{"id":723,"date":"2014-03-05T09:22:26","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T14:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bmoviemaniacs.com\/?p=723"},"modified":"2014-03-05T09:22:26","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T14:22:26","slug":"the-bees-1978","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/the-bees-1978\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bees (1978)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bees\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A man and his young son break into the compound of apiologist (bee guy) Dr. Miller to steal the valuable honeycombs.\u00a0 Ignoring the danger signs, they open a particularly nasty hive of killer bees which overtake them.\u00a0 The next day, the man returns with some friends and his dead son.\u00a0 He blames the death of his son on the scientist for bringing\u00a0things to the area worth stealing.\u00a0 Despite this flawless logic, Dr. Miller (Claudio Brook) asks the men to leave.\u00a0 The angry mob refuses and, as angry mobs often do, they wreck the place.\u00a0 In the riot that follows the villagers release the bees, die violently, and catch fire.\u00a0 In an effort to retrieve his notes, Dr. Miller dies, but manages to save his wife Sandra (Angel Tompkins) by locking her in a walk-in fridge.
\nCut to Sandra in the elevator in John Norman\u2019s (John Saxon) California apartment building.\u00a0 Two muggers attack Sandra in the elevator and immediately open her cosmetic bag.\u00a0 Standard behavior so far.\u00a0 Sandra, a natural beauty has no need for make-up so in her bag she carries bees. \u00a0The killer bees run amok and kill the muggers.\u00a0 Sandra emerges from the elevator unscathed since she coos sweetly and bees like that.\u00a0 She arrives at John\u2019s apartment with her bag half full of bees and never mentions the mugging or the two dead guys in the hall.\u00a0 John and Sandra hit it off right away and make plans to go to John\u2019s lab to look at bees and flirt a lot.
\nMeanwhile, massive clouds of killer bees form all over the country and leave destruction and death in their wakes.\u00a0 Behind all the mayhem, a large cave of bees hums with activity.\u00a0 It reminds me of scenes in The Haunting in which Robert Wise shows us an event, then cuts to a shot of Hill House to let you know the house sees all\u2026only with bees.
\nJohn, Sandra, and Sandra\u2019s uncle Ziggy (John Carradine with an atrocious accent) start working on methods of taming the bees or preventing them from reproducing.\u00a0\u00a0 It helps that Ziggy (the Bee Whisperer) believes bees use a more sophisticated form of communication than most people think.\u00a0 There\u2019s a cool scene in which Ziggy translates bee dancing.\u00a0 It may have been a bit more detailed than real, but it was still fun.
\nFighting the scientists, \u201cBig Business\u201d wants killer bees to thrive so they can add them to their huge corporate hive.\u00a0\u00a0 This would create superbees and a more refined and expensive type of royal jelly.\u00a0 The corporate baddies want to replace the sugar in most consumer products with honey thus becoming honey sheiks and ruling the world and getting all the hot chicks.\u00a0 To that end, \u201cBig Business\u201d has a politician in its pocket who helps them with the copious bee legislation which crosses his desk.\u00a0 At a hearing before several pols, John outlines his plan to treat the killer bees with a pheromone which will make the drones mate with each other rather than the queen which breaks up the panel because they have a mental age of seven.\u00a0 They crack a lot of bad gay jokes and say things like \u201cadding incest to injury\u201d and make plans to go get popsicles.\u00a0 While John speaks in Washington, the bad guys send a couple of guys to off Ziggy.\u00a0 They try to take off, but the bees have other plans and John returns home to a blood bath in the lab.\u00a0 Worn out from cleaning corpses out of their office, John and Sandra go to bed.\u00a0 John wakes in the middle of the night and begins to make love to Sandra only to find she and he and their bed covered in bees.\u00a0 The lovers manage to extricate themselves from the bedroom though because they speak bee.\u00a0 This was the last straw.\u00a0 John, determined to inform the world about the plight of the bees and the reach of their power and not deal with bee-us interruptus again, goes back to Washington to testify before Congress.\u00a0 As he speaks, a cloud of bees enters the room and begins to air their grievances through John.
\nAlfred Zacharias (The Pearl, Crime of Crimes) wrote and directed The Bees and while it\u2019s not the best B-movie I\u2019ve seen, it is the best bee movie I\u2019ve seen involving John Saxon, hit men, and terrorists wielding jars full of bees. \u00a0\u00a0I enjoyed The Bees and it even won an award.\u00a0 Dan Genis won the award for Best Special Effects at the Catalonian International Film Festival.\u00a0 Besides, it was fun. \u00a0John Saxon always entertains, John Carradine played a fun, quirky character, and I never knew what would happen next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A man and his young son break into the compound of apiologist (bee guy) Dr. Miller to steal the valuable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[34,81,99,204,247,252,264],"class_list":["post-723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1970s","tag-bees","tag-bugs","tag-horror","tag-john-carradine","tag-john-saxon","tag-killer-bees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}