Directed by Alfonso Brescia

Written by Alfonso Brescia and Aldo Crudo

Run Time: 100 minutes

Tagline: Super-human feats of strength! Super-thrilling deeds of daring! Super-fantastic conquests of adventure!

Other Titles: Super Stooges vs the Wonder Women

	Darma (Aldo Landi) The mighty Darma is the last in a long line of, well, liars that pretend to be immortal and take offerings from gullable villagers in exchange for protection. After falling victim to an Amazon’s spear, Darma ‘passes the mask’ to his student, Aru.
	Aru (Aldo Canti) After his teacher dies, Aru dons the Darma mask and continues the ancient deception of pretending to be immortal. The mighty Aru is always ready to seduce a willing Amazon, at least when he’s not beating the crap out of them.
	Meela (Malisa Longo) The delightful Meela…ah, the poor Amazon who falls for Aru’s charms. Torn between her love for Aru and her responsibility to her people what will she choose?
	Philones (Riccardo Pizzuti) The oily leader of a gang of Comedy Relief bandits that provide most of this films most insipid scenes…and that’s saying a lot.
	Mario (uncredited) The dimunitive Mario plays the cool-headed foil for Philones’s hot-headed antics. Oh, let the mirth begin! Huzzah!

What can I say? I’m a masochist. Why the hell else would I actually track down, purchase, watch and review a movie like this? Don’t you think I have better things to do with my free time? Ok. I don’t.

Oh hell. Let’s get on with it.

The films opens with the theme song (played by some crazy Italian guy on a Casio keyboard) while credits (consisting of various scenes cut from the movie played in "negative" color…hey, don’t laugh, that was cutting-edge technology!) introduce us to the various actors and actresses in the film. Well, at least the few that dared to have their names connected to this movie. As is wont for cheap films, the only type of transition between scenes seems to be an abrupt jump cut, which is exactly what we do to start the film…sooooo…jump cut to the Amazon Queen ordering her leather-bikini clad legions to ride through the land and find Darma. Once this legendary protector of the people is found (more on him later), he will be forced to reveal the secret of the…are you ready for it…Sacred Fire of Immortality! Huzzah! (Oh, and don’t worry about who this Darma person is, or for that matter, don’t worry about what in the hell is ever going on. You’ll just have to go with the flow if you’re ever going to make it through this movie. Trust me.)

Anyway, jump cut from the Amazons to an extreme close-up shot of a bowl of lumpy stew. Nice.

As the camera pulls back, we catch a glimpse of the first of our 3 heroes, Moog (billed as "Black Samson" in the trailer…good grief!). For no explained reason (were you expecting one?), a gang of rough-necks, led by OCR Philones, (OCR = Odious Comedy Relief) burst into the restaurant and chase everybody out so they can have the place to themselves and eat in peace and banditry. Moog, being so strong and all, pays the thugs no mind and continues gobbling down his meal. A couple of dudes suddenly spot Moog and saunter over to manhandle Moog out into the street. (Hey, don’t you guys know better then to mess with Black Samson?) Without batting an eye, Moog pulls out a rubber ball and slings it against a wall where it ricochets into the assailants’ heads and knocks them senseless. Since this scene involves OCR, it is accompanied by an electronic "nyah nyah nyah nyah nyaaaaah nyah!" taunt…hoy boy…this is going to be a long 90 minutes. (Note From the Future: it was.)

Philones orders the other bandits to attack which results in some slap-stick fighting which is too horrible to convey with mere words. (Hint: See YouTube clip below.) Like I said, Moog proceeds to beat the crap out of the gang as Philones and his diminutive side-kick (it just wouldn’t be an Italian movie without a midget, now would it? Oh, and since he’s not credited, let’s just call him Mario.) look on in shock. Rather stupidly, Philones decides to take matters into his own hands, and is handed a beat down of his own. Even Mario gets in on the action and is dribbled out of the restaurant like a basket ball!!! (Oh…the indignity…) To complete the absurdity, the remaining gang members attack en masse but Moog manages to repulse them with a gigantic belch.

All this and it’s only been 6 minutes!

Anyhoo, somebody must have thought that belching is hilarious, because Moog’s burping continues for nearly a minute. Har dee har har. Moog eventually goes outside (smashing through a wall instead of taking the door because, well, he’s strong) and continues whooping the bad guys’s butts. After even more hilarity, Moog winds things up by tossing Philones and the others onto their respective horses and standing proudly in a highly indelicate buffalo shot. You know what? I was actually considering sparing you this shot, but…nah. I don’t want you getting soft on me now…

Cut to Asian Superhero, Chung, happily riding his water buffalo along the road. (Why the director decided to accompany Chung’s entrance with banjo (!) music is beyond me.) Unbeknownst to Chung, he’s riding through Philones’s "territory" and is promptly attacked by the whole gang.

Yes.

More fighting.

Fun.

If you suspected that since Chung (billed as the “Chinese Chopper”!) is Asian then he’s automatically a martial arts expert, well, then go ahead and give yourself 2 Monster Shack bonus points. (Be sure to redeem your points for cool Monster Shack merchandise here!) To my horror (and steadily worsening headache), Chung’s Kung-fu expertise seems primarily to consist of slicing off his attacker’s pants so that they become so humiliated that they either run away or stand there dumfounded at their awkward situation so Chung can knock them unconscious. (In case you haven’t noticed, this is a fairly ‘bloodless’ film, i.e., swords are used more for knocking people out rather than, you know, stabbing and cutting them.) After endless pants-cutting scenes, all of Philones’ useless bandits are dispersed into the forest, presumably looking for new pants. Naturally, the scene concludes with a female Asian bandit (surprise, surprise…) jumping out of the bushes and attacking Chung. Proving that chivalry is not completely dead, and ensuring that she’ll eventually become his love interest, after beating the crap out of her, Chung offers her a flower. All together now…awwwwwwwwww.

Meanwhile, the Amazons are paying a not-so-friendly visit to Ye Olde Repressed Village. After rounding up the usual lot of skinny, pathetic villagers, the Queen Beghira proclaims that the village is now under their "protection" and will be taxed accordingly. The village chief objects, noting that they are currently under the protection of Darma, some sort of local wizard that lives in the mountains. Incredibly, at that exact moment, Darma appears out of nowhere in a giant explosion. (Well, the type of explosion where the camera films an empty area with an explosion, the camera is turned off, then the actor is place into position and the camera is turned back on. Viola! It’s film magic!) With a brief exchange of threats, Beghira (man, what a beautiful name) orders her Amazons to capture Darma and, oh boy, the chase is on. (You know, if there’s one thing that’s more exciting then underwater knife fights, it just has to be a horse chase. Yessirree.)

Soooooooo, the Amazons chase Darma into a valley where he performs several more weird explosion appear/disappear tricks for our entertainment. Finally, finally, Darma warns the Amazons to stay the hell away from the village or else face the consequences and then makes a final disappearance via explosion.

Meanwhile, back at the village, the Elders summon Mighty Darma from behind his wall of Sacred Flame. (Darma has the disturbing habit of sitting with his legs splayed, very, very wide…yuch.) Now, you may be wondering how Darma can be in 2 different places at the same time. Well, I’m not going to give it away just yet, so hang in there. Like us, Darma himself also seems confused when the villagers thank him for saving their butts from the Amazons earlier that day. Could there be a Darma imposter? (That was a rhetorical question by the way, so please don’t email me your answers.)

Anyhoo, Darma plays it cool and suggests that it might have been a spirit that showed up this morning, so, whatever. The boneheaded villagers buy this lame explanation and present their weekly offerings. Darma eagerly collects the goodies and tells villagers to continue to trust him. Furthermore, if the Amazons do return, just remain passive and he will come to their aid. (Huh?) With all this said and done, Darma disappears behind a wall of flame. Little do the villagers know that Darma is actually sitting on a rotating disk which spins around via help from Darma’s pupil, Aru, who is hiding inside a secret cave just behind the throne.Wow. So the Mighty Darma is actually a big fraud. (I found this revelation a refreshing surprise, to be honest.)

Darma then puts 2 and 2 together and realizes that it was Aru who was impersonating him earlier in the day when the Amazons attacked. After giving him a light ass chewing, Darma hops down from his throne and helps Aru put the day’s offerings in the storage area. Aru, feeling that the time is ripe for a change, asks Darma for permission to be exposed to the Sacred Flame so that he can be immortal just like he is. Darma, sensing that maybe he should finally confess that the whole Sacred Flame Immortality deal is a crock of shit, admits that the role of Darma has actually been passed down from master to student for centuries. (Yeah, I guess that mask has kept everybody fooled for hundred of years. Nobody would ever notice a complete change in body build, voice, height, etc. when there was a "Darma switch", now would they?.)

Anyway, Darma goes off to his room to take a nap, so Aru heads out to do some hunting. (Why do they need to hunt when they get basket after basket of food from the villagers?) After a couple of minutes, Aru comes across Meela, a (really cute) Amazon maiden in distress. Meela looks up and explains that she’s fallen off her horse and twisted her ankle. After a brief 2 second examination, Aru declares that there’s nothing he can do, but he knows somebody who can. Snatching her up in his arms, Aru takes Meela back to the cave and has Darma patch her up. (Wouldn’t there be a Don’t Bring Strangers Into the Secret Cave rule? Good grief.)

With Meela’s ankle patched up, Darma goes off to take another nap (Jeez! What is with this guy?) Naturally, the first thing to do when you have suffered a sprained ankle is to go swimming, which is exactly what Meela and Aru end up doing. (This scene does however have the benefit of slow-motion water frolicking scenes which reveal a good deal of Malisa Longo’s delightful body that is conveniently clad in a wet, sheer, toga thingee if you get my drift.)

As Aru and Meela revel in their new found love (Wow. That was fast: they met 15 minutes ago!), out of the forest stumbles a villager with literally 10 arrows sticking out of him. Before collapsing in a heap he manages to scream "The Amazons are coming!" which I can only assume means that we’re in for some more equestrian pursuit footage. Aru tells Meela to stay put while he goes for help. (Note that the bandage on her ankle is now mysteriously gone and she’s also magically healed as she can now run and put her full weight on it. Hmmm.)

Back at the cave, Aru discovers to his horror that Darma has been speared by the Amazons. (Wasn’t he taking a nap?) With his dying breath, Darma tasks Aru with a journey to a "large city" (could you be a little more vague?) where he’ll meet two other warriors, Moog and Chung. Darma explains that these guys want to be immortal and still believe that he has the secret of lasting life. Soooooo (man this guy sure has a long "last breath"), Moog and Chung will be willing to help Aru as long as they believe that he, as the Darma, will share the secret with them after the Amazons are defeated. (What Moog and Chung might do when they find out that they’ve been manipulated and lied to is not discussed.) With that, the old Darma finally dies (thank goodness), and Aru puts on the magic mask, thus becoming the new Darma. (Hmmmm, I was hoping for a little more pageantry in the whole "Changing of the Darma", but there you have it.)

Eager to reach the aforementioned "large city", Aru runs from the cave and is promptly spotted by the Amazons. Nice one, doofus. With goofy keyboard music to add to the levity, Aru runs for his life through the wilderness with the equally hapless Amazons in pursuit. Through a series of jumps from cliffs (!), flips, hops, and so on (and let me give actor Aldo Canti full props for his gymnastic prowess), Aru eludes his would-be captors and makes his way to the city unharmed. (Aru also jumps up cliffs through the magic of Play The Jump-Down Scene In Reverse. Woot!)

Once in town, Aru stumbles across Philones and his gang of idiots and, surprise, surprise, another huge goofy melee ensues, also accompanied by the exact same music we heard in the previous fight scene with the Amazons, so to put it mildly, it’s starting to get on my nerve. Oh, boy, let’s see. Yeah, there’s a lot of scenes of Aru kicking people in the butt, vegetable carts are overturned (naturally), and boy, is there really somebody who thinks that this is even mildly amusing? (And what the hell is it with the "nyah nyah, nyah nyah, Nyaaaaaah nyah" horn tooting?!)

As Aru kicks ass, Chung watches from the sidelines and occasionally takes out a stray bad guy or 2 with a smack of his sword, or a well placed kick to the rear end. (Ok, I realize that nobody can actually, you know, get hurt (unless you’re an Amazon and then you will get your ass whipped) , but what’s with all the "butt kicking"…it’s starting to get a little weird.)

Why, there’s Moog. He’s met a cute woman who is, tada!, African as well. She tells him that she’s from the village and they immediately fall in love. I’m not kidding.

Philones, who apparently loves to get his ass kicked, decides this would be an opportune time to smack Moog over the head with a 2-by-4. Of course this only pisses Moog off (when will Philones ever learn!? Hoo hoo!) so he proceeds to knock him senseless and set him up on a table with a big empty clay jug in his lap. Mario finds this hilarious for some reason, and man, I really feel like I’m missing the punch line here….

Yes, Chung also ends up fighting the cute Asian gang member whom he gave the flower to earlier in the film. What are the odds? Such mirth!

Man, this scene goes on and on and on. Now, I’m always game for a few minutes of watching people getting kicked in the pants, but this is starting to get a little stale. This is like one of those long, drawn out 3 Stooges pie fight scenes that never seems to end, except that the pie fights were actually funny for a while.

Finally…FINALLY…the town guards show up and disperse the combatants, so now we can thankfully move on to the next scene…good grief.

Coffee break.

Cut to the Amazon camp where the Queen is ordering an attack on the village in order to enslave the men folk. Now, I’m obviously not an Amazon Queen, but doesn’t it seem counter-productive to capture and remove the village’s workforce and then demand grain payments? Whatever.

Another brutal jump cut transports us to Aru’s cave where he explains to Moog and Chung that, yes, he truly is the keeper of the Sacred Flame of Immortality. (Man, what a liar!) For some reason, Aru decides that this would be a good time to go off and meditate. (Yes, I know that Aru had to get out of the scene so Moog and Chung could discuss the Flame without Aru around, but this was kind of contrived.) Chung suggests to Moog that they’re being taken for a ride. (Wow! An intelligent character!) With Aru out of the scene, they decide to pass through the Flames themselves and see what happens. Obviously, they get burned, so ha ha. At this point, Aru conveniently returns from off camera…I guess he was finished with his 30 second meditation session…and convinces his so-called buddies that before the gods allow them to pass through the flames and become immortal they must perform a noble deed, like,oh, helping to free the imprisoned villagers and eventually defeat the Amazons.

Unfortunately for Aru, none of the local villages are willing to step up to the plate and join forces in an all-out attack on the Amazon camp. Well, this slight setback doesn’t stop our hero, so the three heroes go at it alone. The first obstacle is getting over the tall wooden palisades around the Amazon camp. No problem, "first we learn how to fly," says Chung with a sly grin. Sure enough, cut to Moog standing high atop a cliff with leather wings tied to his arms. Hilarity ensues when Moog jumps off the cliff and crashes to the ground. "I guess man is not ready for wings," Aru jokes as Moog pulls himself together. (Yep, that’s about the level of humor in this movie.)

With Chung’s ingenious "learn how to fly and soar over the walls" plan out the window, Aru suggests trying it "his way," which entails loading everybody into a catapult and shooting them up and over a giant (unguarded) cliff behind the camp!

Needless to say, despite the fact that a catapult would have simply launched them directly into the rocky cliff face and to their deaths, the brave trio safely reach the top of the cliff. With that obstacle overcome, they dodge and weave around some convenient man-sized boulders and make their way into the Amazon camp itself. (In a lovely screw-up, the DVD switches to the German audio track for a few lines then mysteriously jumps back to English. Oh well, when you buy on E-bay, let the buyer beware.)

As Aru sneaks around to the main gate, Chung releases the imprisoned villagers. Naturally, all of this is completed without a single Amazon guard seeing them. Yadda yadda. As the prisoners hide (uh…where?!), Aru creates a diversion by setting a few tents on fire, throwing some stools around, and generally kicking over whatever he can find laying around in order to create a big ruckus. The Amazons wake up (once again, where are the sentries?), and with nary a thought of "Hey girlfriends, maybe this is a diversion!", the Amazons storm through the front grates after Aru. leaving the camp more or less completely unguarded (not that it made any difference) so that Chung and the prisoners can escape and return to the village. (And the whole point of this scene was….?)

Later that day, Philones and Mario (Oh…great…Not these guys again…) pay the Amazons a visit and try to cut a deal with the Queen. In a nutshell, they’ll show the Amazons where Aru’s secret cave is. (Not like Aru has ever made any effort in keeping it a secret from anybody.) Asking nothing in return (huh?), Philones and Mario are taken to the "guest tent" (The Amazons have a "guest tent"?!) and placed under the Queen’s protection.

Another head-splitting jump cut to Aru and his buddies in a massive melee with a horde of Amazons. (Huh? Didn’t they get away? What the hell is going on here?) In an odd juxtaposition of levity and violence, corny light-hearted music plays on the soundtrack while Aru, Moog, and Chung beat the crap out of the Amazon women. Ok, yeah, I know they’re blood-thirsty Amazon warriors, but it’s still disturbing to see these guys whooping on them like this. I mean…sheeesh.

Anyhoo, Aru gives chase to the fleeing Amazons and is caught in a trap. Nice one, O Great Darma. After being tied up and unmasked, the Queen demands to know the secret of the Sacred Flame. Threatened with torture if he doesn’t tell, Aru, thinking that his buddies are on their way to rescue him, buys some time by promising to "consult the Gods". Little does he know that Moog and Chung are actually sitting around a campfire enjoying a warm meal. "He’ll be alright," says Moog as he takes a bit of some sort of meat-on-a-stick. And honestly, Aru does deserve this because he’s lied to them the whole movie leading them on that he’s invincible, so why would they want to risk their necks to "save" him if he can’t be killed?

Uh oh! It looks like Philones and Mario are back…yea! So it must be time for some wackiness! Yuck! Yuck! Yes, our favorite pair of super dolts spot Moog and Chang’s horses and decide to take them for themselves. Where they’re coming from (Amazon camp?), why they’re on foot (?), where they’re going (?)…why…who knows?! Just get ready for something zany to happen!

In a shocking turn of events, Moog and Chung kick the crap out of Philones and Mario. Well, actually that wasn’t very shocking. But, boy is it funny. No, not really funny either.

Grabbing Philones by the neck, Moog asks him just what in the hell they were doing at the Amazon camp. Philones brags that all they have to do is introduce themselves and they can just walk in since they’re such good friends with the Amazons. (Uhhhhh…plot point anybody?!) As a token of good will, and trying to save his skin, Philones informs Moog that Aru has been captured. Well, wow. With their friend in need of rescue, and a easy way to get into the Amazon’s camp, Moog and Chang immediately slit Philones and Mario’s throats and hang them up to bleed from the nearest tree.

Oh wait, no. That would have made too much sense.

No, gentle viewer, a simple conk to the head (What? No kick to the butt?) knocks them unconscious and also ensures future scenes of hilarity. I can’t wait.

Without a second to spare, Moog and Chang don some hooded robes, ride out to the Amazon’s camp and gain immediate entrance by pretending to be Philones and Mario. Wow, that’s some security you got there, ladies. I mean, Moog is black for cripes sake! Did you really think he was Philones just because he had a hood over his face?!

ANYWAY….

Once inside, Moog frees Aru from his bonds (the sole guard is tada!…Meela, whom Aru convinces to leave her tribe and join them by simply kissing her. ( "That man sure knows how to handle a woman…" whispers Moog in manly admiration.)

