The Swarm

"Oh my god! Bees, bees, millions of bees!"

You know how some people say that some films are "so bad they're good"? If anyone tells you that The Swarm falls into that category then they're lying! At first I thought this would be a case of file under: ridiculous, stupid and fun, but by the time it got to the 90 minute mark (and with more than an hour still to go) I was well and truly over it. Irwin Allen has been nicknamed 'the Master of Disaster' due to his propensity for making these kind of apocalyptic films, but I think in the case of The Swarm he definitely went one disaster too far.

Brad Crane (Michael Caine) is an insect-specialist who tracks an alarmingly large swarm of bees to a military installation. Once there he finds that the bees have killed everyone and left. He teams up with a grouchy General (Richard Widmark) and a wooden love interest (Katharine Ross) to try and put a stop to the bees before they cause any more damage. Unfortunately, the bees are actually super-smart African killer bees that are so smart they line their hives with plastic (wtf?), and have the ability to cause hallucinations where people think they're being menaced by giant bees. And if you thought having one bee specialist in the film wasn't enough then never fear, Henry Fonda and Richard Chamberlain also co-star as some other bee specialists (apparently the American government keeps an official insect specialist on hand). Maximum retardation ensues.

BRAD CRANE: They're not touching the pellets. I repeat, they're not touching the pellets. They seem to sense that it's something that will kill them.
HUBBARD: These bees are brighter than we thought.

Caine headlines the film, and whilst he's always a suitably lively presence, he is given some gloriously stinky dialogue. In fact, the whole film is full of appallingly clunky exposition. Allen's direction is incredibly heavy-handed (romantic music plays within minutes of Caine and Ross's characters meeting each other, despite nothing romantic happening) and the script is so ludicrously contrived that it's hard to fathom why everyone in the film seems to be taking it seriously. For instance, near the beginning of the film a scientist miraculously appears to verify Crane's identity just before he's about to be locked up for trespassing on military property. Lucky that! There's also a scene where the characters argue for about three minutes over whether the bees should be called 'African' or 'Brazillian'. It's life-draining to watch, and sounds like a parody, but the worst thing is that it isn't a comedy. Soon the bees are an epidemic of national proportions, causing trains to derail and nuclear reactors to explode.

The cast is made up of a who's who of hasbeens, and nearly all of them embarrass themselves via the awkward dialogue and half-aborted subplots. There's no energy at all in it and it's almost stage-like in the way it's blocked (especially in the scenes where Fred MacMurray and Ben Johnson vye for the attentions of Olivia De Havilland, a subplot that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film). Caine and Widmark butt heads throughout the film, but the rivalry between them never feels organic (despite how hard Widmark tries to make it work). A lot of the smaller roles are filled with people who seem to have no interest or experience in acting whatsoever. Also, check out this dialogue:

"Who would've thought that bees would become the first alien force to invade America?"

Just think about that for a second. Who would've thought that? No one. No one would have thought this. And that's because it doesn't make ANY SENSE. The Swarm might've been a cult-ish horror film at least, but the bee-deaths are all bloodless and depicted in slow motion, so it doesn't even deliver in horror terms. Instead we get endless scenes of extras falling to the ground as bees swarm all over them. My favourite of these scenes would have to be the bit where the bees descend on a country town school, and all the kids die in agonizing slow motion, the camera slowly zooming in on a lollipop in a dead child's hand as bees crawl all over it. Then it cuts to their teacher (Olivia De Havilland), who watches them all die from the safety of her classroom before tuning to face the camera to let out this awkward scream of anguish that makes her look and sound like Sloth from The Goonies.

I think this would be a contender for one of the worst films I've ever seen.

DIRECTOR: Irwin Allen
WRITER/SOURCE: Stirling Silliphant, based on a novel by Arthur Herzog.
KEY ACTORS: Michael Caine, Richard Widmark, Katharine Ross, Henry Fonda, Richard Chamberlain, Lee Grant, Ben Johnson, Olivia De Havilland, Fred MacMurray, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Alejandro Ray, Bradford Dillman, Cameron Mitchell

RELATED TEXTS:
- The Swarm, a 1974 disaster novel by Arthur Herzog.
- Caine ranks it, alongside Ashanti and The Magus, as amongst the very worst films he ever appeared in.
- See also The Deadly Bees, a 1966 British horror film that sounds just as bad.
- Allen's over big disaster films were The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Costume Design.