Customer Reviews

Invasion of the Bee Girls [VHS]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Anitra Ford stars as Dr. Susan Smith, an entomologist who has discovered a method for cross-pollinating women with bees. The process is very elaborate. A woman who is large-breasted and sexy is chosen to be their next inductee. She is lured into Dr. Smith's laboratory, a bee hive of activity as her assistants swarm about. Their latest victim is drugged, stripped naked and covered with a honey-like substance. She is then placed in a sealed chamber and zapped with radiation. Hundreds of bees are released in the chamber until they cover every inch of her body. A switch is thrown, the bees magically disappear, and the woman is removed from the chamber. The honey-like goop, which has hardened into a rubbery texture, is peeled off her body. Another switch is thrown and flashing lights swirl all around her. All of the women in the lab start exposing and fondling their breasts. Anitra Ford goes up to the naked inductee and plants a big, wet kiss on her. The woman then opens her eyes, which have become pitch black. She has been transformed into a lethal honey - a bee girl!

The bee girl's sole purpose in life is to mate with every available male. However, their sting is deadly. Every man who makes love to one dies of a massive heart attack after climaxing. Why Dr. Smith has created this race of mutant bee girls, and what their ultimate purpose is, remains a mystery. I found watching beautiful, buxom women making love to overweight middle-aged men to be entertaining enough for me, without searching for a deeper meaning. Too bad government agent Neil Agar, the original cigarette-smoking man, has to investigate the mysterious deaths and ruin all the fun. Sure, several men died, but at least they died happy! This film has the class to have "Also Sprach Zarathustra" play as the end credits roll. I hope they release this movie on DVD soon, before I break out in hives. Like "The Sting," it's a honey of a movie!

Also released as INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS, GRAVEYARD TRAMPS is a highly entertaining, cheesy horror/sci-fi film.

Many female insects kill their mates upon breeding. I didn't know that was true of queen bees, but apparently it is, at least according to this film.

You see, this government scientist inadvertantly creates a "bee girl" in an experiment. She then goes about mating and killing men, while transforming their wives into sister "bee girls."

This is pre-X-FILES horror, so the laboratory transformation doesn't even try to appear realistic. Instead, the transformation process involves a machine with colored flashing lights, bees, nudity, and some very soft-core lesbian kissing.

Victoria Vetri plays a brilliant scientist helping a goverment security officer investigate the deaths of some male scientists. The scientists all died during sex (you know why). Vetri is a former Playboy centerfold, yet we're supposed to believe she's a brilliant scientist because (1) she wears glasses, (2) has her hair tied up in a bun, and (3) wears a white coat. Whatever, she still looks sexy, especially when she strips, so we don't care if she's not much of a scientist.

This is a fun film, but this DVD looks to have been struck off a VHS tape of an old film print. Seriously. There are some film dirt specks on some scenes. The colors are faded, like an old movie. There's also a tape glitch.

I bought a copy of this film on Beta some 20 years ago, and after several viewings, it STILL looks better than the DVD. Sharper and with more vivid colors.

This DVD also has no special features. Not even a trailer.

Worse, this DVD is FULL SCREEN.

I suppose I could forgive the crappy visuals, because at this price, you can't expect a digitally remastered edition. But I can't forgive the FULL SCREEN.

I'd give this film four stars, but deduct one due to the FULL SCREEN DVD.

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS (aka: Graveyard Tramps) is one of my favorite movies of all time! Yes, horrible / beautiful Bee Girls are attempting to take control of earth by seducing, mating with, and killing the poor males of our species! They are also recruiting human females to increase their horrid numbers! Beware! They wear big sunglasses and cover future members (gorgeous naked women, of course) in white, creamy, bee-goo! You could be next! On second thought, no, I'll be next. I hereby volunteer to save you by sacrificing myself to these nasty insectile ladies. If you don't own this film, how will you ever defend yourself against their onslaught?? Buy it now, for safety's sake...

Originally released in most locations under the title INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS (which is certainly much more appropriate to the storyline), this has always been one of my favorite science-fiction "skin flicks" of the 1970s' (with a fun and raunchy plot). Unfortunately, the print on this DVD is fairly grainy and quite dark, making many of the night scenes almost indecipherable (were those "[...]" I saw or not?), but, then again, what should I expect for less than four bucks? 5 stars for the movie, 1 star for the print = 3 stars.