Back outside, Aru and the others grab some blankets and hop off the cliff at the back of the camp because, you know, you can make a functional parachute just by grabbing the corners of a blanket and jumping.

Oh, and hey Amazons! Since this is the second time that Aru has gotten into and out of your camp via the cliff at the rear…WHY DON’T YOU FENCE IT OFF! Good grief. I guess that’s why Amazons went extinct.

Well, you wouldn’t think that Aru and the others would get very far on foot since the Amazons have horses, but hey, surprise surprise. Why it’s Chung’s girlfriend, the Asian bandit, May May Wong (!). For some freakin reason May May has brought some horses so Aru and Co. can get away. Yeah, that makes total sense. You know, if you try to figure this movie out…you’re gonna go nuts.

Aru and the others arrive back in the village to discover that the other villages have decided to join forces and fight the Amazons. Well, isn’t that nice. Gee, where were you when our men were freakin’ carried off?! To put the nervous villagers at ease, Aru explains that the Amazons won’t attack for 8 days because they have a tradition of waiting until the next full moon before launching an attack!!! Huh?!

Normally I’d pull my hair out at something so stupid as that, but I’m way, way past that point.

As the next full moon rapidly approaches , Aru discovers a source of oil bubbling up from the ground. "That stuff smells like it does around the Sacred Fire," Chung notes. Wow, Sherlock, good one. Aru, of course, knows what it is and gives a sly smile. Oh boy, this outta be fun.

Anyway, we cut to a meeting of the local village elders where they explain that they’ve changed their minds and aren’t going to be fighting the Amazons after all! And they tell this on the very night of the freakin’ full moon!!!! Wow, thanks a lot!

Well, with Aru and the villagers completely screwed over by the other villages, they have no choice but to face the Amazon attack alone. Thankfully, Aru has given the villagers loads of petrol bombs (made from the mysterious black goo that’s bubbling up everywhere) which they happily launch at the Amazons via a battalion of crappy catapults. The Amazons, penned between the village walls and a (1-foot high) wall of fire lit behind them as they rode in, can only franticly ride back and force on panicked horses as the petrol bombs rain down from above. (Hilariously, most of the, <cough>, bombs can be seen landing just a few feet in front of the shoddy catapult props, although the big smoke-bomb squibs can be seen exploding much further away where the bombs should have landed!)

I think the editor fell asleep on the job again because this scene goes on and on and on and on…

After the film’s "fire bomb" budget was used up, the Amazons try to ride away. Why they didn’t just do that in the first place is beyond me. Ok, they try to flee and are quickly attacked by a "Bolo Barrage." (At least that’s how it’s referred to in the trailer. I didn’t know that 5 bolos constituted a "barrage", but let’s not split hairs.) After watching way, way too much footage of people throwing bolos into the air (Helloooo? Mr. Editor?), Aru orders the villagers to try and capture the Queen while he, Moog, and Chang rush out into the general chaos and start beating the Amazons.

Again, I think somebody on the film crew had some issues with women.

As the Amazons attempt yet another retreat (how hard can it be to escape on horseback when everybody else is on foot?!), Aru brings forth his final super-secret ultra-weapon: the "Super Tanks." (That loud sound you heard was my palm slamming into my forehead.) Ok, to be fair, I thought these tanks were pretty damned funny, so kudos, guys. But still, a wooden tank-shaped shell carried by 10 or so lumbering peasants with a flame thrower that shoots about 3 feet (making them dangerous only for the tank itself) would hardly pose a threat for a highly mobile, highly trained Amazon army.

Alas, the Amazons are completely overwhelmed by the attack force consisting of 3, count ‘em, 3 wooden tanks.

With the Amazons rapidly disintegrating, Philones seizes the moment to grab some glory for himself and "save the day." Yes, our beloved bandit orders his gang to whip the tar out of the remaining wounded Amazons, which they happily do. (Seriously, the amount of violence dealt out to these women is really starting to get a little weird.)

With the defeated Amazons laid out in a big pile of torn bikini tops and ripped leather battle undies, (…be still my heart…be still), Aru and the Amazon Queen square off for the mandatory "Final Showdown", which, to be honest, is as lackluster as all the other fight scenes in the movie. It seems like the writers couldn’t decide on how to end this scene so it literally just ends with Aru and the Queen staring at each other through a wall of flame. Wow…don’t bother with, like, an ending or anything. Good grief.

Anyhoo, wrapping this up, cut back to the magic cave where Aru tells Moog and Chang to "be patient" and wait for immortality as he rides off into the sunset with Meela!

Holy crap! What a jerk! Are you kidding me?

"I think we’ve been had!" Chang says.

Yeah, you and me both, buddy, you and me both.

Dennis Grisbeck (March 2010)

By the way, if you’ve made it this far, here’s the trailer:

Read more about Supermen vs the Amazons at

Written, directed, produced, and edited by Bill Rebane

Run Time: 92 minutes

	The Legendary Creature of Arak (Janus Raudkivi) I can only assume that this guy owed Bill Rebane a huge favor. What else could explain the fact that he ‘voluntarily’ put on a fuzzy suit and tramped around freezing Wisconsin hinterlands for this ridiculous movie?
	Garrett (Stafford Morgan) The heroic game warden. No matter how many people the creature kills, Garrett is always ready to fight to keep the beast ‘free’ in the wilderness because, well, he’s a forest ranger. Hell, I don’t know.
	Jake (George ‘Buck’ Flower) Local yokel and booze-guzzling Good Ol’ Boy, Jake, is convincingly played by obiquitous character actor George ‘Buck’ Flower. Unfortunately, Flower’s performance is the only thing ‘convincing’ in the entire movie.
	Olsen (Richard Kennedy) Businessman and greedy Big Foot hunter, Olsen will stop at nothing to capture the next Wonder of the World…
	Daniels (Nelson C. Sheppo) As the so-called last survivor of the ‘Arak Tribe’, Daniels plays the obligatory Spiritual Native American who saves the day via a hokey piece of dime store jewelry.

Legendary schlock director Bill Rebane is up to his usual antics in our feature low-budget yeti movie, The Capture of Bigfoot. Yes, filmed in Rebane’s beloved Wisconsin, in the middle of a freezing Midwest winter, we are treated to lots of sled dogs, rednecks, Wisconsin stock footage, and some poor actor packed into a fuzzy white “Big Foot” suit running around yelling “blaaaaaaaarrrr!”. Excited yet? Me neither.

In a quirky side note, director Bill Rebane always hoped to establish Wisconsin as a thriving center for a Midwest film industry, and thus filmed almost all of his movies in local towns and used the populace for cheap extras. Although this choice of location does add a sense of grimy ‘realism’ to his films (and trust me: ‘realism’ is a word seldom heard in connection with Rebane’s works), most of the extras are far from experienced actors and tend to smile in ‘scary’ scenes, look into the camera, and so on . Rebane’s dream of establishing Wisconsin as a Hollywood for the Midwest was based on films such as Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell (1975), The Alpha Incident (1978), and one of my favorites, The Giant Spider Invasion (1975). You can judge for yourself whether or not these films helped his cause or actually did more harm than good…

(Oh, and we can never forget (nor forgive) Rebane’s involvement with Monster A-Go Go (1965)…a film so horrible that Rebane himself described it as “the worst movie ever made.” Consider that a stern warning if you ever dare to try and actually watch it.)

In addition to being a proud part of the Rebane oeuvre, this movie is also included in the world renowned Bigfoot Terror DVD collection featuring 4 crappy movies, all very loosely based on Big Foot, such as the ABSOLUTELY horrible Search for the Beast. Let the buyer beware!

Back to the action.

The movie begins with a generic folk song played over scenes of a fur-clad hunters struggling through the wilderness with dog sleds. Laden on one of the sleds is a refrigerator-sized box covered in leather skins concealing something inside. (bum! bum! bum!)

As the sun goes down the trappers take refuge for the night underneath a stand of pine trees (complete with stock-footage owls so that we know that this scene does indeed take place in the ‘woods’).

Letting the proverbial cat out of the bag pretty damned early (but not like there was any real question as to what was inside the box), Trapper 1 explains to his friend (and us) that the "critter" they’ve trapped is going to make them rich. Dreaming of said riches, Trapper 1 saunters over to the fire while the imprisoned little creature (still concealed in the box, most likely due to FX budget constraints since it costs more to actually show monsters) howls for its mother.

Now, even a city slicker like myself knows that you should never come between a mother bear and her cub, and I’m assuming this holds doubly-true for Big Foot critters (Big Feet?), yet these putative experienced trappers don’t seem to give a crap about possibly coming face-to-face with an irate Big Mama.

OK, I’m going to spare you from the intense build up of tension as the Yeti mother creeps up on the veteran hunters and kills one of them, I think it’s Trapper 1, but who the hell knows, and it really doesn’t matter. Amidst the chaos, Trapper 2 makes a run for it but is pummeled by Big Mama. However, since somebody has to make it back to town to keep the plot going, he manages to escape into the woods. During the struggle, Big Baby escapes from its cage (now magically unlocked) and flees into the darkness happily reunited with its mother.

(During the above "action" sequence, we only catch fleeting glimpses of the white Big Foot as the camera jerks back and forth and spasmodically jump cuts from scene to scene while conveying "excitement". I tried to get a screen shot of the monster at this point, but it was just too dark and blurry, I’ll try to get some better shots later. [Note From The Future: You will.]

The next day, the local yokels are shocked to see a bloodied Trapper 2 slide into town on his dogsled. (NOTE: His name is Hank! Thank you, movie!) "Take it easy with him!" somebody shouts. Agreeing that a gentle touch is in order with a seriously injured man, some guys simply pick Hank up and unceremoniously toss him into the back of a pickup truck before proceeding to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Dave Garrett, the local forest ranger, pops by to see his sweety, Karen, for a little loving, along with some perfunctory characterization and exposition. (In short, this awkward little scene exists solely to establish the fact that Karen’s little brother, Jimmy, has just received a rifle for his recent birthday (plot point!). (It’s really hard to hear what’s going on since the sole boom mic is in the living room with Garrett while Karen delivers her lines from the adjoining bathroom making it nearly impossible to hear what she says…thanks guys.)

After some off-camera loving (thank god), Dave is summoned to the police station by Sheriff Cooper. (In a lovely Rebane touch, Karen refers to Garrett as "Dave", while Cooper calls him "Steve"!) It turns out that Sheriff Cooper is convinced that Hank was mauled by something that "wasn’t human". (Wow, and to think that they haven’t made this guy a special investigator yet…)

Having masterly deduced that Hank’s claw wounds weren’t made by a human, Cooper skillfully decides that this is a case for Forest Ranger Garrett, since you know, he’s a forest ranger, and there’s lot’s of animals in the forest. I guess.

Karen and Dave (Steve?)

Back at the hospital, Hank, (or some other unfortunate film extra that was talked into being wrapped up in gauze for the scene), lies in bed with the requisite tubes and liquids flowing in and out of him in a very "hospital-y" manner. Before passing into a coma, Hank manages to inform his boss, Olsen, that he was mauled by a "critter". (I always thought the definition of ‘critter’ was anything that could be squashed with a shoe, not a 9-foot tall Yeti, but what do I know.)

"Was it ARAK???!!!" shouts Olsen, but Hank passes into a coma before he can respond. (At this point in the movie, I bet most viewers have passed into a coma-like state as well.) As you probably suspect, ‘Arak’ is the name of a mythical beast that supposedly lives in the woods and, well, kills trappers I guess. Anyhoo, Olsen keeps tight-lipped about the whole ‘Arak’ deal when a cop asks him if Hank said anything, so I presume Olsen is to be our Bad Guy for the duration of the film.

Back in town Jake tries to convince the good ol’ boys at the bar that the legendary beast of Arak is responsible for the attack.

Meet the scintillating cast of ‘The Capture of Bigfoot’

Naturally, people think Jake is nuts for believing a bunch of old "Indian superstitions", and who can blame them. And then…

Oh. Cut to woods.

We now see the beast attack some poor sap out in the woods. Little Jimmy hears the man’s screams and moves in to investigate, when all of a sudden…

Oh. Cut back to the bar.

(Damn! I think I’m getting whiplash!)

Like I was saying, back at the bar, Garrett convinces Jake to help him look around in the woods for any signs of dangerous animals. Jake takes the opportunity to mention that the recent attacks remind him of what happened <dramatic pause>…"25 years ago." (I think that was meant to be portentous, but since we never find out, you know, what actually happened, it’s a pretty flaccid attempt at suspense.)

Anyway, while Garrett and Jake make their plans, Boss Olsen has rounded up a couple trappers to go out and poach the beast.

"I’ll give you each ten thousand dollars," Olsen promises.

"That’s a lot of money," gasps Trapper 1.

"That’s a lot of risk!"

(Ed Wood, eat your heart out!)

After a bit of perfunctory haggling, our favorite pair of Big Foot hunters head out to do battle. (Can’t wait.)

Now: at this point you are either

A) intensely curious about the fascinating history of the Arak legend

or

B) asleep

For those of you in category A, the movie now jumps to a helpful Exposition Scene in which Karen explains the legend of the Arak monster while Garrett looks on and asks all the correct questions in order to move the plot along. So, yeah, yeah, the Arak was a man-sized, hairy beast that watched over the local Native American population, and, wow, this isn’t a terribly innovative story is it.

The next morning, Jake and Garrett find the Arak’s tracks in the snow. (What are the odds, eh?) A quick POV shot accompanied by scary music and heavy breathing indicates that they are being watched by the monster, who apparently has the same "Be At The Same Spot Just Where Anybody Happens To Be No Matter How Big The Woods" ability that the Snow Beast had.

After a few minutes of trudging around through snowdrift after snowdrift, and baby, you’re going to trudge right along with them, Jake and Garrett discover the frozen remains of Trapper 3 laying in the snow. (Lucky guy; he’s out of the movie.)

Meanwhile, Jimmy is off in the woods all by his lonesome lonely self when he spots the juvenile Arak scratching around in the snow. In a touching moment their gazes meet. Ok. Maybe not that touching, but anyway. The only worthwhile part of this scene is that we finally get to see the Arak in all of its glory:

If this doesn’t give you a chuckle, then, man, you’re visiting the wrong web site.

(By the way, the DVD transfer of this film is far from perfect. The colors are atrocious and almost every scene is filmed slightly out of focus and under lit, so it’s really hard to get decent screen shots. Please forgive the huge variation in brightness and hue…I don’t have much to work with here, folks.)

Meanwhile, the 2 trappers that Olsen hired, (we’ll call them Jason and Burt, since those are the only 2 names in the IMDB entry for this movie that I haven’t heard yet. Not like it matters…), are happily zipping around the wilderness on their snowmobiles. And let me tell ya, watching people snowmobile is almost as exciting as watching dogsled scenes. Almost.

After snowmobiling through the woods for a while, Jason notices some large footprints in the snow that "ain’t human". Grabbing their guns, Jason and Burt follow the unusual set of tracks into some trees where they spot the baby Arak scrounging around for berries. Being a conscientious sportsman, Burt immediately raises his rifle, shoots, and kills the monster. Mama Arak, presumably standing just off camera waiting for the director’s cue, charges out and gives chase. The ensuing scene is rendered completely incoherent through inept editing, so I’ll do my best to describe it:

• Burt can’t start his snowmobile, Jason can, and zips off without him.
• Burt starts snowmobile and zips off.
• (Insert 1 second shot of monster walking to the right)
• Burt manages to drive his snowmobile off a steep rock outcropping and crashes.
• (Insert 1 second shot of monster walking to the left)
• Jason turns his snowmobile around and picks Burt up.
• Jason crashes into a tree.
• Now Jason’s snowmobile is magically repaired, and he and Burt drive off.
• (Insert 1 second shot of monster growling and then walking to the left.)

Wow. Go ahead and catch your breath if you need to.

Back at the Sheriff’s station, Garrett describes the tracks he saw to Sheriff Cooper.

"They were human…8 inches wide and 20 inches long."

(Yep, that sounds like a human footprint to me allrightee.)

Despite the fact that Sheriff Cooper himself sent Garrett out to look around, he refuses to believe Garrett’s report: In other words, their conversation can be summed up like this:

Cooper: "I sent you out to find something. Did you find something?"

Garrett: "I found something."

Cooper: "I don’t believe you."

(So what was the freaking point of sending him out in the first place?! Stupid movie.)

We’re now informed that there is, <sigh>, a skiing contest scheduled for the following weekend. (Wow, just when you thought it was safe to forget about that lame plot device…Sound familiar?) When Garrett tells him to cancel the event because of the danger the creature presents, Cooper blows him off because he is certainly not going to rashly call off a skiing event of such magnitude just because somebody got spooked by an old Indian legend. Besides, as Cooper exclaims, "There’s going to be 250 people there!"

[Note From The Future: The skiing event provides some stock footage to eat up run time and is never mentioned again.]

Meanwhile, Olsen lounges in his office and dreams of all the money such a creature could bring in if only he could capture it. In a light-bulb moment, Olsen decides to capture the beast using, mwu-ha-ha-ha!, "…live bait!". (Olsen then breaks out in the most hammy Evil Laugh I’ve ever heard.)

Olsen’s reaction to being asked to appear in ‘The Capture of Bigfoot Part 2′

While Olsen makes preparations to capture the Arak, Garrett busies himself with researching the incident "from about 30 years ago" that Jake mentioned earlier in the film. Upon Garrett’s request, the town historian digs up some old newspaper articles discussing the disappearance of 7 men in the course of a year. (Hell, who can blame them? If I lived in this podunk town I’d probably beat feet and get the hell out too.) Anyway, Garrett hears tell of "an old Indian…" named Daniels that supposedly lived through this incident. So yes, I guess we’ll soon be meeting the required "spiritual" Native American who’s in touch with nature and blah blah blah.

We’re next forced to endure an after-ski party at the local lodge. As you should know by now, all movies made in the 70′s are required to have a "disco" scene, and this movie is no exception. As the band pounds it’s way through a tepid dance number,

You’re a sensuous tiger

Prowling alone in the night,

I reach out to pet you

And find your growl is worse than your bite!

we see some chick getting tired of the party (me too, sister, me too!), and heading outside with her boyfriend for some fresh air.

Naturally, since all monsters are instinctively attracted to award ceremonies, band performances, and dance contests (and, in fact, any other type of event that allows cheap filmmakers to film crowds without having to pay them for being extras), a POV Arak is stalking around outside just waiting for, well, somebody to come out for some fresh air so she can whack them.

Oh, and since misery loves company, I’d like to share this delightful song with you. You don’t need to thank me.

While the festivities continue at full swing, Jake escorts Garrett to his place and introduces him to the token Native American Arak expert, Daniels. With Daniels sitting in front of the fireplace (said fireplace is realized by an off-camera Klieg Light shined directly in the actors’ faces), Garrett begins to question him about the Arak and asks him…

Oh. Cut to the monster killing some kids who left the party to make out in the woods. Wow, this looks exciting! I can’t wait to see the carnage…

Oh. Cut to Jason and Burt playing pool and talking about what they’re going to do with their money. This might actually be an interesting conversation, let’s hear what they have to say.

Oh. Cut to the next morning, where Sheriff Cooper and Garrett are examining the scene of last night’s attack.

"We have to kill this thing," says Sheriff Cooper as he stares at the blood stains in the snow.

