#26: Invasion of the Bee Girls

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 7: Side B
1973

Invasion of the Bee Girls begins like an abstract, blank-verse visual and auditory poem: We see a shot of a weedy, junk-strewn motel parking lot. Suddenly a piercing, overdubbed scream is heard. Cut to a middle-aged maid in one of the motel’s dingy rooms standing, horrified, over a man’s corpse, the bluish-gray hue of which seems otherworldly and decidedly wrong. Police sirens are heard in the distance. An incongruously funky score, almost mocking in its idiotic vigor, kicks in. The title flashes on screen: Who are these bee girls, we wonder, and what do they have to do with whatever it is we just saw?

For a low-budget b-movie, it’s a rather artful and avant-garde open--disorienting and slightly subversive in the way it seemingly strips away all motivation and meaning. Or maybe it’s just an incoherent, poorly-edited mess. Whatever the case, there’s something oddly compelling about it all, a sense of the unearthly invading the everyday that the film loses once the plot commences.

Neil Agar (genre vet William Smith) arrives from the definitely-not-made-up, totally-real-sounding State Department of Security to investigate the mysterious death. Turns out the victim, Professor Grubowsky, worked at the Brandt organization, a government-sponsored research facility where the late professor was involved in bacteriological warfare experiments. His lab assistant Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri) tells Agar this before confessing she was with the professor at the motel the night he died.

“What happened?” asks Agar. 

“We balled and we balled and we balled,” Julie tells him, “until he dropped dead.”

“Let’s go to lunch,” says Agar.

Meanwhile, the bodies continue to pile up. Hoping to stave off panic, the local police and medical community hold a meeting for the town’s residents in what appears to be a rundown American Legion. “There are three points of uniformity I’d like to bring out and underline for you,” Capt. Peters (Cliff Osmond)--just one of many large-headed, black-haired, mustachioed men in the cast--tells the crowd. “One: All the victims have been men. Two: All the men have been residents of Peckham. And third: They’ve all died apparently--I’d like to stress the word apparently--by over exhaustion during the act of sexual intercourse.”

This pronouncement only elicits derisive laughter from the crowd; but when one of the doctors suggests abstaining from all sexual activity until the mystery is resolved they turn outright hostile. “Nobody’s gonna deny me what little pleasure I get from screwing my old lady,” cries one balding, beefy citizen who turns up dead a few short scenes later.

While the movie seems to be aware of its own ridiculousness--thanks to a somewhat tongue-in-cheek script by author and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for adapting his 1974 novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to the big screen--it loses the artistry of the first few minutes amid sluggish and repetitive plotting. That is, until the very end, when Agar discovers the female staff of the Brandt organization have been fusing their cells with those of the queen bee and mating in a primeval frenzy with the male population of the town--or something like that.

The big reveal doesn’t make any sense, but the climax, set at the bee girls’ futuristic-looking hive, is well-staged by director Denis Sanders, achieving a sort of exquisite weirdness. Lights blink crazily upon the surface of sinister-looking lab equipment. Vaguely-scientific bleeping sounds are heard. The bee girls surround one of their new recruits and slather her body in a thick white substance, cocooning her. The recruit is then locked in a small chamber, the interior of which is soon swarming with hundreds of bees. The recruit is engulfed. When she emerges from the chamber the other bee girls--most of them bee women in their mid-thirties--peel the white substance from her body as ethereal music plays on the soundtrack. She is transformed, bearing the black, inhuman eyes of her kind. Soon Agar will rush in, smashing the equipment and killing the monsters in predictable and inevitable b-movie fashion. This is how a movie like this must end--but for a few brief moments Invasion of the Bee Girls takes on the quality of something better than itself, something richer and more mystical. It’s an abstract poem again, all subtext, implication and possible transcendence.  

#25: Shock

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 7: Side A
1946

The movie begins with Janet (Anabel Shaw), waiting at a San Francisco hotel for her husband, Lt. Paul Stewart (Frank Latimore), a prisoner of war returning home after two years. She soon falls asleep and dreams Paul is pounding on the door of the hotel room, trying desperately to get in. Frantic, Janet runs towards the door, which, in typical nightmarish fashion, seems to grow further and further away. By the time Janet finally reaches it, she has shrunk. She is hardly bigger than the doorknob and cannot open the door. Paul is stuck on the other side, unable to get in. The dream ends, but a strong sense of absence and anxiety lingers.

Janet wanders out onto the balcony for some fresh air. Through the window of the room opposite hers she sees Dr. Richard Cross--an impossibly young Vincent Price--arguing with his wife Margaret. “I’ve decided to ask you for a divorce,” he tells her. Margaret refuses, threatening to expose his adulterous ways to the papers. Enraged, Cross goes full-on Clue and clubs Margaret to death with a candlestick. Janet faints in fright. When Paul finally arrives, he finds Janet on the couch, silent and petrified. In a very noir-ish twist of fate, Dr. Cross himself is called upon to examine her. 

“What do you think caused it, doc?” asks Paul.

