Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SO CHEESY IT'S A BLAST!, January 4, 1999
By A Customer
For sheer audacity, this is another classic howler from Irwin Allen`s epic disaster back catalogue! Michael Caine and Katharine Ross get all the unintentionally hilarious lines(CAINE: I never dreamed it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friends.) And these bees begin the movie by showing who really rules the skies by invading a nuclear missile silo and attacking the launch crew. They proceed to cause helicopter crashes(yes, that is in the plot!), attack a picnicking all-American family(yeeaahhh) and invade a town during its annual flower festival, causing many victims to run around like penguins trying to fly and fall all over the place looking utter idiots. As the military and scientists' attempts to wipe out the bees are miserable failures, the deadly swarm cause a spectacular train crash(special effects by the local model train shop), and much more mayhem. Then they head for (gulp!) HOUSTON! Can the all-star cast save the day??? We know the outcome, but if you would like an absolute laugh riot(I want to see the extended version myself!) and like to watch well-known names try to deadpan their way through some of the most unintentionally hilarious dialogue ever written for the screen, then this is the cheesy 1970s classic for you! The novel, by Arthur Herzog, incidentally, is much better.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
"Will history blame me or the bees?", October 2, 2006
There's delusion on an epic scale on display in Irwin Allen's infamous The Swarm. It's not the worst of his oeuvre by a long way - Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out are both much, much worse - but it's become the poster child for all the absurdities of the disaster genre at it's hokeyest. But then capsized ships with atom bombs aboard or volcanoes threatening hotel complexes can't compare to killer bees destroying nuclear power plants and causing train wrecks on the Richter Scale of movie absurdity. And it's a curiously second- and third-hand construction too - structurally Stirling Silliphant's script is surprisingly similar to his script for In the Heat of the Night. Okay, there weren't any bees in that one, but from the beginning where big city cop Sidney Poitier is discovered at a murder scene and immediately treated as a suspect by hard-case racist cop Rod Steiger until he gradually learns to respect his expertise, it's being used as a template, with sunflower seed munching entomologist Michael Caine discovered in a missile silo full of dead bodies by hard-case xenophobic general Richard Widmark, who immediately suspects him of their deaths until he gradually learns to respect his expertise (how can you not love a film where Bradford Dillman asks "Can we count on a scientist who prays?" only for Widmark to respond "I wouldn't count on one that didn't"?).
But this isn't a film about trust or even narrative, it's about miscast and affordable stars getting stung to death in slow-motion by what look like bits of oatmeal painted black and fired at them by air-cannons. It's a film about hallucinating patients being menaced by imaginary giant bees. It's a film about military complexes with lots of flashing lights. It's a film about bad acting in the face of insurmountably inane dialogue ("Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?" "I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence." and "Billions of dollars have been spent to make these nuclear plants safe. Fail-safe! The odds against anything going wrong are astronomical, Doctor!" "I appreciate that, Doctor. But let me ask you. In all your fail-safe techniques, is there a provision for an attack by killer bees?" are just the tip of the iceberg). It's about bad fashion sense - this being the 70s, the decade that taste forgot, amid a preponderance of trouser flairs there are a lot of earth tones and oranges amid the costumes, so it's entirely possible that the bees simply mistook the actors for flowers waiting to be pollinated. And it's all done with a gloriously straight face and even, on a few rare occasions, some technical competence - Irwin Allen may have loved schmaltz, but he had a great visual sense when dealing with military hardware and there are some genuinely impressive shots in the picture when he gets to play with the toys. Unfortunately his handling of the actors is much more mechanical, with the old guard (Widmark, Olivia DeHavilland, Henry Fonda, Ben Johnson) faring better than poor old Caine and Katherine Ross. And, like many bad films, it's topped off by a superb score, one of Jerry Goldsmith's very best from his golden period. Much more fun than it's good to admit, the proposed remake has a lot to live up to.
Warners' DVD is pretty good - the extended two-and-a-half hour cut in 2.35:1 widescreen from the old laserdisc release with a 1978 22-minute TV featurette on the making of the film plus the original trailer - but the sound, while acceptable, lacks much range.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It always gives me a buzz., October 23, 2001
THE SWARM is a legendary flop from Irwin Allen, the kind that destroys careers. Hyped from here to the moon, and called "the most terrifying movie ever made" by Allen himself, prior to its release, scientists everywhere were worried that it would cause a mass panic about bees. Not quite. THE SWARM turned out to be a bad movie. Drop your jaw bad. A movie that makes you ask again and again "What made them think this would work!?" A movie so bad that it is capable of giving the bad movie lover a buzz akin to those given by other substances.When the always inept military finds a whole bunch of people dead at a nuclear missile base they think Chemical Warfare. Wrong. Turns out it was a huge swarm of mutated African Killer Bees from Brazil (The Bees from Brazil?) that has illegally immigrated to Texas and now threatens The World (or at least Houston, same thing). Stirling Silliphant's script is so incredibly bad that some b-movie fans put forth that THE SWARM is really a snide parody of 50s mutant bug flicks instead of a serious thriller (check out Ken Begg's 50s schlock check list in his review of the movie at jabootu.com). Either way it does a real disservice to Arthur Herzog's fine novel, which succeeds in being frightening. The direction by Irwin Allen is lethargic, too often the movie just sits there when it should be moving at a mile a minute, but then again that allows the bad movie lover to sit there and savor each rancid morsel of dialog for all its cheesy glory. On the plus side Jerry Goldsmith contributes yet another fine score for a bad movie. Highly recommended and, believe it or not, this is an essential flick for bad movie lovers everywhere.
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