"Why…because it scares people?" says Garrett with a smug, sarcastic sneer.

Uh, not because it scares people: because it kills people, you idiot!!!

As this exciting scene tapers off without any resolution to the argument, we next see some of Olsen’s men setting up an Amazing Arak Trap 3000 © which consists of a net suspended between 4 trees at about 8-feet off the ground. Wow. That outta do the job.

Later that day, Garrett decides to try and capture the beast on his own before Sheriff Cooper and/or Olsen get their hands on it and kill it. You see, the thing must be studied, not exploited. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, at the ranger station Garrett discovers that the tranquilizer gun is gone. "Olsen came by and picked it up with a doctor’s requisition," one of the rangers informs him. (I never knew that doctors could write prescriptions for tranquilizer guns, but maybe the rules are different in Wisconsin.) Pissed off, but without anything he can do about it, Garrett swings by Jake’s place and the 2 of them set off on the dog sled in an attempt to intercept the Arak before the Bad Guys can get ahold of it.

Meanwhile, Jimmy and his Friend (NAMES, please!), have been running about and snooping around the woods for…the creature? Who knows. It’s very unclear what anybody is doing at this point. The curious boys happen to discover one of Olsen’s abandoned mines and carefully enter. (At least that much is realistic; I sure did some stupid things when I was that age as well. And no, I’m not going to get into that right now.) Once inside, Jimmy discovers a huge cage and a handwritten placard proclaiming "The 8th Wonder of the World".

Ok, I understand that discovering a real live Big Foot would be pretty sensational news, but I’m still skeptical as to the Arak’s qualifications as a bonafide"World Wonder". Hmmm, let’s take a look at what a list of the 8 World Wonders would look like if this was the case:

• Great Pyramid at Giza
• Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• Statue of Zeus at Olympia
• Temple of Atermis at Ephesus
• Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus
• Colossus of Rhodes
• Lighthouse of Alexandria
• Big Foot of Cloud Lake, Wisconsin

Something just doesn’t sound right about that.

Anyway, back in the woods, Olsen and his thugs come across Garrett and Jake dog-sledding around looking for the creature. After a brief argument, Olsen konks Garrett on the noggin, and with the help of his gang of goons, bind Jake and the unconscious ranger to a tree. (Wouldn’t tying people up to a tree and leaving them behind in the middle of winter be tantamount to murder? If Olsen merely wanted to keep Garrett out of the way until he could find the Arak, couldn’t he just, oh, cut all the reins and harnesses on the dogs so they be forced to walk home? And even if Garrett were to find the creature first…what the hell is he going to do? He doesn’t have any way to capture it because Olsen has all the tranquilizer guns. Oh, never mind.)

Later that night (or is it the same day? I think Rebane studied at the "Plan 9 School of Chronological Continuity"…), the ever-treacherous Olsen betrays Jason and Burt and has them roped and used for bait in the Arak Trap 3000 ©. Boy, this is going to be fun.

As the camera slooooooowly pans back and forth and back and forth along the darkened tree line in order to build ‘tension’, the Arak finally arrives on cue, only to be quickly driven into the middle of the trap by a series of pre-placed roman candles (that Olsen ignites by pushing down on an old-fashioned dynamite plunger!). With a half-hearted growl, the Arak stumbles into the trap and, with a deftly aimed tranquilizer dart to the ass, the monster is quickly captured.

As Olsen gloats over his catch, Garrett and Jake perish the bitter cold. Alas, in a lovely Deus Ex Machina moment that is so common in movies like this, Arak-whisperer Daniels walks up out of nowhere and cuts them loose. While Garrett and Jake massage their hands to get the circulation back into them, Daniels tells them about the Arak’s capture. (How did he know about this very recent event? If he he saw it, how did he get from the capture site back to Jake and Garrett so damned fast?)

In a blur of exposition, Daniels explains (using Jake as an interpreter, since Daniels "only speaks Indian") that he’s the last of the Arak’s tribe, and then presents Garrett with a (hokey) Arak pendant that will allow the monster to "understand" him when he eventually confronts the creature. (Oh boy, now this is going to be fun!) For some reason, Garrett is supposed to tell the Arak that Daniels is "waiting for him", so I guess that means something to the monster because I sure as hell don’t know what he’s talking about. (And by the way, shouldn’t the message be "waiting for her"? It has been stated earlier that the monster is the mother of the little one. Not to get too nitpicky here, but hey, it’s my job.)

Meanwhile, Olsen has imprisoned his self-proclaimed "8th World Wonder" in an abandoned mine. Satisfied with the evening’s labors, Olsen leaves for the night, but not before ensuring that his priceless capture is guarded by a massive defense force consisting of a solitary redneck standing beside a bonfire.

Ain’t nobody gonna get in here nosirree no how!

On the snowy drive home, Olsen happens across poor Jake who’s walking back to town after escaping the ropes. With an evil grin, Olsen puts the pedal to the metal while Jake runs for his life down the middle of the road. (God, I hate that!) To everyone’s great surprise, Jake does not manage to outrun Olsen’s Ford V-8 pickup truck and is promptly run down and killed.

(By the way, what exactly is Olsen’s motivation to kill Jake? Olsen has the monster, so why bother going around killing people and risk being tossed in jail? It’s not like Jake or Garrett "own" the Arak, so what kind of a threat can they possibly pose now that the creature is in his possession? Sure, they could put him up on assault charges, possibly even attempted murder for abandoning them while tied to a tree, but still…)

In contrast to Jake’s unfortunate demise, Garrett survives the walk to the mine intact and quickly overpowers the lone guard (Olsen, you idiot.). After discovering the Arak laying in a cage no more than 5 feet inside the mine opening (budget constraints certainly limited how much of a "mine" could be created by the stage hands), Garrett immediately gets to work cutting open the Arak’s cage with a very convenient welding torch that just happens to be standing next to the confined creature’s cage.

Back in town, Olsen gets word that Garrett is at the mine and attempting to release the Arak from the cage, so he rounds up an armed posse (with a promise of $100 for "anybody that has a gun") and leads everybody outside so they can follow him to the mine.

OK, I’m going to put this review into high gear because I’m really sick of this movie.

Sheriff Cooper and Deputy Noname show up just in time to defuse the explosive situation brewing in the parking lot and shoosh the drunken denizens back inside the bar. Denied his posse, but not his greed, Olsen clocks Cooper on the head with the butt of his rifle and races away in a stolen police car. Deputy Noname gives chase as Cooper rubs his topknot and hops into a random convenient car with the keys in it, joining in the pursuit as well.

At the end of an uninspired car chase, Deputy Noname collides with a car pulling out from a side road. Instead of an immense collision, the impact launches his car into the air, hmmm, kind of like somebody had placed a concealed ramp there before the shot. But what the hell do I know? Anyway, the Deputy’s car lands on top of yet another car and, tada!, explodes. What’s amazing about this scene is that we clearly see the Deputy’s car land on top of a second car on the side of the highway, but when we jump cut and see the car explode, it’s sitting alone in warehouse parking lot! Wow. The amazing, teleporting, exploding cop car.

Yadda yadda, Olsen and Garrett duke it out in the mine shaft, and as usual, the bad guy ends up accidentally shooting a hole in a big barrel of gasoline that, as usual, is always standing around in the final scenes of a crappy movie like this. Olsen also manages to shoot a box of explosives (a prop which probably cost about 5 cents to make: it’s obviously a cardboard box spray-painted matte black with the letters E X P L O S I V E S glued onto the side). Oblivious to the dangers of storing explosives, gasoline, and welding torches next to each other, Olsen seems shocked when things start to explode and burn around him. And since we’re almost out of runtime, Olsen gets knocked out or something and perishes in the flames.

As the heat intensifies, the Arak knocks off the door to its cage, jumps out, and is about to give Garrett a real whooping, when it notices the goofy "Arak" necklace that Garrett is wearing around his neck. (Oh, it’s so, so moving.) Now understanding that Garrett is "good", the Arak unclenches its hairy fists and runs outside. Oh, Garrett comes to his senses just in time to avoid being blown up, and everybody manages to escape outside before the final money-shot mine shaft explosion that undoubtedly chewed up the film’s remaining special effects budget.

Standing outside the mineshaft, Jimmy, Garrett, and Karen (where in the hell did she come from?) exchange an awkward group hug while watching the mama Arak call to her child. The baby Arak, now magically healed from the rifle shot to the chest it received about a half hour ago, embraces its mother and…what a beautiful reunion between 2 such magnificent creatures.

The end.

Dennis Grisbeck (December 2009)

PS: I love the way the film makers could never seem to make up their minds as to what the creature was called. Take for instance the closing credits above: The mama creature is called "the legendary creature of Arak" but her kid is referred to as "Little Bigfoot". Maybe "Arak" is just another moniker for Big Foot the same way "Sasquatch" is. Wow. Good grief, am I really obsessing this much? Screw it, I’m outta here.

PPS. Nepotism alert! Little Bigfoot was played by Randolph Rebane…I’m assuming he’s a relative of director Bill Rebane since the odds of 2 unrelated people sharing that surname working on this film are just to improbable to contemplate. I can’t seem to find the exact relation, so if anybody knows, please send me an email.

Read more about The Capture of Bigfoot at

Directed by Herb Wallerstein

Tagline: “An unknown terror stalks a ski resort!”

Run Time: 86 minutes

In a nutshell:

A dull, lifeless, "monster in the wild" made-for-TV flick featuring the usual suspects from 1970′s television.

Lines to Remember:

Sheriff Paraday: I understand she was a guest at your ski lodge. I was hoping you could help me identify her.
Tony Rill: I must have seen her somewhere. Maybe I’ll recognize her when I see her face.
Sheriff Paraday: She doesn’t have one.

Bad Movie Elements:

Man in monkey suit.

Endless padding. In this case, scenes of people skiing, and skiing, and skiing, and skiing…

Monster is rarely seen, and when it does show up in the film, it’s typically from the monster’s point of view (in order to save money).

Story line is a flaccid rip-off of a much superior yarn, in this case Jaws, which came out 2 years earlier. Both stories revolve around a gigantic money-making event that is in danger of being shut down because of an unseen menace (that initially only the hero has seen). The hero tries to convince the authorities of the danger but they refuse to act until further deaths force them to comply and agree to kill the shark / snow monster.

Summary:

Open with a pair of women, Heidi and Jennifer, skiing around somewhere on the snowy slopes of Colorado. (Don’t worry too much about their names; they disappear from the film rather quickly). A POV shot from within the trees, accompanied by asthmatic "scary" breathing, indicates that They Are Not Alone. Jennifer unwisely stops to take a break and is quickly devoured (off camera, natch) by an unseen monster, while Heidi skis away in terror.

Back at the local hot spot, the Rill Lodge ski resort, owner and local matriarch, Carrie Rill (played by multiple Emmy and Golden Globe award winner Sylvia Sydney), gleefully announces the advent of the resort’s 50th anniversary of the annual Winter Carnival. (A gigantic banner proudly proclaims a rather generic sounding agenda of "Fun and Games"…yippee!).

Despite the joyous arrival of local the year’s Snow Queen, Betty Jo Blodgett (what a horrible name!), Mrs. Rill’s grandson and lodge supervisor, Tony (played by TV perennial, Robert Logan), has received some worrying news about an accident on the slopes and quickly takes his leave of the festivities to go investigate. A quick snowmobile ride later, and Tony is at an an out-of-the-way aid station where a stunned Heidi recounts to the ski patrol how Jennifer was torn to pieces by a ‘monster’. The ski patrol dudes give each other ‘wink-wink nudge-nudge’ looks and assure Heidi that her friend probably just lost her way. Nevertheless, Tony decides to play it safe and has Heidi escorted back to the lodge to see a doctor while he and the others ski off to try and find Jennifer.

So, yes, more skiing, and skiing, and skiing. And playing "scary" music on the soundtrack is not making this any more exciting.

OK, lessee here… After skiing for 5 minutes through trees and down hills, and through some more trees, and down some more hills, Tony just happens to find Jennifer’s shredded jacket laying in the snow, which is pretty incredible coincidence given the vastness of the Rocky Mountain wilderness, but hey, what did you expect? Sensing that the viewers might be bored at this point, the writers decide to have the monster give a yell causing Tony to turn and spot the Beast moving in the trees. Unsure of what he just saw, but realizing that he’d better get the hell out of there, Tony turns tail and zips back down to the others.

Meanwhile, back at Rill Lodge, ex-Olympic skier, and now down-on-his-luck good guy, Gar Seberg (Bo Svenson) has arrived and is busy scribbling out autographs to happy fans in the parking lot while his icy, and let’s just say it, bitch of a wife, Ellen (Yvette Mimieux) makes snide remarks about his recent string of bad luck in the cut-throat world of professional skiing.

Once inside, Gar and Ellen spot Tony, but Tony pretty much brushes them off. Why? Well, in typical made-for-TV fashion, the subplots come oozing out of the woodwork so let’s see: Gar is actually at the lodge to ask Tony for a job, but Tony is pissed at Gar for something to do with Ellen from the past, and yikes…this is a monster movie right? Oh well: subplots = padding, so there you go.

After giving Gar the cold shoulder, Tony rushes into Grandma Rill’s office to tell her about the day’s events. Despite her disbelief, Tony tries to convince his grandmother to call off the Winter Carnival. Obviously, she’s not even going to consider something as radical as that, Snow Beast or no Snow Beast. When Grandma Rill presses Tony for more information, he sighs and says, "It wasn’t an animal!…and it wasn’t human either." Yeah, that pretty much narrows it down, Tony. Thanks.

Naturally, none of the other ski patrollers saw the monster, nor are they even aware of it since Tony neglected to tell them he saw it:

"I didn’t tell them about it because I wanted to get them out of there as fast as I could," Tony explains.

And yes, that’s a pretty lame way to keep the monster’s existence a "secret". I mean, c’mon, Tony, you saw a 12-foot Snow Beast in the trees and you didn’t feel it was worth mentioning to anybody?

Grandma Rill, concerned with the financial repercussions if word got out about the supposed monster tells Tony to keep his mouth shut. Tony, despite his grandmother’s objections, insists on telling the local lawman, Sheriff Paraday, so they have a huge discussion about whether or not to even do that much. What’s strange here is this huge back-and-forth about whether or not to tell the cops about the monster, but what about the missing Jennifer and her bloodied, shredded Jacket? Won’t that raise a few eyebrows? Oh well, an agreement is finally reached: Tony knuckles under and agrees to keep his trap shut until after the festival. Furthermore, and quite absurdly, they agree to say that Jennifer’s death was an avalanche accident!

Oh, and remember Jennifer’s friend who witnessed the monster’s attack, Heidi? Won’t she say something to the press? No, no, Grandma Rill has it all under control: she orders a doctor to sedate Heidi with something to "knock her out for a while."

OK, Seriously. That’s the plan? Keep Heidi drugged for the the duration of the festival? How in the hell are they going to explain all this? I mean, they’re essentially kidnapping Heidi and keeping her as a drugged captive for what, a week? What about Heidi’s friends and family? Won’t they notice that she and Jennifer are missing? Well, the writers couldn’t find a way to resolve these questions either, so they essentially drop Heidi from the rest of the film. Nice.

Next we cut and see some local yokels poking around the abandoned Fairchild Place, i.e., an old barn that some underpaid location scout stumbled upon during the making of the film. Once inside, the shocked townspeople discover Jennifer’s remains, sans face, splattered all over the floor. Staggering back from the gruesome scene (don’t worry, we don’t get to see it), one of the men rushes off to inform Sheriff Paraday.

Back at the Lodge, Tony, despite the days busy events involving drugged girls and Snow Beast cover-ups, finds time to put his and Gar’s differences aside and give him a job as the local ski-pro. Over a cup of coffee, the pals catch up on their pasts and reveal that back in the old days Ellen had to choose between them, and she chose Gar, and Tony was pissed, and blah blah blah blah. In some more clumsy dialog, Tony asks Gar if he still is a crack shot with a rifle. Why, yes he is. Cool, huh? Before Tony can explain why he asked such an odd question, Grandma Rill pulls him into the office to inform him of the discovery of Jennifer’s remains.

(Seriously, at this point, isn’t Tony legally obligated to mention the bloody jacket he found? Not to mention the fact that nobody has even reported Jennifer missing yet? Good grief!)

Soooo…Before heading out to identify the remains, Tony deems it prudent to take a dip in the pool with Gar and explain just what the hell has happened recently. After some goofy exposition about "Big Foots", this film was made in the 70′s during the whole Big Foot craze, so it’s really funny hearing these guys talk about how "real" they are, Tony tells Gar what he saw in the woods and, furthermore, that he basically hired Gar to find the Beast and kill it.

"Just because it doesn’t look like us, it’s a ‘thing’, so it’s OK to go out and kill it?" Gar sarcastically snaps in response.

No, Gar, actually you should go out and kill it because it’s slaughtering skiers and ripping off their faces! Good grief!

Meanwhile, Gar’s wife, Ellen, decides to don her skis and take a solo trip out in the woods. Amazingly enough, Ellen skis around and just happens to stumble across the Fairchild barn where she espies the local police closing off the area. Casually looking down at the snow, she spots some gigantic footprints leading off into the wilderness. These woeful ‘tracks’ are supposed to be monster prints, but they just look like somebody stuck their feet in the snow and dragged it around to make it ‘big’. (Not to mention the fact that a 12-foot high monster must weigh, what? a thousand pounds, so it’s kind of strange that the footprints are only about an inch deep.) Even though the sun is going down and she’s by herself in the middle of nowhere, Ellen decides to follow the footprints and see where they lead.

Cut to see that Tony and Gar have finally arrived at the barn and are being filled in with the details. After being warned to brace himself, Tony gingerly steps inside the barn and identifies Jennifer’s body by the color of her ski outfit. (The monster had ripped off Jennifer’s face, which admittedly is pretty gross, but why would it bother?) Back outside Tony admits to the Sheriff that he’s actually seen the monster but didn’t want to tell anybody about it in case the visitors would panic. Now I’m no lawyer, but to me, withholding this kind of information would qualify Tony for charges of criminal negligence. But who am I to say? Sheriff Paraday, the paragon of law enforcement, blows all that aside by stating, "Well, I can certainly understand your grandmother not wanting any of this getting out,"and simply asks Tony what the monster looked like. Sheesh. Paraday then orders Tony and Gar to just say that Jennifer was killed by a "crazed grizzly bear" until the monster can be tracked down and killed. Yeah, Sheriff, I guess there’s no need to actually inform the public about something like this, is there?

As Paraday and the others chat so enjoyably about the upcoming hunt and slaughter, Gar’s better half, Ellen, has been doing some snooping around of her own. As mentioned before, she’s oh-so-stupidly decided to follow these strange tracks in the snow and now, after who knows how long, it’s starting to get dark so she opts to head back to the lodge. On the way back, of course <sigh>, Ellen falls on her ass and…wait a minute, she gets up and skis off before the monster can get her! That was…TOO CLOSE!

Later that evening we join the others in the local high-school gymnasium where everybody is going through a dress rehearsal for the crowning of the Winter Queen. Or maybe it’s the real thing. Who knows. Furthermore, to compliment the already copious quantities of ski-scene padding, the movie is now padded with exciting shots of people hanging up banners and balloons. Ohhhh…I’m all a-quiver! Anyhoo, just as the festivities are about to begin, Betty Jo peers out a window and to her horror sees a man in a monkey suit staring back at her. Oh, shit, sorry. I mean the Snow Beast!