Graveyard Tramps (1973) aka Invasion of the Bee Girls...I have no idea where the alternate title `Graveyard Tramps' came from, but it's pretty awful in terms of not being relatable to the film since it implies something completely different than what the feature actually is, a really goofy mad scientist type movie (Graveyard Tramps implies to me zombie prostitutes). I will say there is a bit in a graveyard (a short funeral sequence) and plenty of seemingly trampy female characters, but the original title is much more applicable. Directed by Denis Sanders (Shock Treatment), the film stars Anitra Ford (The Big Bird Cage), an original `The Price is Right' model, and William Smith (Any Which Way You Can, Hell Comes to Frogtown), probably best known for his late 1960s/early 1970s motorcycle drive-in flicks Run, Angel, Run (1969), Nam's Angels (1970), and Chrome and Hot Leather (1971). Also appearing is former Playmate of the Year (1968) Victoria Vetri (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth), Cliff Osmond (Sweet Sugar), Anna Aries (The Omega Man), and Jack Perkins (Night Shift).

Something odd is going down in the small town of Peckham, California, specifically seemingly healthy men are turning up dead due to heart attacks induced by too much copulating (of all the ways to bite it, death between the sheets don't sound all that bad...). Anyway, one of the corpses is a scientist who works at a gooberment funded research facility, so in the name of national security, some uppity ups in Washington send along special agent Neil Agar (Smith) to see what's what. Upon arriving Neil checks in with the local sheriff named Captain Jim Peters (Osmond) before heading out to the research facility and hooking up with a top-heavy blonde scientist named Julie Zorn (Vetri). More bodies begin turning up, and Neil learns most of the scientists entertain themselves during the off hours by swapping wives and such...it's a groovy scene, man...anyway, Neil, unsure if the recent spate of unexplained deaths are due to some form of virulent venereal disease, decides to quarantine the town (the military shows up to block the roads), and one scientist suggests those still among the living practice abstinence until the root cause is determined, which doesn't go down well with the local yokels (apparently the town offers little in the way of leisure activities). The bodies continue to pile up and Neil eventually gets a lead on a leggy scientist named Dr. Susan Harris (Ford), whose work involves something to do with bees. As it turns out, she's been busy creating a legion of comely automaton creatures, complete with black eyeballs, for reasons as yet undisclosed, who have a penchant for shacking up with the local male population and sexing them up to death. The good news is they don't seem all that picky about whom they bed, the downside being whomever they hook up with ends up taking a dirt nap (there's always a catch). Eventually Neil gets the goods on Harris and her Foster Grant sunglasses wearing, honeybee cabal, but it may be too late as Harris and her minions continue their `pollinating' ways...

While this film suffers in a number of different ways (goofy plot, low production values, intermittent storyline), it excels generally in being just a whole lot of fun, especially if you dig on bargain basement science fiction...oh yeah, it also has a whole lot of female nekkidness, something which I wasn't really expecting, but it certainly helped in terms of keeping my attention. Every main female character (along with quite a few minor ones) gets nekkid at some point or other, offering up a generous helping of sleaze, something I can appreciate especially given some of the women appearing in the film. Perhaps the most delectable was Anitra Ford (check out them gams) as at one point she performs a striptease prior to putting it to one lucky, soon to be deceased, male character. There's another scene, one involving the Bee women transforming a recent widow into one of their own, and after the process a number of them start opening their shirts and fondling themselves in almost ritualistic fashion. Whoever cast William Smith in this film deserves some credit as he brings along a lot of experience given his extensive work within the world of low budget films. The man has undeniable appeal and a definite screen presence, enough so to make me wonder why he never really moved into the realm super stardom. Perhaps it was for the best, as talents helped in adding a certain amount of credibility towards any number of low budget features that would have suffered in his absence. As far as the rest of the performers, they were good enough given the material, perhaps a couple who stood out more than most for me being character actor Cliff Osmond (who played the sheriff) and Anitra Ford, who's incredibly beautiful. The latter may have not won any awards for her abilities (in terms of acting), but I did feel there was more to her than just a pretty face and a smoking body. I think another thing that helped this movie a lot was it felt like the filmmakers never really took anything too seriously. The production seems pretty loose, which actually works here, at least in my opinion. And I'll say this, some of the science aspects of the story actually sounded realistic, even if the transformation process was hokey as hell. I did feel the feature could have used a little more action, especially given the fact William Smith was the main, male character, but whatever...