“It’s hard to say,” muses Price in that faintly menacing, slightly ironic, vaguely lisping way of his. He looks out on the balcony, suspecting Janet may have witnessed the murder. He convinces Paul to let him take Janet to his remote, countryside sanitarium for further study. What follows is a seemingly endless succession of scenes in which Dr. Cross skulks into Janet’s room, hammers his fist on her bedside table and prods her with questions, forcing her to relive the night of the murder and in this way determine how much she knows. When Janet suddenly recognizes her doctor as the murderer, Cross sets about trying to convince the woman that she’s insane.

“Your mind is sick and getting worse,” he tells her. “You wouldn’t want your husband to see you in that condition. He doesn’t even want to see you like this. You’re losing your mind,” he says. “Losing your mind.”

While these scenes have a certain queasiness to them in the way Dr. Cross abuses his role as an authority figure and care provider, they also grow a bit repetitive. In fact, the film loses momentum almost as soon as the action shifts to the sanitarium, a setting which should be steeped in anxiety and paranoia but which--excepting a tense scene involving a thunderstorm and a bug-eyed escapee from the mental ward--becomes rather dull and stagnant. If only the rest of the film had been able to capture the tension of that early dream sequence, which plunges our heroine into a world of post-war uncertainty where her very sanity, less than five minutes into the picture, seems to be in question. Sure, it's a bit derivative of the famous dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound, released a year earlier; but it's still effective, lending a certain ambiguity and psychological depth to Janet that the character loses the longer Shock confines her to bed, an inert and passive victim.

#24: In Hot Pursuit

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 7: Side A
1977

Wacky, circus-style music plays over the opening credits of In Hot Pursuit, struggling mightily to establish a tone of pure and unadulterated zaniness that is immediately undercut by the very first scene, in which two pilots mutter disinterestedly to each other as they slowly bring their pot-filled plane in for a landing in a field somewhere in rural Georgia. Waiting for the plane are drug-runners Oosh (Don Watson), his Bad Company t-shirt-sporting brother Boosh (Don’s real-life bro Bobby Watson) and a couple other long-haired, too-tight-jeans-wearing, Doobie Brothers-roadie-looking-types. When the plane lands Oosh and Boosh hand off a sack full of money to the pilots and load the grass into their musty Winnebago. That’s when the fuzz shows up.  

“Jesus Christ!” cries Boosh in his thick Southern drawl. “Here come the damn po-lice!” Cue a protracted backroads chase--In Hot Pursuit’s raison d’etre--involving the Winnebago, half a dozen cop cars, a Cadillac-driving old-timer, and an oblivious, burrito-eating trucker who continues chowing down even after accidentally swerving his eighteen-wheeler across the road and slicing the roof off Oosh and Boosh’s RV. Eventually the boys are apprehended and brought to the local jail, whereupon Mr. King (Paul Weiner), the sweaty, thick-necked head of the drug-smuggling operation, calls in his sweaty, thick-necked associates to devise a prison break. Their brilliantly idiotic plan entails landing a helicopter on the roof of the jail, where the boys just happen to be repairing an air-conditioning unit (who knew maintenance work was such a big part of serving time?) under the watchful eye of the sheriff. As the copter descends, the boys knock the sheriff out, grab onto the copter’s landing struts and are whisked away.      

This, inevitably, leads to more chases; double crosses; an armored car heist; multiple cops bellowing slight variations on the line, “That’s the car we got a lookout on! Let’s get ‘em!”; incongruous musical cues; some extended bed-lounging; a miraculous plane-landing in the middle of the forest; and a belabored comic set-piece consisting of a massive double-wide being transported down the highway atop a flatbed, an out-of-control, dope-filled tractor-trailer, and repeated cuts to a drunken, barefoot yokel inside the double-wide napping on a dirty cot.

Between this sort of desperate humor, the largely incomprehensible dialogue, Mr. King’s wood-paneled office that looks more like one-time director Jim West’s step-mom’s rumpus room than it does the headquarters of a major crime syndicate, and the delightfully low-rent credits (one of the actors is billed simply as Big Jim, another as Mrs. Oxly), In Hot Pursuit has a scuzzy, homemade charm to it not unlike that of fellow southern-fried Fifty Pack classics Twister’s Revenge and Country Blue. Add to it the fact that the movie, also known awesomely as Polk County Pot Plane, is loosely based on one of those strange-but-true news briefs--in August 1975 drug smugglers cleared out a 1000 foot landing strip on Treat Mountain in Georgia and against all odds landed a Douglas DC-4, a plane designed for runways of 3000 feet or longer--and the whole thing seems imbued with a goofy, over-the-top sense of local pride. Then there’s that badass claim at the end of the movie--No stuntmen were used in this film--which makes Oosh and Boosh’s car-crashing and helicopter-dangling antics all the more impressive. In some ways, the movie seems like something your inebriated, hirsute, redneck uncles--you know, the ones that let you play with fireworks when you were a kid and sip from their cans of Bud Light at family BBQs--might’ve cobbled together back when they were still young, a little crazy and their ambitions extended beyond long, hazy afternoons on the couch watching NASCAR.