really is that bad. My eyes were sore from rolling them so much.
How exactly do you assemble such an impressive cast and still make an epically bad film? Answer: you give them a script that is so horrible it would make Ed Wood's head spin. Don't believe me? This movie features not one but two separate scenes were it instantly switches from day to night. How about hanging plants on the outside of a skyscraper? Or a guy in a wheelchair kicking open a door?
The pain begins with the Army finding civilian Michael Caine inside a locked underground military facility. He's alive and everybody else is dead of invisible bee stings. Why he's alive and how he got there is never explained. The President decides that since Caine just happens to be a bee expert to put him in charge of the Army's campaign to destroy the killer bees. Around 40,000 deaths later (I'm not joking) the Army takes control and they attack the billions of bees - that have now taken over Houston - with flamethrowers! Somebody got paid to write this?!
Fred MacMurray and Richard Chamberlain were the only ones that walked away from this wreck unscathed. Everybody else, even the great Henry Fonda should be embarrassed.
Movie Review: "The Swarm fizzles...a dud of a film."
Summary: 2 Stars
Towering Inferno is playing at the theater on the street, in the film, THE SWARM, but this film just isn't up to par, as the Inferno. The plot is dumb, the acting, terrible at times, and the stunts, not well thought out, like the train crash, which was simply added, to heighten the spectacle. The film is worth viewing, though for it's nostalgic look back at 70's film making.Movie Review: P-U! If only the film was as good as the cover....
Summary: 1 Stars
As a child I was pen pals with one of the The Swarm's stars: Christian Juttner. Christian came up through the Disney farm team system (creating child actors). He's the only good thing in this miserable dreck. Don't get me wrong - he's over acting, but he isn't chewing up the scenery like so many others in this long, drawn out pot boiler/action film.
Irwin Allen produced The Swarm. He also created "The Towering Inferno," "Earthquake," and "The Posiedon Adventure" among a vast list of low grade science fiction/action television series. Allen used a formula for each of his films/television series. He doesn't stray from it here.
Michael Caine is at his most painfully horrible, overacting so badly he verges on a manic personality. Olivia DeHaviland embarrasses herself with a god-awful southern accent and overacts so badly she seems to be doing a skit impression of herself for an acting class on how NOT to act. Fred McMurray is saddled with dismal dialogue but doesn't actually embarrass himself.
Allen throws us a bevy of A-List actors from the silver screen era, only to squander and waste them. The script is absolutely painfully bad. Nothing quite makes sense (not that this silliness could ever really make sense.
Apparently, swarms of African Killer Bees has been sitting around procreating and mustering up the nerve to declare war on all of Texas (although only an idiot would not realize that the sets used are in the Hollywood Hills and backlots everywhere in Hollywood). What if these swarms were to get together and create one huge swarm? What indeed?!
The opening of the film: a large group of men in orange mechanics overalls and orange motorcycle helmets wander around a military facility without uttering a word - this takes place over about twenty minutes. Apparently we are to understand that these boys in orange are the scientists and military personnel assigned to investigate a disaster: the military installation has been decimated by something....but what? The lab is quite obviously from Allen's television series: 20000 Leagues Under the Sea and Lost in Space. When they do speak, you wish they just shut up instead of uttering such drivel.
Now, we are to believe that these bees kill quickly and efficiently leaving no tell tale signs of what killed the victims. First of all there would be huge welts on the victims and secondly there would be some dead bees (they tell us they've only discovered one bee carcass - I got news for you - if I'm getting stung by a swarm of bees, I'm still going to get in a few good slaps and take out more than zero bees).
Christian Juttner's character is part of the first onscreen attack. His parents are killed as they set up for a picnic (thank heavens, because neither of them can act)- Juttner is mercifully spared because he was sent to the car for a thermos...
He drives the car(covered in bees) into the backlot...um, I mean the nearby town and is whisked off to a hospital for treatment of his bites. He later sneaks out with some friends and antagonizes the swarm of bees in the picnic area where his parents died. Then he runs around talking to Michael Caine and promises to watch over some woman Caine has taken a liking to. Next we see Juttner in bed in the hospital sick, dying, dead! Wow! Where did this come from?
deHavilland agonizes as only a high school freshman acting student would over the deaths of dozens of school children in the playground (however never do we actually see a bee on any of these kids).
No where in the film do we see any indication that bees have actually stung any victims. There are no welts, no marks, no redness. They're just .... dead. (I've actually been attacked by a hive full of hornets....let me tell you - they leave huge welts on you - all red, sore and painful).
This film is great if you want really bad cinema. It is not even remotely good though.
Please run ...and run quickly from ....The Swarm!
Movie Review: Cinematic torture, Irwin Allen style
Summary: 1 Stars
I remember when I was a mere young one that I really wanted to see this film. It didn't play very long in the theater, and I never rented it on VHS. I knew it was going to be bad, but I decided to try it, figuring what the hell else is there to do in 2 1/2 hours? It was one of the worst decisions of my life. This is godawful. There's no way you can recommend this to anyone. Even Gen Xers, who seemed attracted to watching really bad movies and TV shows, would have a hard time enjoying this, in their terms, "ironically". This is the extra long, "roadshow director's cut" that runs an interminable 156 minutes. The film ran 114 minutes in the theaters, but they put this longer version on laserdisc. Warner put the 156 version on the DVD, and we're stuck with it. The performances are so badly over the top (especially Michael Caine and Slim Pickens) that you grimace and wished that you never rented this film. Sure, there are many unintentional laughs, but it's not worth renting the film for. There's even a silly romance between Fred MacMurray, Ben Johnson, and Olivia de Haviland that gets thrown in just to bore you even more. The many guest stars should be ashamed of themselves, but these disaster epics were very hip in the 1970's. It was one of those things where the celebrities of the day HAD to be in it (even then, celebrities had to be at the "hip" thing, no matter how awful it was). The featurette is actually interesting. It's kind of fun to listen to the actors talk about the horrible bees and how they were going to destroy the country (just like the Russian were going to invade and California was going to have a massive earthquake and fall into the ocean, two 1970's whoppers that never happened either). It's great to watch Irwin Allen acting like Mr. Auteur, capturing his "vision". Allen can make a decent film, like The Towering Inferno. But this is just inexcusable. There are boundless continuity flubs here. My favorite has to be the next to last scene. Richard Widmark, Michael Caine, and Katherine Ross are stuck in a high rise being attacked by bees. The army is armed only with flame throwers, but that don't stop the bees. The bees get Widmark (it's a spoiler, but I really hope you don't watch this, much less buy it), but somehow, Caine and Ross escape the building (we never find out how), and make it to an ocean shoreline where they destroy the bees. Did they pinch a cab in the middle of the bee storm? Or were the bees sleeping? Anyway, in conclusion, don't buy this. Please, don't buy this.