Film Summary DCCL (The Bees)

 

Will than this movie live up to its title. It's a B movie about bumblebees and at first I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that it would get better as time went on. But it's just ridiculous. 

It doesn't know what it wants to be. A 1950s B-movie run, a 1970s Bee Movie? Both have very different tones and can approach filmmaking from unique angles. But when you try to do both at the same time each end up with this confused mess of beekeeping, Bee languages. Military plots against bees, sentient bees and a bunch of corporate people who want to profit off of the bees. But then want to kill the scientist whose genetically modifying the bees. I really don't understand what their deal is in the long run. Are they just evil capitalists for the sake of being evil capitalists?

So the film starts out somewhere within Latin America. 
And yes I don't know which part. 
They could be in Brazil, they could be in one of the many Spanish-speaking countries. I can't differentiate between Portuguese and Spanish and I'm not going to make the effort for this movie. 
The outbreak started in Brazil so I just assume it's there. 
But all the same there's this American scientist and his wife conducting some sort of Bee research down in one of these Latin American countries. Some Bee Thieves try to steal honey but not knowing which bees that they're dealing with, leads to the kid of the adult thive getting killed by killer bees. And thus a mob of people to destroy the laboratory, as they blame them (the US scientist) for the infestation of bees. 
This leads our wife character (played by Angel Tompkins) to flee to the United States with all the information she has and a few specimens of bees for research. 

There's this subplot about financial problems that really never comes to anything even though they acknowledge it later on and I guess this girl is the closest thing we have to a real protagonist. 
You think it be John Saxon, but he's absent for a large part of this movie he kind of gets pepper it in enough that you remember he's there but honestly just doesn't feel like the right guy. 
Meanwhile you've got poor Angel Tompkins having a play this really disinterested woman whose intelligence seems to flip flop with the tides. 
Sometimes she understands Bee Anatomy, other time she doesn't. 
And my God is the male gains leering on her this time. 
Just look at that stupid poster they sexualized her to the nine. And it's not like it needs to be. 
It's not an exploitation film. 
It's just eye candy to draw people into this otherwise really C-grade film. 
And it's always a shame because I think this movie could be pretty good with just a bit more work. 
But what are you going to do. 
There's a bunch of bees attacking people. The film uses this ''effect'' on the screen a few times to indicate where the bees are. Along with the people runing around like they're being attacked sometimes. There's actually Bee involved sometimes. And a lot of times I'm baffled as to how much these actors have to interact with scores of weird bugs. 
It's not worth it for this movie I'd say.

I swear part of this movie just wanted to be a slasher flick with bees but they couldn't get away with it so they had to find purposely pepper in these awkward kill scenarios and where thieves and murderers and thugs randomly get attacked by bees for our entertainment. And it just doesn't help the pacing. I don't think this movies is badly paste as some do but it does suffer from a few problems and that becomes really problematic when you realized it's only an hour and a half long.

And the end of this movie is absolutely ludicrous. 
So the B's are kind of sentient and it's indicated from early on that they can communicate better than conventional bees, but at the end of the movie It's revealed that they can talk to the actual people. It reminds me of bad killer plant movie where the planes are able to communicate with pheromones. Anyways they decide to attack the U.N. and use Saxon to try and convince the world to be less environmentally destructive otherwise the bees will kill them all. 
It kind of reminds me of Superman 4 where Superman tries to tell the world's to give up nuclear arms to force a piece. 
It's very silly and it doesn't really mingle with the rest of the movie. 

Oh and for some reason the second Republic flag of Spain is being used at the UN. Which is especially confusing as they stop using that flag after the 1930s. 
That's a Nick-pic of something else altogether

Overall it's the really dumb movie. It has little glimpses of something better. A movie about possibly 'smart' bees and environmentalism intermingled with Humanities better understanding and technological achievements. 
But then it's intermixes with bad action scenes, bad slasher flick deaths, stock footage of military planes and a plot that feels like it's out of 1953. 
And the whole thing is just a mess. It was kind of fun to watch though it wasn't boring as it was too darn weird to be boring.

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