Beauty and the Beast

(Ho, ho! Man, I’m clever. I just love me.)

Being a gigantic, 12-foot snow beast, and uninvited to boot, the hirsute visitor understandably causes quite an uproar. (As is the norm for these cheap-o monster flicks, the extras can be seen laughing and smiling in the general "horror" as they flee.) As everybody runs around laughing and screaming, the Snow Beast lackadaisically smashes a window and swings his arms around in a half-assed effort to grab somebody, but eventually gets bored and shambles back to the parking lot where he promptly kills some woman in a car that didn’t have the sense to just drive away.

Later that night, after the general mayhem has died down, Gar sits in his hotel room and contemplates the Good Old Days and his now fading celebrity. (As if skiing scenes weren’t boring enough to begin with, we are now forced to endure Gar’s flashbacks of skiing…argh!) For some reason, maybe to try and recapture some of his past glory, Gar decides to straps on his skis in order to find the Beast alone…which leads to…yes, you can say it: more skiing!

OK, wait a minute. That’s not exactly what’s happening. The editing here is just atrocious. It turns out that Gar’s wife didn’t ski away in the previous scene after she fell down. No, she was actually captured by the monster and taken back to the abandoned Fairchild Farm. (Gee, thanks, movie!) So, ok, Gar is actually skiing out to the old barn to see if Ellen is there because she hadn’t come home that evening from her ski trip. (It’s always so fun to try and figure this stuff out myself. Sloppy, sloppy writing.)

No, wait. Gar does find Ellen in the barn, but she wasn’t captured by the monster, she had just gotten lost and took refuge from the cold. (Damn you, Snow Beast movie! Damn you!) Taking advantage of their time alone, Gar makes a little campfire as he and Ellen discuss their marriage problems and blah blah blah they end up smooching. And, oh, what a cozy place to hang out since, yeah, wasn’t this the place where the Jennifer’s faceless body was discovered just the day before? But, oh never mind, it just goes to show that there is always time for sub-plot nonsense.

OK, Gar and Ellen’s cozy little reconciliation scene is interrupted when the Snow Beast begins banging on the door to get in. (It can’t even open a dilapidated wooden door?) All this doesn’t matter though since Gar and Ellen manage to get away from the stupid monster. Whatever, Snow Beast, whatever.

The next day the town is abuzz as the Sheriff triumphantly announces that he’s killed the Beast and it’s now safe for everybody to hit the slopes again. As the crowd cheers their gallant lawman, Gar can only shake his head in disgust at Sheriff Paraday’s duplicity as the camera lovingly lingers on what Paraday really shot: a guy in a Halloween bear suit. No, sorry. A viscous grizzly bear. But really, weren’t there about 500 people that saw the monster at the school gym the previous evening? Oh well, I guess they look pretty much the same:

Sure. Yeah, I can see how you could mistake the two…

The next day Gar confronts Paraday about his little ruse. Paraday admits that it was a cheap trick, but he needed a way to calm everybody. But why? Now they think it’s safe but it’s not ? What’s the point? Ugh! Anyway, Gar again convinces Paraday that they should head up into the mountains to kill the monster…which was their plan in the first place way back when they discovered Jennifer’s remains, wasn’t it? Oh, to hell with it! Stupid movie. I just can’t help feeling we’re going in circles here…

The next day, Gar, Tony, Paraday, and, boy, they’ve even brought along Ellen because she’s soooooo essential to the plan, load up a camper and set up an ersatz headquarters in the middle of the woods. Why in the hell they couldn’t set up their headquarters somewhere safe like, say, back at the Lodge, is beyond me. I guess we’re probably in for a Scary Scene involving the camper. So let’s see, after watching the gang ride snowmobiles around, and around, and around (at least they aren’t skiing, but still…) Tony calls everybody to a halt and suggests that they all head back to the camper! So then why the hell did I have to watch them snowmobiling for the last 5 minutes…seriously, Mr. Editor…what the hell!?

Unbeknownst to Tony and the others, while they were away the Beast has discovered their camper and happily begins to tear it apart. Well, sort of. It does struggle mightily with the ski rack, which absolutely hilariously, is mounted on the back of the camper with a pair of lame rubber suction cups! What a challenge that must have been for the Beast!

Stare in awe…at the strength of the Mighty Snow Beast!

Upon returning to ‘headquarters’, Tony and the others immediately see the ski rack on the ground (HORROR!) and decide to wait for the monster instead of driving around looking for it. (Fine by me!)

Sure enough, the next morning the Beast does return and kick over a big pile of logs from the top of a nearby hill. It turns out that Tony has parked the camper at the bottom of the hill directly in the path of the logs. (Idiot!) This inexcusable lack of foresight results in the camper getting battered and toppled by the logs, and worse, trapping Sheriff Paraday inside the wreckage. (Defying all laws of physics, the logs have managed to turn themselves 90-degrees to the camper and plunge into the back window even though they rolled down the hill completely parallel to the vehicle. Huh. That’s strange.) As the Beast approaches, Gar and the others flee in fear (leaving their rifles behind! Gawd! What morons!!!), and abandon the wounded Paraday to his fate! Nice.

Like I said, after bravely leaving the Sheriff behind to fend for himself ("We’re safe now," Tony callously points out to the others, "It got what it wanted…"), Tony, Gar, and Ellen trudge through the snow back to the abandoned barn. (I’m getting really sick of this stupid barn.) So….after warming up a bit inside, Tony announces that they should head back to the camper and get their rifles. ARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!! Who the hell edited this stupid movie! Why? Why?! Why?!! This is getting ridiculous!

Soooooooooo…back at the camper…AGAIN!, (In between scenes, the camper’s paint has magically changed color from dark brown to white; nice job, guys.), the survivors manage to recover their weapons. Sure enough, right on schedule, the Beast just happens to show up (it’s really amazing how this thing is everywhere all the time), and gets shot for its troubles. Gravely injured, the wounded Beast runs off into the forest while the others don their skis and head off following the trail of blood. Yes! More skiing scenes.

Thankfully, we’re now in the last minute of run time now (yea!). Gar finally confronts the monster and empties his pistol into it. Mortally wounded, the Beast manages to summon the strength necessary to keep coming at him. (Wow! It’s not exhausted after tearing those suction cups from the camper?) The only redeeming part of this scene is that, for what it’s worth, we get the film’s best view of the monster, and it’s really not that good. However, because I like ya, I went ahead and took a screen shot of the stupid thing:

Sorry, folks, that’s it.

OK, where was I?

Oh yes, the monster charges Gar.

Gar impales it with his ski pole.

Monster dies.

Survivors embrace.

Dennis goes to bed.

The End

Dennis Grisbeck (April 2009)

Read more about Snowbeast at

Directed by Bert I. Gordon

Tagline: “For they shall inherit the Earth… sooner than you think!”

Run Time: 89 minutes

“Oh my God…they’re herding us like cattle!”
- Cute Blonde

Bert I. Gordon’s The Empire of the Ants is a cheesy giant ant film based loosely, and I mean very loosely, on a 1905 H.G. Wells short story, and with "Mr. BIG" well into his 80′s by now, this movie just may be his cinematic Big-Bug swan son: a final salute (or middle finger, depending on what you think of his films) to all of us who, whether we love him or hate him, have spent money and time watching his generally low-quality dreck.

If you don’t know who Bert I. Gordon is, then please send me your address so I can come visit you and slap you in the head with a trout. Until then, I’ll try and refresh your memory: Bert Gordon is best known as the man who created a slew of goofy low-budget flicks in the late 1950′s and early 60′s that revolved around ‘giant’ bugs and people. Such screen gems include a plutonium-enlarged Air Force pilot in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) (and its very unnecessary, and unwanted follow up, War of the Colossal Beast), a gang of huge hippie teenagers in Village of the Giants (1965), a giant spider in Earth vs. the Spider (1958), and, my personal favorite, an attack of giant grasshoppers in the grandiosely entitled Beginning of the End (1957). (Bert, who along with his wife Flora, created all of his special effects, dabbled ever so slightly in the opposite side of the miniature/giant spectrum in the forgettable 1958 sci-fi film Attack of the Puppet People starring B-Movie regular, John Agar.)

As noted above, the title of our feature film was taken from a short story written in the early 1900′s by legendary sci-fi author H.G. Wells. In the original story an investigator delves deep into the South American jungles to investigate the rumor of killer ants that reportedly destroyed a colony of settlers. However, in Gordon’s rewrite, things get a little watered down; let’s compare the 2 plots:

H.G. Wells : Captain Gerilleau is sent into the jungles of Guaramadema in South America to investigate a deadly plague of ants that have been killing local settlers and destroying the countryside.

Bert I. Gordon : Ants eat radioactive silver paint, become giant, and kill a real estate agent played by Joan Collins.

So now you know what I meant when I said ‘loosely’ based on the book. By the way, Gordon created a similar film the previous year based on another H.G. Wells novel,The Food of the Gods; a story about experimental foods that cause bugs and animals to grow to gigantic size: a theme that proved too irresistible to the ever industrious Mr. Gordon who just had to make a movie of it.

So, let’s get started:

Open with a boat skimming across the ocean as crewmen, dressed in full-body protective suits, casually launch barrels into the sea just a few hundred yards of the coast of an island. (Plot Point!) Subtlety never being one of Director Gordon’s strong points, the barrels are painted silver and as the camera zooms in, multiple times, we see the words "Radio Active Waste" stenciled on the sides. So, OK. I get it, I get it.

(I had to laugh at this…even after all these years, Gordon is still using radioactivity as Ye Olde Plot Device in order to magically "explain" how insects can grow to such enormous size.)

Anyway, it was hardly a shock when the next scene reveals one of the barrels cast up on the beach and, why lookee there, it’s leaking silver paint. Oh, I mean radioactive waste.

Ahhh yes, well that explains it. Enough back story, now let’s move on.

Meanwhile, back on the mainland, a representative for "Dreamland Shores" Real Estate, Marilyn Fryser (played by a then still-pretty-hot Joan Collins. Yes, you know it’s true. Don’t deny it!) prepares for the day’s arrival of potential customers. (Oh, and guess where those barrels of radioactive waste have washed up? I’ll leave that as an rhetorical question for now.) Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Marilyn greets the guests as they arrive and then ushers them aboard a chartered boat so as to take them all out to the island so they can take a look at the available properties.

Before we proceed, let’s take a quick look at the victims as they arrive:

Old Couple looking for retirement home: Dead meat for sure. Since when do old people survive monster movies?

Bitter ‘Play Boy’ and Clueless Wife:

Bitter Guy, wearing a horrendous leisure suit, is hopefully going to meet a painful death in the mandibles of a giant ant puppet.

Clueless Wife? Dead. No doubt.

Cute Blonde : Dead…maybe. She’s pretty cute so she might make it.

Young Drunk Guy : Too young + Too ‘cute’ = Ant meat? Hard to say.

Chintzy Couple from Jersey: Gee…what do you think? They’re from Jersey!

Cut back to the island to see a pair of disgruntled Dreamy Shores employees drinking beer and setting up signs pointing to the various available lots. In typical crappy movie fashion, the workers take slugs of beer while gushing wads of exposition telling us just how remote the island is…but there is a small town nearby…<cue scary music>. With that out of the way, another jump cut reveals ants crawling around on the goopy silver paint that masquerades as radioactive waste.

After arriving on the island, Marilyn and the others engage in completely unconvincing small talk as they munch on a free buffet. People introduce each other, couples splinter off from the main group, chit chat, then return to the buffet. Are you bored yet? Good. Me too. There’s a word for this type of scene: PADDING! Get used to it.

This clumsy vignette culminates in an inexplicably motivated scene showing Bitter Married Guy luring Cute Blonde out in the tree line where he tries to rape her! Why? Why? (The scene ends with her kneeing him in the nuts and stalking off to join the others.) Oh, but the action doesn’t stop there…oh no, no, no. As Bitter Guy composes himself after the vicious assault to his groinial-area, we hear an obvious rip-off of the famous Jaws theme song along with a knee-high POV shot from within the bushes. Considering that we just saw the ants eating the radioactive waste a mere 3 minutes ago, that’s some pretttttty damned fast growing there, pardner. Oh, and further keeping in the spirit of scientific accuracy, the ant "sees" like a kaleidoscope, because, you know, ants have a gazillion little eyes.

After this lovely 3 or 4 minutes of wasted run time (and my life), Marilyn herds her guests onto a tram in order to drive them around the island and see the development. I just have to say, that this putative "island paradise" is utterly forlorn and devoid of any charm or warmth whatsoever. I’m thinking that Bert was on a tight shooting schedule because the whole scene, nay, nearly the whole film, appears to have been shot on an overcast, blustery day. It just doesn’t scream Island Paradise, if you know what I mean.

Soooooo…more boring padding…more clumsy conversations…more pointless characterization. And why is it pointless? Because we all know they’ll soon be eaten by Winnebago-sized ants so who cares about their personal problems??!!

Finally, and brother, do I mean finally, the tour begins. (It looks like this was all filmed at an abandoned housing project with home-made "Dreamland Shores" signs hastily stuck into the ground by the film crew. "This building here is going to be torn down," Marilyn mentions as she guides her guests along a weedy beach. (Yeah, sure, this is suuuuuuuuuuuuuch prime property.) After strolling past yet another derelict building (would you really want potential investors to be seeing this?), they all clamber back aboard the gaudy "Dreamland" tram and begin a tour of even more rundown, abandoned lots.

Anyhoo, the tram putters along as Marilyn bellows through a bull-horn directly into the ears of the people sitting immediately behind her. Hilariously, and in keeping faithful to the generally low-budget feeling of the movie, the tram conveys the guests past one desolate, depressing lot after another; each dubiously labeled"Future Tennis Club", "Future Pool Area", and so on. An occasional ant POV shot is tossed in so that we can feel scared or something. (I especially like the scene where we hear Marilyn blabbing into the bullhorn on the soundtrack while we see her sitting completely still in the front seat, facing forward, with her hands in her lap. Brilliant.)

Wooo boy, the tram makes its a stop at another picnic table where the guests pile off and begin eating again..this can only mean one thing: more characterization! Aiyeeeee!

Thankfully, Chintzy Man in Green Leisure suit sneaks off to take a closer look at some unfinished water mains sticking out of the ground. "You don’t trust anybody," his wife complains to him as he pokes and pulls at the pipes. Boy, yeah Lady, you’re right: looking around before you invest in beach front property is pretty rude.

Chintzy man kneels to the ground and pulls out a piece of unconnected PVC water pipe. "You see! They’re dishonest!" he triumphantly exclaims just as a group of gigantic ants descends upon them. Swinging a 2-foot long plastic pipe in an effort to hold off an ant the size of a Grey Hound bus, Chintzy Man shouts for his wife to run for help. (Uh. She dies. Sorry.)

(I will give Bert Gordon credit for improving in his special effects. The post-processed ants are opaque and not transparent as nearly all his special effects "bugs" (and people!) were in his earlier films.)

Anyway, while the ants are happily devouring Chintzy Couple the others hop back onto the tram and continue the tour without realizing that the Chintzy Guy and his wife are missing. When somebody soon points this out to Marilyn, she blows it off by noting that they’ll catch up later. Wow, now that’s customer appreciation for you.

(The fact that it took several minutes before anybody even realized that they were missing is pretty amazing considering that there’s only 10 people in the group to begin with, not to mention that the wife is wearing a lime green outfit!)

After a few more minutes of driving, and you’re going to watch every second of it, Cute Blonde lets out an ear piercing scream when she spots a dead construction worker laying on the side of the road.

As everybody grimaces in disgust, some Einstein matter-of-factly suggests that they probably should go back and look for Chintzy Couple. Naturally, nobody jumps at the chance to run through the woods and be killed by some (as yet) unseen menace, so Drunk Guy and Cute Blonde grab their proverbial cajones and scurry off into the woods while glibly shouting "We’ll meet you back at the boat!"

After a few seconds of reconnoitering, Drunk Guy and Cute Blonde happen across the exact spot where Chintzy guy was gobbled up. "Oh my God!" she shouts upon seeing a pair of blood-stained green pants. (What was she screaming at? The pants or the blood? We may never know…) Out of nowhere, some giant ants appear via the magic of Bert I. Gordon split-screen work . (My suspension of disbelief was severely strained as I saw the "giant" ants pressing up against the glass walls of the aquarium in which they were filmed.)

Back at the dock, we see giant ants merrily walking along the pier and crawling all over the chartered boat that Marilyn and the others used to reach the island. (The ants are now much larger than the ones previously shown, and are simply black-matted onto the scene without having the ants actually super-imposed onto the image…weird.)

(I had to laugh when I saw the Captain standing on the beach casually watching a stream of monster ants walk out onto the pier while taking a "Knee Up"…ala Giant Gila Monster.)

To add even more humor to the shot is when the Captain and his First Mate are fighting the ants on the boat, you can clearly see that they are standing on the beach, which doesn’t quite agree with the establishing shots showing the boat tied up at the end of the pier…but let’s not be so petty as to dwell upon these tiny inconsistencies. (But I will indulge myself in just enough pettiness to nab a quick screenshot:)

Uh…wasn’t the boat tied to the end of the dock?

Anyway, the Captain, and I think somebody said his name is Dan, swims back to shore after chopping a hole in a gas can, setting it on fire with a flare, and blowing up the boat.

To my thinking, blowing up the boat was pretty stupid because, really, what’s the worst thing the ants could have done to the boat anyway? Crapped on the carpets? So now, thanks to Captain Dan, the boat is a burning wreck and everybody will have to hoof it through the ant-infested forest in order to reach (presumed) safety in the island’s only town.

After another long, boring scene (surprised?) in which everybody huddles around a camp fire arguing over what to do next, the gang reluctantly agrees to trudge through the forest and find the river which should take them back to civilization. (Mr. BIG includes a wonderful shot of ants climbing on a picture of a beach house in order to make them look "giant", a technique which he, er, perfected in the giant-grasshopper "classic" Beginning of the End. At least in this movie the ants are a better behaved than the grasshoppers and don’t climb off the edge of the "house" and into the sky. [NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Actually, in a later scene several ants do in fact "take to the sky"!])

Oh, and needless to say, a good chunk of runtime is chewed up watching everybody run through the forest…every freakin’ step. Speaking of "chewed up", it’s that point in the movie where the non-essential characters must begin to be killed off. (Relatively non-essential, that is. All the characters are, of course, two-dimensional paper cut-outs, so it’s all pretty hard to tell who’s going to be killed first.)

So let’s see, who’s first. Ah yes, for no reason whatsoever, the Old Couple decide to head off on their own and take refuge in an old ramshackle shed because…wow, that was just a super smart idea. ("We lost that old couple," somebody remarks later in the film in a moment of heart-breaking sentimentality.)

Wow. That was a really dumb idea.

In quick succession, Bitter Married Guy’s wife trips over a log (Wow…now there’s a plot contrivance that never gets old…), twists her ankle (<sigh>), and is quickly dispatched by a giant ant puppet. Right on the heels of that exciting scene, some Other Guy gets eaten (I think it’s Marilyn’s business partner.)

OK, I know I’m being vague here with the characters’ identities, but look:

1) The characters are completely unappealing.

2) Nobody has used any names yet, except Captain Dan, so I can’t really tell who is who.