It appears there are a few, different DVD releases by a few, different companies, out there of this film, but the one I have is the one released by Brentwood Home Video. The picture, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), is shoddy and murky, especially during the scenes that occur at night. The audio, on the other hand, comes across well. There aren't any extras, but there are all of about six chapter stops. I noticed one of the other DVD releases lists prominently on the cover that Claudia Jennings stars in the film, but that's a mistake as she doesn't appear anywhere in the film, as far as I can tell.

Cookieman108

By the way, I really enjoyed end credit sequence, as displayed are visuals of bees flying about some flowers, all to the tune of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra), the theme featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It felt fitting in a way I'm unable to describe.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (aka Graveyard Tramps) is one of my favourite sci-fi films from the 1970s. It is a genre-bending film that includes detective fiction elements, feminist overtones, and mild horror schlock. The feminist elements may not be obvious to the casual viewer, but the plot element of housewives turning into bee girls, and then doing a fatal number on the men of the city truly makes it a girl-power movie!

This re-release "movie title" has nothing to do with what the movie is about.

FYI the true title is "Invasion of the Bee Girls." It is quintessential 70's . If you like 70's femme fatale films... you will love this.

I saw this movie while in the Air Force, late-summer 1972. A civilian employee on-base claimed that her cousin, Victoria Vetri, starred in a movie at the local drive-in - she got no takers. Then she piped up that Vicks (Ms. Vetri's nickname) was also Playboy's Playmate on the Month for August 1967 and PLAYMATE OF THE YEAR. Bingo! she got some attention.

The movie actually is plot-driven, and production values are better than the typical 1970's sexploitation flick. The main stars, Vicks and william Smith are both polished actors and well-cast. The unintentional humor is provided by the supporting cast, mainly stereotypes of rednecks and hicks. The script writing gets lazy here.

The plot revolves around Anitra Ford, an early Barker's Beauty from the Price Is Right She is a queen bee turned mad scientist who is driven to create murderous women in her laboratory hive. Making love to one of these horny, two-legged bee sex machines causes heart failure.

Thus, there is plenty of silicone-free female nudity, provided by Ms. Vetri as well as Playmate Claudia Jennings. This DVD will win no awards, but it's a fun way to keep abreast of the times (pun intended). The only downside to this DVD is poor audio in certain scenes. However, these shortcomings don't detract from the overall experience. You are ogling in this movie, not paying attention to much else.

Walk in with low expectations, and this movie will not disappoint.

Note added 2/26/10: This film's director, Nicholas Meyer, to this day has never seen a print of this movie. The working title of Bee Girls was "The Honey Factor"; when the producers changed the name to "Invasion of the Bee Girls", he figured the movie had become too declasse for his tastes. He was unaware that Bee Girls had been further degraded to "Graveyard Tramps." He is considering biting the bullet and finally buying a print and viewing it before he dies.

This is another one of those movies us kids used to watch all the time on local TV stations, late on a Sunday afternoon when we should've been playing "Kick The Can" or something. It's a horror movie of the sort that only could've been made in the '70s. And the sort of movie that wouldn't get shown locally today in the middle of the afternoon (even edited, defocussed, or whatever other tricks are used to hide nudity). But hey, it was the '70s.

William Smith plays the affable government agent come to town to investigate the not terribly mysterious death of a research scientist. Turns out the scientist died "in flagrante delicto", if-you-know-what-I-mean-and-I-think-you-do*. Well, nobody thinks too much of this until men start dropping like (sorry) flies and the only clue is a strange buzzing sound. Hmmm.

The actual "deduction" process isn't exactly the airtight sort of reasoning you'll find in screenwriter Meyer's later works like "The Seven Percent Solution" or "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", but then that's not really the point is it?

The point is to watch various men die fitting deaths at the hands of the bee girls and to see the climactic (though never adequately explained) transformation of ordinary (though extraordinarily fit and buxom) housewives into mutant queen bees. (The transformation process is pretty elaborate, too.)

Anitra Ford, a model who didn't do much acting after this, plays the damsel/scientist in distress. Of interest to Ed Wood fans may be the (brief) appearance of Rene Bond, star of Ed Wood's Necromania.

The film doesn't take itself to seriously, which lends it considerable camp value 25+ years later.

*With apologies to Joe Bob Briggs

I listened to a radio interview with the writer of this movie and purchased it as a result. The movie isn't bad, but it's definitely of its time, like the late 50s.