Crew
Director/Producer – Bruce Geller, Teleplay – Guerdon Trueblood, Photography – Richard Glouner, Music – Walter Murphy, Bee Effects – Norman Gary & Kenneth Lorenzen. Production Company – Alan Lansburg Productions Inc.
Cast
Ben Johnson (Sheriff Donald McKew), Michael Parks (Dr Jeff Durand), Gretchen Corbett (Jeanette ‘Jeannie’ Devereaux), Horst Bucholz [Buccholtz] (Dr Jorge Meuller), Paul Hecht (Dr Rufus Carter), Bruce French (Police Lieutenant), James Best (Pellegrino)
Plot
Donald McKew, the sheriff in a parish on the outskirts of New Orleans, returns home to find his dog dead. Suspecting it has been poisoned, he takes it to medical examiner Jeff Durand who determines that it has been killed by bee stings. At the same time, they discover that a boat has collided with a ship on the river and that those aboard have been killed by bee stings. Durand brings in his ex, entomologist Jeannie Devereaux, who consults experts who find that they are dealing with a swarm of South African bees that have crossbred with deadly African killer bees. As the New Orleans Mardi Gras starts, the group try to find the bees’ nest and a means to defeat them.
I have commented elsewhere that there has never been any such thing as a good killer bee movie. You can look to embarrassing examples like The Deadly Bees (1967), Killer Bees (1974), The Bees (1978), Irwin Allen’s The Swarm (1978), which for many years was considered one of the worst films of all time, Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare (tv movie, 1995) and Killer Bees (2002). Invasion of the Bee Girls (1972) often gets lumped in but is quite enjoyably tongue-in-cheek and gets excused because its killer bees are actually human women, The presence of killer bees were even cited as one of the prime reasons that the remake of The Wicker Man (2006) was laughed off the screen. I may have to revise my words as The Savage Bees proves to be one exception to the rule.
The Savage Bees is one of the few directorial outings from Bruce Geller (1930-78), no less than the creator of tv’s Mission: Impossible (1966-73). Geller also wrote and produced assorted other tv series and tv movies, most notedly tv’s Mannix (1967-75). His only other work as a director was the film Harry in Your Pocket (1973) about pickpockets. The Savage Bees was made as a TV Movie that aired on NBC but was released theatrically in some parts of the world. Geller was killed in a plane crash only a couple of years after making this.
The set-up of a swarm of African killer bees mated with South American bees was later used as the basis of The Swarm. In this case, you can make an educated guess that writer Guerdon Trueblood borrowed the basics from the Arthur Herzog novel The Swarm (1974), which would have been published at the time of The Savage Bees, but before it was adapted into the Irwin Allen film. To its credit, Trueblood has done his research on bees and establishes a reasonably credible-sounding and believable scenario.
And thanks to Geller, The Savage Bees emerges as a solid and reasonable entry in a genre niche filled with B (as opposed to bee) films. The film does the whole formula of the Animals Attack film fairly well – the initial incident, the government official(s) that goes out on a limb trying to warn the general populace, the moribund authorities who stall taking preventative measures because of a big holiday – without any of it feeling like a cliché. The film gets in solid performances from Ben Johnson and Michael Parks, both used to more in the way of tough guy roles, usually in Westerns, and here give hard-headed no-nonsense performances as they charge about trying to stop the bee menace.
The film is a little slow to start delivering bee attacks – only one of them by the one-hour point. One of the key things that makes the difference from most bee movies is that The Savage Bees uses real bees as opposed to an optical swarm. Most of the above-mentioned bee films fall down badly when it comes to the bee effects, but Geller relies on actual bees that look highly effective when we get in close. The best scenes come towards the end when Horst Bucholtz enters a food truck and later has his protection suit covered; a drunken couple in a coupe that are mobbed by the bees; and where Gretchen Corbett is trapped inside her VW Bug as it is covered by bees – all scenes that are using actual bee swarms. This does lead to the surreal climactic scenes where the team lead the bee-covered Volkswagen in a cordon through the streets of New Orleans to the Superdome where the bees are trapped inside and the air conditioning turned down to freezing to kill them off.
Terror Out the Sky (1978) was a sequel.
Scriptwriter Guerdon Trueblood had a career mostly in tv. His other scripts included the tv movies The Love War (1970), Sole Survivor (1970), It Happened at Lakewood Manor (1977), Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977), Terror Out of the Sky and Jaws 3-D (1983).
Trailer here
Full film available here