3) Who cares? (See #1)

So with the character list literally halved in the last 5 minutes, the survivors find a half-rotten boat tied up to a tree. I’m going to pause the film and take a quick head count: Yes, there’s Marilyn, Captain Dan, Bitter Married Guy, Cute Blonde, Drunk Young Guy, and an Old Woman that has the sweets for Captain Dan. (Where the hell did she come from? Ack! I give up.)

Hey! A name: Drunk Young Guy is named….<drum roll>…Joe!

BLARRGH! I’m huge!

By the way, do you want to know something even more boring than watching people run through the woods? Watching people row a boat up a stream. I tell ya, this movie has got it all. The only thing we’re missing now is a nice, long, slow-motion underwater knife fight. Yessirree.

After an eternity of watching Captain Dan rowing the boat up the stream (including a heart-stopping "Should We Turn Left Or Right?" scene), the survivors are forced to stop the boat when they spot a fallen tree blocking the way. A huge shocker here: the tree is full of ants (of the Split Screen species). After a brief tussle, Captain Dan manages to swing the boat around and start paddling up the river again. What excitement!

Well, at least it’s not too long before the ants ambushed them again. (Won’t these people ever learn?) This time the Plot Gods declare that Bitter Married Guy, er, Bitter Widowed Guy, is to be the next victim.

(I just had to chuckle when they showed Bitter Guy struggling with the and in the water: the rubber ant model must have been full of air because you can plainly see it floating on its back with its feet in the air while the guy is supposed to be ‘fighting for his life’!)

Sooooooo…the boat sank, for some reason, who knows, and now, yes, everybody is compelled to trudge through the woods…again! Good grief!!!!! (And yes, there are 5 exclamation points there.) Oh, and now everybody is magically completely dry even though they were all dumped into the river just a minute ago. Strange. (But not as strange as the fact that Cute Blonde’s shirt is still wet…thanks Mr. Gordon!)

(By the way, what is it with seeing Joan Collins attacked by giant ants that gives me a macabre sense of satisfaction?)

During a brief respite from the, uh, action, Captain Dan points out that the ants seem to be holding back, "They could kill us anytime they want…<dramatic pause>…they just don’t seem to want to."

(Oh really, Captain? That’s a pretty bold assertion when you stop and consider that your First Mate, Bitter Guy, Old Couple, Marilyn’s business partner, Bitter Guy’s wife, Chintzy Couple, and two Gardners have all been devoured in the last 30 minutes!)

Anyway, realizing that they are being herded "like…cattle", the survivors decide on the only ‘sensible’ course of action: head upstream in the direction that the ants seem to be herding them. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

After trudging through the some more forest (boring!), Marilyn and the others stumble across a rundown homestead and talk to an old couple that quickly point the way to town, but wow, there’s something mysterious about them. ("Don’t let them take you to the sugar refinery!" the old woman whispers to Cute Blonde before her scowling husband can tell her to shut up.) Anyway, the local Sheriff swings by, picks them up, and takes them into town. (On the way to town the Sheriff awkwardly points out the town’s gigantic sugar refinery…Oh brother. This is almost as ridiculous as the Flower Festival in The Swarm.)

So, shall we connect the dots?

Creepy townsfolk.

Sugar refinery.

Main highway closed.

No phone lines available.

Hmmmmm, are the local yokels under the control of the ants somehow?

Nahhhhhh, that’d be too stupid, wouldn’t it?

In summary, after a sequence of hamfisted events, it dawns upon Marilyn and the others that Something Is Up. With no easy way to escape the town, they hot wire a car and burn rubber up the main highway. Needless to say, they get about half a mile before they’re run off the road by Creepy Cops and taken into custody. Through the magic of editing and lame plot devices, Joe and Cute Blonde manage to escape the cops’ clutches and flee into a corn field. (Unfortunately for me, this escape sequence provides Gordon yet another golden opportunity for more padding, this time with people running through corn stalks instead of trees. <sigh>)

Meanwhile, the others, now in police custody, are transported to the sugar refinery and pushed inside a large building along with a truck load of zombified locals. When the refinery’s steam whistle blows, the giant ants (this time they’re nearly half as high as the refinery building) appear out of nowhere and clamber inside the sugar warehouse in order to dine on its sweet contents.

(Again, Gordon chose to film real ants climbing on a picture of the building to make them look giant sized. And, once again, several misbehaving individuals climb off the picture and up into the "sky", providing one of the films few entertaining moments.)

Back inside, Marilyn, Captain Dan, and Old Woman That Likes Captain Dan are shoved to the front of a long line of glassy-eyed townsfolk where they discover to their horror (and my great amusement) that the townspeople are kept ‘zombified’ by being placed in a small booth where the ant Queen squirts them with a vaporous pheromone. This ‘pheromone’ (which greatly resembles dry-ice fog, if you get what I’m saying…) transforms its victim into a mindless drone that will now do the ants’ bidding, namely, keep the warehouse full of sugar.

Yep, I’m tired and it’s Bullet Time:

• Marilyn gets ‘smoked’ by the Queen and becomes a glassy-eyed drone, (much like myself at this point). She tries her best to convince the others to give in to the power of The Ants!
• Captain Dan gets pushed into the booth, pulls out a road flare (from where??!!…never mind, don’t answer that!) and attacks the Queen.
• The other ants, feasting on sugar in the neighboring building, hear their Queen’s distress call and freak out.
• Said ants go amok and attack the refinery workers thus affording Gordon more use for his monster ant-head puppets.
• In the confusion, Joe reaches the refinery from the corn field, and finds a convenient gasoline tanker truck.
• Joe, being an expert in large gasoline transportation vehicles, quickly opens its valves and drives around spilling gas everywhere in preparation for the inevitable Gigantic Explosion Scene.
• The town Sheriff, somehow free of the Queen’s spell (really, how does all this work?) whips out his service revolver and kills the Queen.
• Equally inexplicable, Marilyn falls to the floor and dies in a puff of ant pheromone. Why she died and why the Sheriff is suddenly freed are questions the poor viewer will never have answered.
• I must admit, seeing Joan Collins dying in a cloud of pheromones with a giant ant-head puppet in her lap is oddly satisfying.
• Remember the Gigantic Explosion Scene I mentioned? We’ll, it has started. Enjoy.
• Ants burn up. All 4 of them. (What about the others?)
• Captain Dan, Old Woman That Likes Captain Dan, Cute Blonde, and Joe all make their escape via boat in an Incredibly Exciting Outboard Motor-Boat Sequence!
• Cue credits and aspirin.

The End

Dennis Grisbeck (March 2009)

Read more about Empire of the Ants at

Directed by Richard Ashe

Written by Bill Finger and Charles Sinclaire

Tagline: The rising moon creates a monster

Run Time: 90 min

“There is an answer…and I think I know what it is…and it makes me sick to think about it!”
- Johnny Longbow

Are you tired of run-of-the-mill werewolf movies? Bored with the usual ‘werewolf bites man, man turns into werewolf, werewolf killed by silver bullet’ story line?

Then how about a ‘were-lizard’ movie? And to make things even more fun, you don’t become a were-lizard from being bitten, but by having a fragment of moon rock lodged in your brain? Still not satisfied? Then let’s have the hero of the story be a Navajo professor named Johnny "Longbow" (don’t ask), an expert in anthropology, Navajo legends, and making stew. Hell, let’s throw in a bunch of 1970′s cheesiness, bad haircuts, and a police chief that can’t seem to unhook his thumbs from his belt.

If all that is still not goofy enough for you, then you might as well find a different movie review website.

"Track of the Moon Beast" revolves around Paul Carlson, a mineralogist who somehow gets a piece of moon rock (!) stuck in his head, lodging itself deep inside his brain. Everything seems OK until he transforms into a man-sized monitor lizard and starts eating people and making a general nuisance of himself whenever the moon is full. The authorities call in the renowned professor Johnny Longbow, expert in Navajo legends, who solves the case and kills the were-lizard with moon-rock arrows (and makes a pot of stew along the way).

Bluntly stated, this is a God-awful movie. The writers tried to add an air of respectability to the story by calling into play some bogus Navajo legend about "fire from the sky" and other such nonsense. Sorry. Doesn’t work.

Buckle up for this one…it’s going to be a long ride through an inane movie.

Prepare yourself for "Track of the Moon Beast"!

The Cast:

	Paul Carlson (Chase Cordell) The exciting life as a topless mineralogist gets even more exciting when a piece of moon rock gets stuck in his brain. Living at home with his mom in a hotel (or something), he divides his time between being a were-lizard and running around without a shirt.
	Prof. ‘Johnny-longbow’ Salina (Gregorio Sala) Professor of Anthropology at the "University", Johnny also excels at making ‘Navajo stew’ and coming up with ridiculous legends.
	Kathy Nolan (Donna Leigh Drake) The movie’s official babe. As dumb as a box of rocks, she Likes to eat Navajo stew and forget NASA photo shoots. Easily the worst actress I have ever seen…"Moon rocks! Oh, wow!"
	Police Captain Mac (Patrick Wright) Albuquerque’s Chief of Police and close buddies with Johnny Longbow. He is rarely seen without his thumbs in his belt. Patrick Wright has also skillfully played roles as a policeman in other hits such as "Revenge of the Cheerleaders", "Roller Boogie", and "Maniac Cop". Not to mention a noteworthy performance as ‘Uncle Elmer’ in "The Bikini Carwash Company". Believe it or not, he also played ‘Mr. Peterbuilt’ in the Russ Meyer’s flick "Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens"! (Now if that doesn’t make your skill crawl…)

Our film opens with somebody looking through big telescope into the night sky while "spacey" music plays in the background. You know the kind: A $10 Casio synthesizer set on full reverb, hit every third note while moving your finger up and down the keys. Incredibly, there is a UFO hurtling towards the Earth; UFO as in ‘Unidentified Flaming Object’. Yes, the ‘effects’ where achieved by setting fire to a plastic ball and suspending it in front of the camera. (Gee…didn’t Ed Wood do stuff like that in, oh, 1959? I thought special effects had advanced a bit since then, but oh well).

With typical bad-movie editing, we abruptly cut to a Native American ceremony…I can only assume it is a Navajo ceremony since the movie’s hero is supposed to be Navajo, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.

OK, now we come to the title and credit sequence. While the credits roll, we watch a motorcycle driving along a lonely dirt road through the arid mountains of New Mexico (this film was shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the surrounding foothills). The motorcycle pulls over and the guy gets off it to start digging in the dirt.

We are treated to a minute or so of runtime watching him scratch around in the rocks, dusting things off, picking a bit at something. Yes, watching a mineralogist at work is as fascinating as it sounds. Soundly, a scream breaks the mountain silence! Who could it be? The mineralogist looks around, wipes the sweat off of his head, and gets back to work. (?) I guess when you pick and scratch at rocks by yourself for years and years you get used to hearing voices in your head. Well, a second scream shatters the silence, and now maybe he’ll take notice. It seems like the actor is more annoyed that his work is disturbed rather than surprised by the screams. Now that is good bad-movie acting!

From behind a boulder jumps our hero, Professor of Anthropology Johnny ‘Longbow’ Salina, laughing at how funny that joke was.

You see, it’s funny when you’re in the middle of nowhere and somebody hides behind a rock and starts screaming. I thought I would tell you in case you didn’t realize that from the scene. Hee hee!

Two of Johnny’s students, Budd and Janet are also behind the rock. (I wonder how they got there since this is truly in the middle of BFE (bum f— Egypt: kids, ask your parents). Johnny explains that they are part of his summer field course in anthropology. (Wow! A monster movie with both mineralogists and anthropologists! This is exciting!) Besides learning that Budd and Janet are a couple, we also quickly see that neither one of them can act worth a damn. This is painful stuff here. (It doesn’t really matter though. They are written out of the script after a couple more scenes.)

Well, here comes the movies sex pot. From behind the rocks comes another person, Kathy Nolan. (Well, this movie sure didn’t waste any time introducing all the characters! Saves me a lot of trouble trying to guess their names.) Kathy walk directly to the shirtless, buff Paul and shakes hands. It turns out, as Longbow awkwardly tells us (nearly flubbing his lines), that Kathy is doing a "picture story, on the, uhhh, religious customs of the tribes around here." (Yeah, right!)

After more painful dialog, we find out that it was her idea to play the practical joke on Paul because she wanted to get some shots of his reactions when he heard their screams and saw the "ceremonial mask" that she happened to bring with her (don’t ask).

I have to get this off my chest: The acting in this movie is terrible! Thank you. Back to the movie.

Kathy (rather boldly) invites Paul to "…an authentic Indian supper…" at Longbow’s place out on the reservation (oh brother!). Paul accepts (maybe somebody should ask Longbow first?), and they head off to dinner. Kathy turns back and asks Paul why people call the professor by the name "Longbow". (See Classic Lines) Paul gives her the translation, which is kind of strange because, well, "Longbow" is English already, so how can it "translate" to something completely different? It’s like asking somebody what is the English translation for "car wash" and they say "place where many cars go to be washed". With that issue all cleared up, Kathy and Paul join the others and head to Jonny’s for dinner.

Out on the, er, reservation, we see Johnny Longbow and the others having an authentic Indian dinner. If an authentic Indian dinner means being crowded around a tiny table, eating stew and watching a microscopic TV, then the filmmakers did a great job reproducing it.

Authentic Indian dinner at Chateau de’Longbow

The announcer on the TV informs us that an asteroid has hit the moon. The impact has sent a shower of fragments towards the Earth, but don’t worry, they’ll all burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere before they hit the ground. (Ohhh, ok. If you say so.) Conveniently enough, the "greatest density of fragments" will be over the American South West. (Hey! Isn’t that where this movie takes place? Hmmm….I wonder if somebody is going to be hit by one of the fragments!)

As people compliment Johnny on the stew, Janet asks him what the recipe is. He takes a deep breathe, like this is going to be a huge chore to recite, and says, "Chicken…corn…green peppers…chili………..onions………well, it’s an old recipe around here." He names the ingredients with the same enthusiasm you would expect from a kid reading out loud the periodic table of elements! You would think he would be a little more pleased…oh well.

After the news report Johnny stands up and turns off the TV. (It turns out that they are eating outside because, you know, Johnny is so in touch with nature.) We discover that Kathy wants to take some night shots of the area (yeah, night shots of the desert should make for an exciting report!). Paul offers to tag along and show here some exciting spots (heh! heh!), but they are "pretty far away." That being said, Paul and Kathy stand up, and without a word, walk over to the Paul’s motorcycle and drive off (!). (I guess they need about 6 or 7 hours to get to these spots before sundown since it looks to be around noon as they leave the scene.)

As the others sit and eat their Navajo stew, a lizard runs across the ground and startles Janet (Eeeek!). She asks Budd what it was, to which he responds in a manly way that it was "just a lizard". (Let me get this straight, Janet is doing anthropological field work in the New Mexico deserts and she’s never seen a freakin’ lizard?!) Johnny nods his head in a sagely fashion and says "You get used to lizards here, they’re quite common…that’s why so many tribes in this area have legends about lizards…" (?)

He then goes on to tell them about a Navajo Lizard Legend. (I’m not making this up!) Here you go:

"The story of Lizard and Coyote (as told by Johnny Longbow)

"One day, before man walked on Earth, Lizard and Coyote were having an argument…about what shape man would take. Lizard won the argument. They finally agreed that man’s hands would be shaped like lizard’s: Four fingers and a thumb (!?). Coyote drove a hard bargain, he agreed that man’s hands would be shaped like lizards rather than his paws, but only, only, if man…would be mortal…and never again, try to be like lizard." (??)

First, I’m no expert on Navajo mythology, but this sounds like total BS to me. Second, I lived 8 years in the American South West, where there were also plenty of lizards, and I never heard of an over-abundance of "lizard legends".

The story ends with Longbow giving the (White) students that goofy "wise Native American deep in thought" look. Or else he’s trying to remember what his next line is.

We cut to a fantastic night scene. Kathy and Paul are at one of those ‘great spots’ he was bragging about so much at lunch. He points out the landmarks, even showing her Albuquerque in the distance. This shot is pretty funny because it’s underexposed and you can’t see a damn thing!:

"And over there is Albuquerque…"

Kathy asks Paul where exactly they are, to which he replies "Sandia Creast…ten-thousand, six-hundred, and seventy eight feet, up or down …depending on where you are and your point of view." (?). Now, like I said before, I lived in the South West for awhile, and it gets dag-gummed cold in the desert at night. Yet, here is Kathy in Daisy-Duke cutoffs and short sleeve shirt. (Oh yeah, where are her cameras? Wasn’t she up here to take night shots?)

Paul and Kathy are now cuddled up by a tree watching meteorites streak across the sky. Amazingly, one meteorite passes within a couple of feet of them. Paul jumps on top of Kathy to, *ahem*, protect her.

As they stand up Paul exclaims that it was a "meteorite …a lunar meteorite!" (Well, duh!). Kathy notices that Paul is bleeding from his forehead, but no big deal, Paul is a topless-mineralogist: he simply takes a tissue, wipes away the blood, and casually throws the bloody paper onto the ground. (Nice going, litterbug!)

They also notice a glowing meteorite (you know that every lunar meteorite pulses and glows, don’t you?) that has impacted just beside Paul’s motorcycle. Two points to anybody who can guess where they got the "spacey" sound for the meteorite…Yup! Lifted right from "Monster A-Go Go", that goofy "radioactive" sound that the monster made. Man, to be reduced to using "Monster A-Go Go" as a source of special effects…it boggles the mind.

As a professional mineralogist, Paul decides to take it home since "…it would make a great souvenir." (Of course, any mineralogist who came across a glowing, pulsing, pinging moon rock would do the same instead of, say, taking it to the lab for study.)

When Paul says that now he’ll finally have his own moon rock (?), Kathy jumps up and shouts, "Moon rock! Oh Wow! That reminds me, I have to go into town tomorrow!" (!?) That’s kind of like watching a show on Discovery channel and saying "Dung beetle! Wow! That reminds me, I have to return those library books tomorrow!"

It turns out the reason for Kathy’s excitement is that there is a NASA "exhibit" at the University the next day and she is suppose to cover it. (I’m becoming less and less impressed with Kathy’s professionalism as a photo-journalist.) Paul suggests that they attend the exhibit together and then go out to dinner afterwards. Karen agrees, but is still a little concerned about the scratch on Paul’s head, noting that it could "get infected." Using a classic pick up line, Paul says, "We could go to my place…I have lots of antiseptics in my medicine cabinet…" Boy! Paul is one smoooooth operator! You go, boy! I know that all women are attracted to a guy with a house full of antiseptics. Sexy!

When they arrive at Paul’s house, they pull into the garage and get off the motorcycle. Kathy is pretty impressed with the place and wonders if they have the place to themselves. (Note that they just met this very same day! Ahhh…those were the 70′s, eh?). Paul, the Casanova of mineralogists, says "Yeah, my mother’s in Europe. She travels a lot."

Hey, Paul, a little advice: When you bring a babe to your place, don’t tell her you live with your mother. Ok?

Karen awkwardly makes her way into Paul’s bedroom and starts picking and poking at the various nick-nacks hanging on the walls. (And I mean, awkwardly!) She finally sees a telescope, oddly standing in a corner of the room, and remarks "I bet you spend a lot of your life being lonely." Paul explains that "When your parents are divorced, you get used to it." (?). Yup, Paul’s the stereotypical lonely, telescope-peering mineralogist who still lives at home with his mother. We all know the type.

