Sunday, May 27, 2012

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)


“I never did manage to see Invasion of the Bee Girls,” the film’s screenwriter, Nicholas Meyer, notes in his autobiography, The View from the Bridge. “Maybe one day. People who see it on my résumé keep telling me it is a camp classic, but I never know what this means or if it’s a good thing.” Rest assured, Mr. Meyer, it’s not a good thing. According to Meyer’s account, producers hired him to flesh out their basic notion of a horror movie in which women prey on men. He provided a fanciful story about an experiment that gives women insect-like appetites; these women then suck life energy from male victims during sex. While it’s rather difficult to imagine a worthwhile movie emanating from that storyline, Meyer’s subsequent sci-fi credits (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Time After Time, and so on) justify giving him the benefit of the doubt. In any event, Meyer describes being aghast when he was shown a rewritten version of his original screenplay, and if the finished film is any indication, his reaction made sense. Invasion of the Bee Girls is a cheap-looking, lurid, silly thriller with barely any trace of character development or narrative momentum. In place of these qualities, the movie has naked chicks screwing men to death, to the accompaniment of the kind of funked-out music one might hear in a low-rent strip club. Wandering through this sensationalistic sludge is reliable B-movie actor William Smith, who plays a detective investigating mysterious murders until he’s captured by Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford), the psycho who transformed a bevy of babes into a coven of killers. Invasion of the Bee Girls offers a few kitschy distractions for fans of grimy drive-in cinema, including an endless array of breasts and some bizarre sci-fi imagery once the film decamps to Harris’ trippy lair, but unless that sounds like enough to keep you interested, take Meyer’s lead and avoid this bargain-basement clunker.

Invasion of the Bee Girls: LAME

3 comments:

Baby M said...

If only they'd run it as a double feature with "The Sting"......

:-)

Cindylover1969 said...

The movie originally gave writing credit to Meyer and rewriter Sylvia Stevens - Meyer took the script to the WGA in a bid to get his name taken off, but the poster shows how that worked out for him.

Unknown said...

This was on British television the other night and the one major distraction (Apart from the frequent sex scenes) was the fact that the film is set in a part of California called Peckham; Peckham is also an area in London where the classic BBC sitcom "Only Fools & Horses" was located. Every time "Peckham" was mentioned I half-expected Del Boy & Rodney to turn up in their battered old Reliant Robin (Hopefully, these references will mean something to Anglophiles who consult this website).