The Swarm

There's an old joke about Pia Zadora in the title role in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank.  Toward the end of the play, someone in the audience  had gotten so annoyed with her, they yelled out "She's in the attic!".

Irwin Allen's The Swarm is like that.  A killer bees disaster movie, it should have been a hit. By the last act, though, you want to smear honey on Michael Caine and Katherine Ross, and not in the sexy way.

Following his successes with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, and in the wake of Earthquake and the Airport movies, Allen returned to directing (after doing the action sequences in The Towering Inferno) after a sixteen year break.  He should have stuck to directing.

Based on the novel by Arthur Herzog, Irwin took a script from his Inferno writer Stierling Silliphant and turned it into a cast of thousands epic.  Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Jose Ferrer, Olivia De Haviland, Richard Chamberlain, Patty Duke, and Slim Pickens  All wonderfully, marvelously overacting- Pickens mourning his son in a ten minute segment has more range- and EMOTION!- than I've seen in, well anything else he's done.

The effects should have been better.  It was Irwin Allen, for Heaven's sake.  But the wideshots of the swarm looked like coffee grounds.  The final bee killing conflagration was bad bluescreen.

The only redeeming things about it were A) the really, really bad science and B) awesomely snarkable material.  I can be quiet and respectful to movies when they warrant it, but this was PRIME MST3K materail.

We got a flatscreen television and a Roku for Christmas; Warner Brother has an interesting selection of movies that I'm looking forward to watching-  The Swarm?  I'm looking forward to forgetting.