To complete his image as a total loser, Paul introduces Kathy to his pet lizard. (No, that’s not what I meant! You perverts!)

Needless to say, Kathy is repulsed by Paul’s lizard. (Perverts!). He explains that the lizard is named "Ty. Short for ‘Tyrannosaurus’. (See Classic Lines)

Worried that he frightened Kathy by showing her his lizard, Paul quickly apologizes. Seeing that it’s been, oh, about 5 hours since they met, Kathy says "It’s us that I’m worried about!", and they start kissing.

Yup! Things move pretty fast out in Albuquerque! A hell of a lot faster than this movie at least…

The next day Paul and Kathy are at the NASA exhibit. Kathy walks around taking pictures of, oh, exhibits, Paul’s ass, whatever takes her fancy..

Heeeey! Nice "Moon Rocks", Paul!

Strangely, as Paul gets close to the moon rock exhibit (which looks a lot like a ball of aluminum foil placed on a garbage bag), a goofy beam of light shoots out from the rock and hits Paul in the head. Paul collapses and Kathy rushes to his aide. We then see a blurry shot from Paul’s POV (complete with Monster-A Go Go "pinging" special effects). Regaining his composure, Paul remarks that he’s OK, he "…just blacked out." He leaves the exhibit to get some fresh air, while the actress playing Kathy tries to make convincing ‘worried’ faces.

We now see a "country" singer at some sort of outdoor concert. I guess the movie’s budget allowed them to hire only local, er, talent, judging from the song’s lyrics:

My voice has been gettin’ froggy
I’ve been smokin’ too damn much
Singin’ songs to the sun that’s risin’
Rhymin’ words I can not touch

You really don’t want to hear any more, do you? OK, I didn’t think so.

We see Paul, Kathy, and Johnny Longbow sitting in the crowd, having a good-ole time, except for Paul who is grimacing and holding his head in pain (like the viewer). Johnny suggests that they take Paul home, where he’d be "…a lot better off." Yes. I agree 100 percent. Get as far away as possible from this band. In an odd sequence of scenes, exhibiting the total lack of direction and editing skills used in this film, we cut to see Paul at home with Johnny. Paul is of course shirtless. The odd thing is that the music continues playing on the audio track, which would be OK, I guess, if it were meant to accompany the scene, like background music, say. Yet in this scene we see Paul and Johnny talking while the song continues! Who knows what they are saying…we can’t hear anything because of the "sound track"! Ridiculous!

To prove that this isn’t a fluke, we cut back to the band, still singing of course, then switch scenes back to Paul’s bedroom where Kathy is now talking to him, but we still can’t hear what they are saying because of the music that is played over the scene! Ack!

Song ends. Thank you God.

With Paul safely tucked into bed, Kathy and Johnny stand on the front stairs of Paul’s house and discuss Paul’s predicament. Johnny explains to Kathy that Paul is going through a stage "learning about himself" (?). Yeah, I guess that would explain the black outs, blinding head aches, and nausea. Blowing his lines yet again (fire this guy!), Johnny says, "He’s used to doing things by himself…FOR himself…" Enough of that. Johnny drives Kathy home and everything seems to be OK.

Alas, Paul is in for a rough night. Tossing and turning, he finally gets out of bed and draws the curtains back to see, <GASP!>, a full moon! He starts panting, groaning…

Now we see a drunk walking down the street. (Life expectancy of a drunk in a monster movie? Anybody want to take a guess?) Apparently this guy is coming back from a hot night at the Albuquerque bowling alley because he has a big silver bowling bag with him and a bowling jacket with his name on it: "Duke". Duke drops his keys on the front lawn and bends over giving us a much unwanted shot of his ass. (Note from the future: His name is actually Sid.)

Not able to find his keys, he starts pounding on the door, shouting for his obese wife to let him in. His wife manages to dislodge herself from the sofa where she was drinking beers, smoking, and watching the "national news". She yells back at her husband that if he keeps coming back drunk …yadda…yadda…yadda.

She locks the door and goes to bed leaving Sid outside to sleep it off. No sooner has she gone to bed than Sid hears something moving towards him across the lawn. With oh-so-not-scary growling noises, the monster approaches and kills him. The viewer does not get to see the carnage, but is treated to the monster’s POV as it walks up and attacks Sid. Exciting. Inside, the woman sees a pool of bright red blood forming at the base of the door, opens the door, and sees he mutilated husband standing at the entrance. (How in the world is he still standing?). He falls into the doorway, she screams, and we fade to black.

The next morning the police are at the scene. Meet the police chief, Captain Mac (If I had a dime for every movie policeman named ‘Mac’, boy, I tell ya…). Mac has called Johnny Longbow to the scene in order to take a look at some puzzling evidence. (Isn’t that what all police captains do when they are investigating a murder? Call the local anthropology professor?)

Mac takes Johnny over to look at the bodies. Yes, the old woman died to because "she had a weak heart…and whatever she saw when she opened the door apparently finished her." He pulls back the sheet that is covering poor old Sid revealing a pretty horrible sight, if you are afraid of bad special effects. Oooo! I’m going to have nightmares for sure now!

Johnny suggests that maybe a mountain lion could have been responsible for the attack. "Not that easy…" is the reply from Captain Mac. Nope, they are going to make this film as difficult as possible for me. Putting his arm around Johnny’s shoulder, Mac leads him to the back of the house to show him something rather strange. It turns out that whatever attacked Sid went to the back of the house and "tripped over a garden hose" (Now that’s one scary monster!). It then grabbed at the wall as it fell, leaving both a big footprint in the mud and a bloody hand print on the wall.

Johnny astutely notes that the mark was definitely not made by a mountain lion, but rather a human hand. Yup, a huge human hand with webbed fingers and 3-inch claws. Chalk up another point for the Department of Anthropology!

After seeing the footprint in the mud, Johnny suggests that they talk to the head of the paleontology department, Dr. Deets. Good idea…since, well, you’ve ruled out mountain lions and all.

Back at Johnny’s house, er, Johnny’s mom’s house, Kathy shows up to see how he’s doing (wearing a nice hot-pink short-shorts ensamble…God bless the 70′s!). Oh yes, I must point out that this is not the same house that they drove to the night before, but you didn’t notice that, did you?

She lets herself in and wakes up the slumbering Paul (shirtless of course). He appears to be back in his pajama bottoms and the bed is made. This can only mean that before he changed into the were-lizard, he took off his pants, killed the old couple, came home, put his pants back on, made his bed, and went to sleep. Wow!

Over in Dr. Deets’s office at the paleontology department, the casting of the footprint has now been examined by Deets who comes to the conclusion that it is the "left hind foot print of some…form of reptile…some, very, very large lizard." Gee, thanks doc. After some more boring, pointless, meandering conversation, Deets says that whatever made the footprint is related to the tyrannosaurus rex. (!) How he came to that conclusion is not explained, which is probably for the best. Johnny and Mac leave the office of the esteemed Professor Deets in no better shape than when they came in. Mac is worried about how in the hell he’s going to tell the Commissioner "…or anybody else down at City Hall…" that a man was murdered by a dinosaur. Well, I have to explain to my friends how I can manage to watch movies like this, so I can’t say that I feel sorry for you, Mac.

As we change scenes, we hear "Indian" music, so we must be down on the reservation. I have to say that these attempts to include Native American culture into this film, although with good intent, simply make me cringe. Obviously not meant as condescending at the time, I just can’t help but note the air of smugness whenever Paul talks about Johnny’s quaint ‘Indian ways’: Navajo Stew, Johnny’s skills with bow and arrow, the ‘oh so cool’ Indian legends, and so on. I’m all for multiculturalism but it doesn’t have to be done in such a simple-minded and stereotypical fashion.

As I was saying, back on the reservation, some kids are practicing with a bow and arrow, shooting targets taped to a haystack (*cringe*). Kathy is taking photos of the youths while Paul watches. (Doesn’t he have anything to do, like, I don’t know, mineralogy?) As luck would have it, Johnny Longbow was the "Conference Archery Champion back in college…." (*cringe*) (Well duh! He is an Indian, right? Aren’t they all? And White people can’t dance! Right? ) Paul wants a demonstration but Johnny demurs. Paul continues to insist and when Kathy says "C’mon Johnny Longbow. I want to see you live up to your name!", well, Johnny agrees. Paul walks to the back of Johnny’s car and pulls out, Ta Da! A bow and some arrows! Of course, being the authentic, "In touch with his people" type Navajo, Johnny has made it all himself! (Kathy of course reacts almost like she’s never even seen a bow and arrow before…)

"Everything is authentic Indian!" (*cringe!*)

Good Lord! Paul then reaches into Johnny’s car and pulls out a couple of ears of that multi-color "wild" corn, that, you know, all Navajos have in their cars. I’m just trying to give you an idea of the magnitude of the stereotyping that’s happening here…I’d laugh if it wasn’t so damn embarrassing to watch!

As you might have guessed, Paul is going to use the corn in a pseudo-William Tell type stunt in order to demonstrate Johnny’s archery skills to Kathy. He holds an ear of corn in each hand and stretches his arms out to his sides. Yes, this looks as stupid as it sounds:

What’s a red neck’s last words?
"Hey y’all! Watch this!"

Johnny takes aim and hits one of the corn ears. Suddenly Paul grabs his head and collapses to the ground. Johnny admits that they’ve probably "over done it" by taking Paul to the reservation that day. Overdone what? His a damn mineralogist, um, I think they can go out into the sunlight. What exactly do they think is wrong with Paul? I mean, he’s a young guy, obviously in good shape, and suddenly he starts having blinding headaches and fainting spells. Yet nobody seems concerned in the least. Hello?! Two words: brain tumor! Get this dude to the doctor!

Alas, Kathy takes him home, takes him into bed, and gives him a couple of aspirin. (!) She insists on spending the night just in case he needs something (Oo La La!). After seeing that Paul is safely in bed, Kathy takes a pillow and a couple of blankets over to Paul’s sofa and starts to read. Umm, isn’t it broad daylight out? (See picture above) Well, I guess it’s never to early to bundle up in some blankets, turn on the light and start reading. Especially for an obvious fan of literature like Kathy.

Later that evening as the moon comes up, Paul awakes from a restless slumber and, <sigh>, takes off his shirt. He stumbles out into the living room where Kathy is sleeping on the sofa, using some weird blurry POV shot, because, you know, it’s cool. He then walks outside, around a huge indoor swimming pool and out the door into the back yard. You may also note a sign over the door going out to the yard, and a multitude of chairs and tables around the pool. Yes, that’s right. This movie was filmed at a hotel! No kidding!

We cut to a scene with three men playing poker in a tent. As the game progresses, suddenly the side of the tent rips open and the monster jumps in. I wish I could have taken some good shots of the monster but the shot was filmed with such poor lighting it wasn’t possible. Needless to say, the monster looked totally bogus as we shall soon see. Anyway, a guy gets hit in the shoulder which somehow causes his neck to be slashed open, another old guy obligingly sits completely still so the monster can get a good grip on his ‘arm’ and rip it off, and other such nonsense.

We cut back to the hotel, er, I mean Paul’s house. It’s morning now, and the monster has taken back on it’s pajama pants and transformed back into Paul. Kathy has awoken and found Paul out by the pool, laying in a lounge chair. Paul doesn’t remember how he got there except that it was too warm in his room last night, so Kathy calls him a big baby, says she’ll make breakfast, and goes back inside. That shows you how logical people act in this movie.

Back at Chief Mac’s office, he and Johnny are discussing the latest murders (See Classic Lines). Mac still can’t seem to accept the fact that a dinosaur is alive. Alas, he admits that maybe there is a dinosaur still alive "…up in the hills…"

With a jarring cut, we change scenes back to Paul’s bedroom. Johnny has arrived to take Paul to the doctor (Duh! About time!). Paul is laying in bed, shirtless (ENOUGH ALREADY!), and agrees that it’s probably about time to get his noggin checked out. Paul also lets Johnny borrow his moon rock since he has gone through "all his text books" and can’t find the "answer to it" (?). (Answer to….? What?)

At the doctor’s office, Paul is about to have a series of X-rays taken of his head. (Why this requires him to take off his shirt, I don’t know, but he does it anyway.) Johnny excuses himself saying that he has an "errand" to do in the area. Ummm….ok? We next see him talking to a clerk at a photo shop. The clerk is looking at some pictures that Johnny has had developed, saying that he’s never seen anything like it before. Just a minute here:

1) What film is this? I never saw anybody take any pictures!

2) Why can’t we see what is in the photograph?!

3) Why are these pictures never mentioned again?!

4) What the hell was this scene all about!

5) This is a really terrible movie.

Having finished his oh-so-important errand, Johnny arrives back at the hospital just in time to hear the results of the X-rays. The doctor, after seeing Paul’s X-rays, notes that they "…usually don’t discuss them with their patients." (!!) (Do they usually keep patient’s test results a secret from them?) Despite the hospital’s policy of not discussing test results with the patient, the doctor has decided to make an exception because the case is so "unusual".

After showing Paul the X-ray of his head, the doctor breaks the news to him: "You’ve been hit by a small particle of matter of some kind…not enough to cause any pain because of the high speed." (Remind me to never go to that hospital if I ever get sick in Albuquerque…)

How did the doctor know about the "speed" of the particle. Paul certainly has no idea he was hit by anything. Stupid movie. The doctor also notes that this type of thing is "not unusual" (!!!) You see, soldiers have survived with particles of shrapnel in their brains…Well, gee. Thanks again, doc. To Paul’s irritation, the doctor says they will have to keep him there for a few days for observation, and "…if that area doesn’t clear up…we’re going to have to do something about it…surgically." Well, yes, I suppose you will.

Now it appears that Mac is paying a visit to Johnny at the anthropology department, where Johnny is showing Mac some slides of 400-year old Navajo paintings that he remembers seeing during his Ph.D. dissertation (or something). The paintings depict a story of a man who is struck by a light from the sky, and then turned into a "demon-lizard-monster". OK, so this story implies two things: First, that about every 400 years somebody in New Mexico survives being struck in the head by a piece of moon rock. Second, that having a piece of moon rock in your head will transform you into a man-sized were-lizard at each full moon. Oh Brother!!! (See Classic Lines)

Thanks for sharing that story with me…
now to get my thumbs unstuck…

Johnny and Mac next head over to the NASA exhibit at the university’s geology department. Mac has closed the exhibit "on his authority" so they can examine the moon rocks alone. (Oh! The awesome powers that rest in that man’s hands! I bet you had to kick out hundreds of people from that exhibition!) Johnny takes on a glove, holds Paul’s moon rock "souvenir" up in the air and slowly approaches the other moon rock that is sitting in the exhibit case. As he nears the case, a beam of light shoots out from the moon rock and strikes the rock in Johnny’s hand. This strange occurrence is explained in full by Johnny: "…some unusual element in this fragment that synchronizes with that larger mass over there…and it produces some kind of energy reaction!" As patently bogus as this explanation is, even if it were true, how the hell would an anthropologist know this?!

Back at the hospital, Paul has been informed of his plight. He has agreed to be strapped down while the moon rises in order to see if the "Indian legend" is true. He would first like to speak with Kathy before anything happens, because they’ve known each other for so many hours now… Johnny goes to phone her at the reservation (?). After Kathy arrives at the hospital, she goes into Paul’s room to talk to him. They kiss, and cry a little bit. Whatever.

As night falls, Kathy is told to leave the room, since, well, something scary might happen. Sure enough, Paul transforms into a man in a hideous rubber suit, while Johnny and Mac stare in horror through the barred door. Yes, Paul changes into the monster. I guess Mac won’t be making fun of Indian legends anymore.

The next morning, Paul is still strapped to the bed (shirtless and in boxer shorts! Oh yeah!) while Mac and Johnny doze in chairs beside him. Paul wakes up and realizes what has happened. Understandably upset, Mac tries to reassure Paul by saying "…they won’t convict you…they won’t even blame you!…once the people have all the facts." That’s reassuring. Johnny informs Paul that one of NASA’s top "lunar scientists" (?), Dr. Lawrence, and a leading brain surgeon, Dr. Rizzo (!), are on the way to the hospital to help Paul.

When Rizzo and Lawrence arrive at the hospital, Rizzo orders a new set of X-rays to be taken of Paul’s head. To his horror, they find out that the situation has taken a turn for the worse: "The particle in that young man’s brain has disintegrated, and energy factors are spreading through his entire system!" Hmmm. OK. Paul overhears the prognosis: The energy will be released all at once and he will be consumed by the flames. Or something. It sounds bad whatever it is.

Paul takes Kathy aside and tells her that if he is going to die he wants to "…look like a man." He plans on fleeing from the hospital and, well, kill himself, or something. At least go someplace where he can think things through. This scene is enacted by some of the cheesiest, wooden dialog between Paul and Kathy that you can ever imagine: "Oh, why couldn’t we have more time!?", "Do it…because we love each other…", blah blah blah, and so on. Good lord!

Paul steals a doctor’s coat and stethoscope (!), walks out the front door, and hides by the hospital’s emergency entrance. Wouldn’t you know it, a man drives up on a motorcycle, parks it, and of course leaves it running! Paul steals the motorcycle and hits the road.

We next see Paul at the local "Coins – N – Guns’ store (!!!) While Paul is inside the store, a bulletin comes on the radio telling people to be on the look out for him and gives Paul’s description. Paul hears the announcement and runs from the store before he can buy the gun.

Back at Mac’s spartan Chief of Police’s office, he and Johnny are once again going over the situation. The come to the conclusion that Johnny might be trying to kill himself (Well…duh!). Then Kathy starts to remember what Paul said to her about Sandia Crest, about how it was his favorite place to go to relax and all that. While she is remembering all this, she gets a totally bizarre look on her face. I really don’t know what the hell the director told her to do, it looks like somebody suffering from constipation sitting through an electroshock session.

Kathy opts not to tell Mac and Johnny about Sandia Crest, and decides to go up there alone. She lies to Mac and Johnny, saying that she’d feel better if she could go back to the reservation (?) and surreptitiously excuses herself.

Meanwhile Paul is still driving along a dirt road someplace and for some reason suddenly crashes the motorcycle (on a perfectly straight road no less). Then in a totally manipulative scene, he looks up and sees a cable car going up the side of a steep mountain. We see that Paul is inside the cable car, then he opens the door and jumps out, plunging to his death on the rocky mountainside below.

No wait! He was just imagining it! Wow! Auteur! Auteur!

With the motorcycle destroyed in that most unusual of crashes, Paul has no choice but to start trudging up the mountainside on foot. After a while (how long? Who knows…) the police find the bike and report it to Mac. Johnny has a light-bulb moment and realizes that the road where the motorcycle was found leads to Sandia Crest!

However, Paul is not faring so well. We see him stumble and fall down a rocky slope, apparently unconscious. At that moment Kathy drives up and parks along side of the road. She gets out of the car, takes out a pair of binoculars, and scans the hillside (and yes, the shot is filmed through that ridiculous ‘binocular lens’ shaped opening).

She sees Paul laying motionless on the ground and drives off to help him. Somehow she reaches him and helps him to his feet. He pushes her away, saying that it will be night soon, and scrambles up the hill alone.

If all this seems like its jumping around a lot, well, it is. I don’t think the editor of this film had heard of a "fade" or a "segue".

