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