Wow! Now it’s suddenly night time and we see Kathy laying on the ground calling out for help. It appears she has gotten her foot stuck (!?). When did this happen? What’s going on here? Anyway, Paul goes back down the hill to help her, but the full moon sets in motion the transformation!

Two policemen parked on the road hear the monster’s roars and start firing blindly into the dark, while Kathy screams and screams. Hmmmm. Well, these two numbnuts won’t have to worry about filing any paper work because suddenly the monster appears behind them, bonks their heads together like something out of a Three Stooges episode, and they die (I guess).

As Mac, Johnny, Rizzo, and Lawrence (whew!) arrive at the scene, they see the dead policemen but the monster has already gotten away. For some reason Johnny turns on the patrol car’s spotlight, shines it on the hill, and immediately spots Kathy, still with her foot stuck (yeah, right!). Have I mentioned how utterly ridiculous this movie is?

After going up the hill and helping Kathy down, Johnny runs back to his car and gets out his bow, and not just any arrows, but special arrows that he has made: arrows with moon-rock arrow heads! (Just kill me now, I can’t take much more of this.) When Kathy sees that they intend to kill Paul, she screams, pleading with them not to do it, then gets in her car and drives off. (?)

Kathy pulls off on some random dirt road and what do you know…there’s the monster. Finally we get to see the monster in all of its, er, horror:

The horror!

At that moment Johnny runs up with his bow and moon-rock arrows. (Man! He runs fast! How the hell did he catch up with Kathy?) He shoots an arrow into the monster’s chest which sets off an amazingly goofy special effects show as the, um, moon-rock energy dissipates all at once. Or something. Who cares.

Eventually the monster is reduced to a glowing spot on the ground. Ashes blow away in the wind. Majestic Native American music plays. Everybody piles back into their cars and drives away while Johnny holds Kathy in his arms and stares thoughtfully into the darkness.

The end.

Dennis Grisbeck (March 2005)

Read more about Track of the Moon Beast at

Directed by Irwin Allen

Based on the novel by Arthur Herzog Jr., Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant

Tagline: “It’s more than a speculation – it’s a prediction!”

Run Time: 156 minute Director’s Cut (Yeah, baby! 2 and a half hours of cheese!)

“I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees…They’ve always been our friends.”
- Dr. Bradford Crane

After a person sees enough bad movies, it’s easier to categorize each movie based on its particular "pedigree": From contemptible, insulting tripe such as Hobgoblins, to incomprehensible quagmires like Manos: The Hands of Fate, and Monster A-Go Go, to bizarre 60′s monster-musicals such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? and The Horror of Party Beach. Another popular genre is the cheap "homage" (i.e., rip-off), of which the Italians seem particularly skilled at producing. For example, the "Superman" rip-off The Pumaman and the Conan "homage" of the ‘Ator’ series: Ator: the Fighting Eagle, Ator: the Blade Master, Ator: The Invincible (aka: Cave Dwellers), ad nauseam…

One of my favorite "flavors" of bad movies is the Hollywood Superstar Debacle…when egos (and budgets) run wild and unchecked by the reason of cooler minds. The result of a virtually unlimited budget, an Oscar-heavy cast, and a deplorable script is inevitably a morass of confused plot lines, absurd dialog, ham-fisted acting, strained credibility, and humiliated actors.

Exhibit A: The Swarm.

Our current feature is a lovely example of just such a travesty…and brother, is this film packed with embarrassed heavy-weight stardom. The film’s cast reads like an Academy Award alumni meeting: (A ‘*’ indicates an Oscar win, a ‘+’ indicates an Oscar nomination.)

Needless to say, the aforementioned actors and actresses went on to win many more awards after "The Swarm", which must add to their eagerness to forget that they ever appeared in this fiasco. (Well, maybe not Michael Caine, who seems to appear in whatever script that shows up in his mailbox that week. God bless ya, buddy!) On an odd, almost enigmatic note, "The Swarm" was nominated for Best Costume Design (!) in the 1979 Academy Awards. (It lost out to Death on the Nile.)

Although "The Swarm" was not Irwin Allen’s first directorial effort, it was undoubtedly the largest and most audacious film he had helmed up to then. Irwin "The Master of Disaster" Allen is better known as the producer behind the 70′s ‘disaster’ blockbusters The Poseidon Adventure (1971), and The Towering Inferno (1974) (He also produced a couple of 1976 TV ‘disaster’ movies Fire! and Flood!). I can only assume that Allen leveraged his success as a producer to wrangle such a heavy-weight cast for this ego-driven flop. (Irwin Allen didn’t seem to learn his lesson from this ponderous production…he went on to produce and direct Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979) (starring…surprise!…Michael Caine), and was also the man behind a few made-for-TV disaster flicks, The Night the Bridge Fell Down and Cave-In!, both from 1983.)

Small World Alert: In an interesting note, it was "The Swarm" screen writer Stirling Silliphant that happened to be scouting for locations in El Paso one fine day in the 1960′s when he met aspiring actor/director/producer Hal Warren. After chatting for a bit, Hal bet Stirling that he could make just as good a film as any big Hollywood production but on a much smaller budget. The result? Hal Warren’s legendary Manos: The Hands of Fate, arguably the worst film ever made. How delicate we dangle from the threads of fate, eh?

I’m proud to say I wrote this review based on the 156 minute Director’s Cut DVD. Say that slowly: One-Hundred-And-Fifty-Six-Minutes…! Unfortunately, most of the restored footage is scenes of tedious dialog that were wisely edited out of the theatrical release.

The DVD also has a 30 minute documentary on the making of "The Swarm". It is refreshingly hilarious (and believe me, anything seems refreshing after watching nearly 3-hours of "The Swarm"), and contains several interviews with the stars of the film, all of whom can’t brag enough about what an honor it was to work with such a talented director as Irwin Allen. Even funnier then the glassy-eyed cast’s flattery of Irwin Allen is the way most of them, in all earnestness mind you, attempt to warn the viewer of the all-too-real threat of killer bees invading our country and killing everybody. (We all remember The Great Bee Invasion of 1980 where 59 million people were stung to death and half of the United States was rendered inhabitable? You don’t? Oh, that’s right, it never happened.)

I vaguely remembering seeing this movie at the theater, and I also remember there being a bit of hysteria in the media about swarms of killer bees approaching from the "South". Oh well, maybe it was all empty hype orchestrated by Hollywood to help increase box-office returns for the movie. Anyway, if you ever see the DVD, make sure to check out the documentary…it’s a riot.

I know I’m not giving away too much by saying that the story revolves around a swarm of killer bees, a stuffy military guy, General Thalius Slater (Richard Widmark), that wants to blast the bees to kingdom come, and a renowned entomologist, Dr. Bradford Crane (Michael Caine), who tries to neutralize the threat without harming the environment. The General and the Scientist butt heads at every opportunity, resulting in unforgettable, and unbelievable, heated arguments at every turn. While Slater and Crane argue, and argue, and argue, the bees destroy a town, a nuclear power plant, and also derail a train for good measure. The killer insects finally settle into downtown Houston, when the military finally steps in and sends in a team of men with flame-throwers to burn down the entire city (!!!). When Houston’s immolation fails to wipe out the bees (Duh!), Crane devises a method to lure the bees into the Gulf of Mexico where a convenient oil slick has been spread onto the water’s surface. The bees land on the water, the oil slick is ignited, and bye-bye bees. (Yeah, now that was environmentally friendly!)

On a side note, I really wonder how much of the film’s $21,000,000 dollar budget went to special effects. It couldn’t have been too much since the bee attacks are often created by off-camera stage hands dumping bags of yellow and brown pellets into fans and blowing the resulting "swarm" onto the actors. Interestingly, Irwin Allen hired unemployed people (and I imagine paid them next to nothing) to clip the stingers off thousands of live bees for use in scenes requiring living insects. (It’s also been said that after filming scenes with live bees, Michael Caine thought the multitude of yellow spots on his clothes were honey from the bees and ate them…until somebody finally told him the yellow spots were actually bee shit.)

All in all, "The Swarm" is a gigantic, expensive, bloated mess, and well, I guess I have 156 minutes of to get through so I better get started.

	Dr. Bradford Crane (Michael Caine) The nation’s foremost entomologist…You know the kind. His concern for the environment takes priority over all else: including the plot’s credibility. His devotion to the environment is enough to drive General Slater (and the viewer) up the wall.
	General Thalius Slater (Richard Widmark) Crane’s military foil. General Slater is hamstrung by Crane’s idiotic plans throughout most of the film. Only when it’s too late is Slater given control…by then the bees have invaded Houston. So what’s the first thing he does? He orders the city to be burned to the ground…with hand-held flame throwers.
	Capt. Helena Anderson (Katharine Ross) Good old Captain Helena Anderson, an Air Force medical officer and all around great gal. Due to the script, Helena is quickly reduced to Crane’s girlfriend and not much else. After getting stung by a killer bee, she has an Amazing Recovery© and lives to the end of the film to ensure that Crane has somebody to hug in the closing scenes.
	Paul Durant (Christian Juttner) Paul’s family is killed by bees in a tragic picnicking accident. (Dontcha hate when that happens?) Paul, pretty irritated that the bees killed his parents, tries to exact revenge by attacking the hive with homemade molotov cocktails. Naturally, the bees get pissed off and wipe out his home town. Smart move, Einstein.
	Dr. Hubbard (Richard Chamberlain) Another character whose sole purpose in the film is to argue with Crane at every turn. Unfortunately for Hubbard, the token ‘Environmental Warrior’, he just happens to be visiting a nuclear power plant when the bees cause it to explode. Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
	Dr. Walter Krim (Henry Fonda) The nation’s leading immunologist, Krim bumbles around struggling to find an antidote. He never really produces anything helpful, and as time runs short, he experiments on himself with his antidote. Guess what happens.

We open with a grandiose wide shot of what looks like an abandoned missile silo…Hmmm, I wonder where all the soldiers could be? I hope nothing bad has happened. An armored personnel carrier cautiously makes its it way up the mysteriously deserted access road and through the unguarded main gates. The Air Force APC comes to a stop and out of the vehicle’s rear hatch, like clowns hopping out of a Volkswagen Bug at a Shriner’s circus, a squad of highly trained extras, sorry, Air Force soldiers, emerge with weapons at the ready. As I sit and watch all this, I can’t help but wonder why some soldiers are wearing orange jump suits while others wear white, but then again, Top Secret Air Force procedures are certainly too advanced for a mere civilian like myself to understand.

I’m also confused as to why some of the soldiers carry M-16′s, while others carry revolvers (!). Furthermore, others are armed with flame throwers. (The Air Force uses flame throwers?).

In an early funny bit, the soldiers in white are completely sealed into their bio-hazard suits, while the orange-clad soldiers wear flight helmets (!) that are completely open around the neck…so why the hell are they wearing oxygen tanks? And since we’re at it, why the hell are they wearing flight helmets?

Anyway, as the soldiers make their way across the silo grounds, they discover a civilian van parked outside the silo entrance. Hmmm, I wonder whose van that is? The tension is killing me. No. Really. It is.

After gaining entrance into the missile silo itself, the colorfully-garbed soldiers make their way through the eerily silent corridors and finally reach an elevator. Piling into the elevator all at once, and violating every rule in the book regarding "bunching up during combat", the soldiers descend into the bowels of the missile silo; namely sub-level 18: the Communication Center.

Combat Rule #1: Never bunch up…elevators excluded.

Upon reaching the appropriate floor, the doors open and…And…AND….!!!!

We are treated to more Walking Down Dark Hallway excitement.

Alas we reach some sort of control room. How do I know it’s a control room? Because of the floor-to-ceiling computer panels. Gazillions of blinking lights, and a "ticka-ticka-ticka" sound add to the sense of awe in the face of such advanced technology. You may want to avert your eyes as the camera pans across the room revealing several dead bodies sprawled on the floor and slumped over desks. The attack on the control room was obviously so swift and unexpected, that a pair of soldiers didn’t even have time to fall down when they died since we can plainly see a couple of bodies standing and leaning against the far wall. (???)

I said stand at attention soldier! I don’t care if you’re dead!

After looking around a bit, the search party remove their helmets as the team leader, Major Baker, radios in to "Top Kick"…aka General Slater.

OK, obviously the filmmakers wanted to keep the identity of the "killers" a secret for a little while longer, but let’s be realistic: The film’s title is "The Swarm", so everybody better know just what happened here. If you are still puzzled then please contact your local mental health clinic.

Furthermore, given the fact that they were killed by bees, a few questions should immediately pop into your mind:

1) Where are all the dead bodies above ground? I assume that the guard shacks and watch towers were manned by, you know, guards. So where are their bodies?

2) How did the bees get into the silo itself and descend 18 floors en masse?

3) Now for the biggest plot hole that is ignored throughout the entire film: Nature designed the bee to leave behind its stinger after it stings something thus allowing the maximum amount of venom to be pumped into the victim. Unfortunately for the bee, a sting is a one time deal since the loss of the stinger results in the bees death. So obviously there should be about a bazillion little bee corpses strewn about the missile silo…so where the hell are they?

I do have a theory that could explain how all the silo was taken out: A swarm of killer bees, disguised as flower delivery men, attacked the base above ground and killed every guard before anybody could radio in what was happening. The bees shed their delivery uniforms and donned the dead soldiers’ uniforms instead (after carrying away the bodies and stashing them out of sight in the motor pool). Once dressed in the stolen uniforms, the incognito swarm of bees tricked the guards inside into opening the massive steel doors that lead into the silo. After overcoming these guards, the bees pushed the ‘Down’ button on the elevator, got into the elevator car, and killed everybody floor by floor. Once again, the bees’ disguise was so amazingly convincing, that not a single soldier had any chance to summon help before being stung to death. (Furthermore, nobody, and I mean nobody, managed to step on, slap, or otherwise squish a single bee, which would leave behind a bee corpse to be found later.) After killing everybody in the missile silo, the bees gathered their fallen comrades (if any), pressed the ‘Up’ button on the elevator, and ascended the 18 floors back up to the surface.

Yep, that would explain it.

Anyway, General Slater and his soldiers arrive and secure the base. Back down in the Control Room the soldiers are busy baggin’-and-taggin’ the bodies. (Bodies which, if I may point out, don’t show a single welt or red mark despite being stung to death by killer bees.) Without warning, Dr. Bradford Crane (Michael Caine) calmly walks into the control room from an adjoining chamber. (Nice job of securing the base, you idiots.) Shocked by the sudden appearance of a civilian dressed in leisure suit, Major Baker raises his gun and quickly asks the stranger just how the hell he got into the silo.

"It’s a complicated story…it starts a year ago. But let’s skip that," Crane replies.

Yeah, the script would pretty much have to skip that explanation because there’s no way in hell a passing civilian could have gotten inside! What a story! Hooo-wah!

Baker tacitly agrees to "skip" the explanation (the film never brings it up either) and orders Dr. Crane to be patted down, revealing, wait for it…a bag of sunflower seeds. Get it? Good because I don’t. I guess it’s all part of the wonderful character development process that is so vital in a movie about killer bees.

At that moment, Slater walks in, sees Crane and growls, "What the hell is he doing here?"

A fair question to be sure. Alas, before Crane can explain himself (or use his "let’s just skip it" explanation), a radar operator runs in and breathlessly reports an "unidentified force" about 30 miles outside the base. Slater orders Crane to be "checked out" (uh yeah, a civilian is found in a missile silo full of dead soldiers, good idea, General) as he rushes off to take a peek at the radar screen in the next room.

Slater’s curiosity is piqued when the radar operator reports that the "object" is moving at 7 mph. (Oh my God! Something moving at 7 mph! Alert! Alert!) Slater quickly dispatches a pair of helicopters to check it out this slothful threat.

After a short time one of the helicopters radios in, "A black mass…a moving black mass."

For some reason, instead of say, flying away from the bees, the helicopter flies into the swarm. Now everybody knows that a helicopter will immediately go haywire and crash into the ground when encountering insects, which is exactly what this one does.

"Oh my God…we’re losing control!" the pilot screams as the camera is rotated in an effort to convince the viewer that the helicopter is spiraling out of control. This clever special effects effort is somewhat wasted when you catch a glimpse of the horizon and a couple of telephone poles at the bottom of the windshield as the helicopter <cough> ‘plummets’ to the ground.

This helicopter is spinning high in the air…not sitting on the ground…nosirree.

As one helicopter crashes and burns, the other is having problems of its own. "Oh my God! Bees! Bees! Millions of bees!" says the pilot with about as much enthusiasm as somebody making a root canal appointment. Once again, this helicopter also "loses power" (?), spins (with the ground easily viewable at the bottom of the windshield), and crashes into the ground.

After losing contact with the helicopters, Slater scrambles a squadron of jet fighters to track the swarm. (Jets? The bees move at seven miles per hour. I repeat: Seven. Couldn’t they just use a couple of kids on bicycles to pedal along and track them?) At long last, Slater orders the mysterious civilian to be brought before him for questioning.

Baker informs Slater that the prisoner’s name is Bradford Crane.
"Ph.D. Institute of Advanced Study. Princeton via Cambridge," Crane adds. (Ahhh…THE Institute of Advanced Study. Well why didn’t you say so?)

"English?" Slater asks upon hearing Crane’s dialect.

"American…for the last eight years."

(Yes, I’m glad we cleared up THAT plot hole. Whew! I was going nuts wondering how Crane got that accent. Don’t worry about explaining how a swarm of bees rode in an elevator or anything…)

Now comes the first of many inexplicable shouting matches between Crane and Slater. As we all know, it’s a tried-and-true gimmick to have Military and Science butt heads in order to create conflict. When handled correctly, it usually works, because hey, the Military is Evvviiilll, right? Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work in this film which is too bad because it’s such a central part of the story (as such). Crane and Slater fight over everything, lashing out at each other at every opportunity. To be frank, it’s unconvincing and quickly becomes tedious.

Anyway, Crane recounts how he saw the swarms of bees earlier that day, followed them, and then entered the open gates at the silo to see if the bees "had flown down here". (Still, not to beat a dead horse, but who opened the gates? The bees? Even if Crane could have driven onto the grounds, how did he get access into the silo itself? Oh yeah, the bees left a key under the matt.)

"Just who are you?" Slater demands to know.

"I’m an entomologist."

"Bugs?"

"Insects, General!" Crane snaps with a trace of indignation in his voice.

For some reason Crane explodes into fury and begins shouting at Slater that Something Must Be Done to stop the bees.

Slater listens to Crane’s tirade before shouting back, "Thousands of people are stung by bees every year…and it’s damn rare if anybody dies from bee stings!". (There’s a lot of shouting between these 2 knuckle-heads. And yes, it’s not just rare, it’s "damn rare!")

"Then they have to be African bees, don’t they?" Crane asks.

"You mean the African killer bees?" Slater asks. (Remember that back when this movie came out the so called African "killer" bee was pretty big news, at least in the tabloids and schlocky sci-fi books that nerds like me read.)

Slater just can’t buy the fact that bees are responsible for the murder of the silo’s entire garrison. Hell, Slater said he’s even "read the reports" (The reports?) and it will be at least 10 years before the killer bees reach the US.

"By whose time table…yours… or theirs?" Crane cynically remarks. (Uh, bees have a timetable? Somebody throw this idiot into the brig and call the police, will ya?)

Fed up with Crane’s nonsense, Slater tells him that either he’s a "crackpot" (agreed), or else he’s somehow involved with all the deaths. Not to be outdone, Crane demands that Slater "kick on your video-com system" and contact Dr. Connors at the White House. (The White House’s emergency entomological response team?)

"Arthur Connors, the President’s adviser?" Slater says with disbelief. Slater doesn’t buy it. Why not? Because these 2 guys have to argue no matter what, and it’s already getting annoying…and there’s a lot more arguing to come. Whatever. Slater refuses to call the White House which drives Crane into a frenzy because he was hoping to have Connors verify his identify.

"Dr. Connors hasn’t the foggiest idea whether I’m on, off, on top of, or under this complex! But I have to speak with him and I mean right now!!!" Crane shouts, spittle flying in every direction.

"Lock him up!" Slater orders, doing something that should have been done a long time ago if you ask me.

Just as Crane is being led away to the brig (Finally!), in walks Captain Helena Anderson, the designated Love Interest, Crane’s future squeeze, and oh, she’s the silo’s physician as well. It turns out that Helena is one of a handful of survivors of the initial bee attack along with a few bee-stung soldiers that aren’t doing so hot.

"I need anti-toxins," Helena implores General Slater.

Crane steps up with a suave look on his face and casually mentions, "I have cardio-pep compound in my van…" (Valentino could learn so much from this guy…)

"Cardio-pep?" Helena says, "I just read an article in the Medical Journal about cardio-pep…by some scientist named ‘Crane’…"

The Medical Journal…and wait a minute. The author’s name was Crane…and his name is Crane too…could they be one and the same?!

Blah blah. Another argument breaks out between Crane and Slater. This time it’s because Slater refuses to allow Helena to use Crane’s "experimental substance" on the injured soldiers. (Yeah, I guess it’s better if they die.) Helena insists that she has to contact an immunologist, since none of the "usual procedures" are working.

Crane, the Source of All Knowledge, interjects: "The best immunologist in the country is Doctor Walter Krim…you’ll find his card in my wallet." (Uh, he carries around the country’s best immunologist’s business card in his wallet?) As Crane is led away to contact Krim, Helena tells her story of how she survived the bees by crawling through "air-conditioning ducts to get over to pod three".

"It’s damn hard to believe that insects have accomplished what nothing in the world could have done," Slater says, "except germ warfare or a neutron bomb: neutralize an ICBM site."

Not to be picky (Me? Picky? Never!), a neutron bomb is specifically designed to kill with massive doses of radiation, not blast damage. In other words, if you were to drop a neutron bomb on top of a hardened ICBM silo in the middle of the desert you’d get a medium sized crater and a bunch of glow-in-the-dark lizards. (I don’t even want to get into the ‘germ warfare’ bit because it’s too imbecilic.)

Cut to a family having a picnic out in a field somewhere. The camera pans across a swarming bee hive as light-hearted comic relief music (tooting oboes and twittering flutes) plays on the soundtrack. I’m not sure if the music was chosen in order to make the upcoming bee attack more of a surprise, or whether somebody thought that being stung to death was ‘fun’. Either way, it’s annoying, as is most everything in this movie.

Yes, the camera zooms in to a bee sitting placidly on a leaf minding its own business. The bee "watches" the family from its leafy perch as they set out their food and begin to eat lunch. (As an extra treat, we get to see the family via Bee-Cam! Far out!) The scene’s accompanying comical music turns ominous indicating all is not well for our Sunday picnickers. Mom sends Paul back to the car in order to fetch the thermos (and so he won’t die…well…not yet at least. Oops! Sorry!) As Paul returns from the car, Mom notices a bunch of bees flying around the table. Her solution: whip out a can of bug spray and shoot a gigantic cloud of insecticide over all of the food. (Yummy!)

OK, let’s see here. Paul takes a couple of steps from the car and notices a MASSIVE swarm of pellets, sorry, bees streaming out of an old hollow tree. (To say that this dense cloud of brown plastic pellets being blown out of a hollow tree by an off-camera fan looks anything at all like a swarm of bees would be a bit of a stretch.) Anyway, Mom and Dad (played by God-knows-who…but at least they allowed themselves to be covered by thousands of real bees) get swarmed and quickly stung to death as a Paul, helpless and horrified, watches from inside the car.

Fortunately for Paul, the car keys are in the ash tray (the first place anybody would put the keys when getting out of a car, right?) and he fires up the family’s ride. A quick flip of the windshield washers to clear the bees away (resulting in several bees getting ‘smeared’ across the windshield…yech), and Paul hauls ass out of there.

Well after that charming scene we return to the missile silo, where not a hell of a lot seems to have happened while we were away. Ahhh, yes. Down comes a gigantic video screen and one General Thompson comes into view.

Thompson shouts (of course) at Slater that the thought of a modern ICBM missile silo being taken out by an attack of "natural origin" (as stated in Slater’s report) is absurd. As Slater tries to explain the nature of his report, Thompson espies Crane standing at Slater’s side. When Thompson begins to object to an "un-cleared" civilian being privy to their conversation (Once again, agreed. Wouldn’t Crane’s ass be in a jail cell by now?)

Crane butts into the conversation, "I’m Dr. Brad Crane, an entomologist," he says, "…We have been invaded by an enemy far more lethal than any human force."

So a swarm of bees is more lethal than, oh, just off the top of my head, an atom bomb? A hydrogen bomb? McDonald’s food? Once again, to my astonishment, instead of ordering Crane to the brig, or at least restricting him to the silo’s video arcade, General Thompson growls that he’s going to personally verify Crane’s identity with Dr. Connors.

Cut to Marysville, a small generic town somewhere in Texas. Wouldn’t you know it: that week is the town’s annual Flower Festival. But wait a minute! Bees like flowers! This could be trouble! (Boy, they really hit you over the head with the irony in this movie don’t they. If you’re looking for subtlety, don’t watch ‘The Swarm’) Actually, the Flower Festival is a bit of a red herring since it’s Paul’s upcoming asinine attack on the hive that infuriates the bees and causes them to attack Marysville.

Wow, how ironic, eh? Who would’ve imagined…

We now get into one of the more horrid aspects of this film. The Geriatric Love Triangle between the town’s school superintendent, Maureen, the elderly Mayor Tuttle, and the town’s handy-man, Felix.

Not that watching a pair of amorous men in their 60′s fighting for the romantic attentions of an equally elderly woman is bad enough, but they all freakin’ die in a trash crash. So, you know, I’m sorry to ‘spoil’ that for you, but I have to shout: "What’s the f*@¤%***ing point of spending time, nay, a lot of time, with these characters to just kill them off?

Yes, who will finally end up charming the pants off Maureen? Felix or Mayor Clarence Tuttle? Blech!

Will Maureen choose Felix?

Will Maureen choose Mayor Tuttle?

It doesn’t matter! They all die in a train crash! Woo-hoo!

If you really must know, Mayor Tuttle has had the hots for Maureen for a long time now. As luck would have it, Felix moved to Marysville, retired, and set his sights on Maureen as well. In other words: blah blah blah.

A battle of wits ensues between our love-struck retirees just as Paul (the kid whose parents were just whacked by the bees at the picnic) comes careening through the town in his parent’s car. The car swerves madly from side to side and eventually crashes into a lamp post.

Returning to the missile silo, General Thompson informs Crane over the video screen that his credentials have checked out. (Crane can’t resist the opportunity to shoot Slater a smug I-Told-You-So look. I’m surprised he didn’t stick his tongue out at him.) Thompson also reports that the President has placed Crane in command of all operations. (Say what??!!)

"What are the limits to my authority?" Crane asks.

"None," a flabbergasted Thompson sighs.

Much to Slater’s chagrin, he’s ordered to give Crane his full cooperation for the duration of the crisis.

Let me get this straight: The President is giving full control over the armed forces to a civilian entomologist? Just let that sink in so that you can truly appreciate the depths of absurdity that this movie has attained in the first 24 minutes of run time. (Only 132 more minutes to go! I can do this!)

The President said what?! Baker and Slater react to the news that Crane has been put in charge.

Anyway, the first order of business is for Slater to summon the people listed in one of Crane’s files. Yes, Crane keeps a list of key personnel to contact in case of a killer bee attack. The second task: Return Crane’s pouch of sunflower seeds. (Hoo! Hoo! Such charming whimsy!)

"The file contains the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of everyone I want flown in," says Crane before taking a dramatic pause, "Just tell them…the war that I’ve always talked about has finally started." (!)

As Crane makes his way to the infirmary to speak with the survivors of the initial attack, Slater pulls aside his XO, Major Baker, and tells him to keep an eye on Crane because he can’t believe that Crane "just happened" to be at the silo just when the bees were attacking. Not only that, Slater also points out that Crane also "just happened" to have a list of personnel and equipment to be flown in. (To be fair, Slater has brought up several reasonable points during the film; all of which the script dutifully ignores.) To facilitate Baker’s ‘spying’ on Crane, Slater assigns him to be Crane’s ‘military liaison’ so that he can spend the maximum amount of time with him. (Oh joy, what fun that would be.)

Just as Crane gets to the infirmary, Dr. Helena receives a terrifying telephone call: the bees have killed the Durant family…"All except Paul", she says with relief. Without any hesitation, Helena tosses off her lab coat and drives off to Marysville with Dr. Crane in tow. (Umm, Helena, don’t you have duties to attend to? You know, like your patients?)

In case you’re wondering what Helena’s relationship is to Paul…well, I’m wondering too.

Now for one of the film’s more notorious moments…the infamous "There Is No Bee" scene.

At the hospital, Paul writhes in pain (he apparently received a few stings himself) as Crane and Helena enter his room. Paul, critically ill from the stings, begins to hallucinate and screams that there is a giant bee in the room. Crane calmly tells the attending physician to back away, as he softly says, "Paul…there is no bee. There is no bee." As the giant process-shot bee fades away, Paul calms down and collapses from exhaustion. (Dr. Bradford Crane: Entomologist and Psychologist! Boy, I guess he really did go in for some Advanced Study.)

One thing that is ridiculous about this scene, besides seeing Michael Caine repeat "There is no bee. There is no bee" as a giant bee licks his shoulder, is how Crane tells Paul to reach out and ‘touch’ the bee so he can see for himself that it’s just an illusion. Crane tells the delusional youth to reach out "further, further…" and just as the boy’s fingers touch the bee, Crane says,"There, you see Paul…no bee." But wait a minute…it was Paul’s hallucination! How could Crane possibly know how far Paul had to reach to ‘touch’ the bee, and how did Crane know the exact moment when the bee disappeared? Stupid movie.

"Paul…there is no bee."

With his work done for now, Super Crane, the Man Who Can Do Everything, stands up and simply states, "I’ve got to go." (?) Before he leaves, Helena takes Crane aside, peers into his eyes and gives her heart-felt thanks for helping Paul, a child that she obviously has feelings for…but for no clear reason. (Thanks, Mr. Screenwriter.)

Note From the Future: Later in the film Helena explains via a throw-away line that Paul was her first patient back when she was the town’s doctor (!). I’m pretty sure that this scene was cut from the film’s final release; thus anybody seeing the movie in the theater would never find out why she was so fond of Paul!

Soft, sappy, piano chords drip from the audio track just in case you don’t "get" that they are falling for each other.

Anyway, after taking care of business at the hospital, Crane and Baker drive to the site of the picnic attack. Meeting them there is General Slater (why is he there?), and a host of other military and police folk. (In the background of the shot you can glimpse a couple of soldiers still walking around in full bio-hazard suits and armed with flame-throwers. Boy, I guess they got their money’s worth out of those costumes…) As Slater and the others look on, Crane bends over and begins poking around the grass. "I’m looking for bees…unfortunately they washed the Durant car before I could get to it."

So, uh, the kid crashes into the lamppost and somebody shouts, "Quick! Get that kid to the hospital!…and wash his car!" You know, this is one of the things that really starts to annoy me after awhile: All these damn bogus plot devices and throw-away lines used to push the ‘mystery’ along. So we’re supposed to believe that they haven’t found a single dead bee yet? And they couldn’t get one from the Durant’s car because somebody washed it?! Ayeeeee!

Instead of bees, Crane discovers tiny bits of plastic scattered over the area and quickly points them out to Slater.

"What’s so significant about that?" Slater asks.

"I’m afraid to speculate…but I think the bees did this." (Didn’t you just say you were afraid to speculate?)

To make a long story short, Crane tries to convince Slater (i.e., the viewer) that the bees have been in America for a long time "spreading…increasing." (Whatever the hell he means by that.) Furthermore, the killer bees may be lining their hives with chewed up bits of plastic. Why this fact is so portentous is beyond me, but the film-makers thought it worthy of its own blast of ominous music on the sound track. Ooooooo! Bees that can chew plastic! Are you scared yet? Really though, I have no idea why this was brought up, and the film never touches on it again.

Back at the silo now, we see that Dr. Krim (Henry Fonda), the country’s leading immunologist has arrived. We quickly realize that he and Crane are good buddies as Crane offers Krim a portion of his sunflower seeds. Slater steps forward to introduce himself and Krim gruffly says that time is short. Slater agrees and suggests that the best course of action is a "quick knock out." (In an insipid cut-away shot, Crane and Krim exchange a knowing look as if to say "Military guys…can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em…")

Crane reaches into the helicopter, lifts Krim out, and plops him down into his squeaking wheelchair. I don’t know why, but I had to chuckle when I saw Michael Caine carrying a sun-flower seed chewing Henry Fonda. Now there is something you don’t see everyday. (By the way, Krim’s squeaky wheelchair is the source of several groan-inducing characterization lines.) After a tour of the infirmary ("They don’t look too good, do they?" Krim says in a display of compassion and bedside manner), Crane, Krim, and a couple other doctors head over to the make-shift mortuary to examine the bodies.

Outside at the silo’s main gates, the County Engineer, Judd Hawkins (Slim Pickens! Was no star safe from Irwin Allen’s charms?) is trying to gain entry to the silo. When the gate guard refuses to let him in, Judd demands to see General Slater or else he’s going to shut off the silo’s water supply. (!) (To be honest, sometimes I feel like I’m in Alice’s Wonderland. I mean, I’m watching a movie where the County Engineer is threatening to shut off the water to an ICBM missile installation. I mean, wtf?!)

Yes, you heard correctly, an ICBM silo with a water supply directly connected to the local water main. Oh, and let’s just play along and forget that it’s probably illegal to threaten a military installation in such a manner. The whole point to this scene is that Judd wants to see his son who was stationed at the silo. (Gee…I wonder if his kid was killed by the bees. Wouldn’t that just be…<yawn>…terrible?)

Anyway, Slater comes to the gate and the guard tells him of Judd’s threat to the silo’s utilities.

"I don’t think you have the authority to do that," Slater says. (Gee General, do you really think Judd might be overstepping his authority?)

"Well, while your a-checking…I’ll be a-throwing them valves!" Judd shouts, making it perfectly clear that he a-means business.

Faced with the possibility of not being able to flush the silo’s toilets for 10 minutes (the time needed to call the police, arrest Judd, and restore the water), Slater relents and lets Judd into the silo to see if his son is among the dead.

Yea verily, I have walked to the edge and peered into the Abyss of Stupidity…and it’s name was The Swarm.

Meanwhile, Krim has been analyzing the venom from the dead soldiers’ bodies.

"It’s more virulent than the Australian brown-box jellyfish," Krim says.

Crane turns and says with a sigh, "Well, I guess that’s it then."

"Yup," Krim replies, "It looks like your nightmare has finally arrived." (The Brown-Box Jellyfish nightmare? Oh, he means the bees. Never mind.)

Crane continues, "We’ve been fighting a losing battle against the insects for 15 years [?], but I never thought I’d see the final face off in my lifetime." (Yes, the 15 Year Battle of the Insects that started in 1963.)

Crane takes a deep breath and with a completely straight face says, "I never dreamed it would turn out to be the bees…they’ve always been our friends."

In a way you have to admire an actor who would agree to stand in front of a camera and deliver a line like that. Kudos, Mr. Caine, kudos.

Anyway, in comes Judd and General Slater. As the Ominous Music fades into Heartstring-Tugging Music, Judd and Slater solemnly check the names on the body bags. Well, big surprise, one of the stiffs is Judd’s son. In a wild display of over acting, Judd, weeping, tries to walk out of the morgue with his bagged son slung over his shoulder.

"I’m afraid you can’t take him," Slater says as he gently puts his hand on Judd’s arm.

"The only way you can stop me….<sniff>…is to shoot me!…and I’d thank ya if ya would!"

General Slater casts a glance to Crane, who gives his silent consent to let Judd take his boy home. Weeping, sobbing, shaking, and gasping, Judd lugs his burden out of the morgue and out of the film. (I wish somebody could tell me how many Air Force regulations have been broken in this one scene alone.)

Now for the arrival of our next embarrassed star: Richard Chamberlain, who has been swindled into portraying Dr. Hubbard. It turns out that Hubbard was sent by the President "to help out" (?!). It quickly becomes apparent that Hubbard’s sole purpose in the film is to argue with Crane. (Oh, and get blown up…blown up real good.)

"I want you to know that I came here reluctantly," Hubbard immediately snarls to Crane. (Hoo-boy! This is going to be a fun movie!)

As Crane leads Hubbard and the others down to the meeting room, Slater and Baker watch them depart.

"He’s a rude son-of-a-bitch…didn’t even introduce us," General Slater complains, "You’d think he was a General." (Har. Dee. Har.)

After a small chuckle from the previous bon mot, Baker says that Crane wants to listen to the tapes taken just before the bee attack. Slater, with token resistance, sighs and tells Baker to give Crane access to the tapes, even though there’s "not a damn thing on them that will help us." (As pointed out before, whether Crane makes a reasonable request or not, Slater is bound to resist, argue, and complain.)

Cut to some sort of computer room (lots of blinking lights, and furiously spinning reel-to-reel tape drives). A tape is playing over a loudspeaker:

"So what are you going to do about Rita?" Disembodied Voice #1 asks.

"I’m gonna marry her!" Disembodied Voice #2 cheerfully responds,"Hey man, I love Rita…I’d marry her whether we were gonna have a kid or not." (I remember from my days in the military that if anybody were to say something like that he would promptly get his ass kicked.)

The next conversation on the tape reveals that a test of the backup alarm system was performed the same morning the bees attacked. (Plot Point!) Caine jots this interesting tidbit down on a scrap of paper before hurrying out to speak to the group of people that have gathered in a meeting room to hear his announcement.

Once everyone has been seated in the auditorium, Caine begins, "We have been attacked by a mutant strain of African killer bee."

Hubbard naturally disagrees: He’s seen no proof that the African killer bees have reached America. Admittedly, Hubbard has a point: Since nobody can find a single f"#¤"¤"ing bee anywhere, so how does Crane know that they are African? In response to Hubbard’s objections, Crane suggests that a hurricane may have "swept the bees in" over the Caribbean ocean via Venezuela. (Following all this? No? Good.)

Crane’s faithful ally, and fellow sunflower seed eater, Dr. Krim, backs up his theory by spewing off some nonsense about the toxicity of the venom found in the stings, and how the venom matches only the African bee. Hubbard’s still not convinced, so Crane turns on an overhead projector and shows some slides.

"You are now looking at the final test we made this morning of the one dead bee that we found," Crane says as he stands before the first slide. If you look at the slide you can easily see that the so-called picture is a drawing of a bee wing with honeycomb in the background! It’s from a freakin’ biology text book!(I increased the brightness on the screenshot so that you can plainly see that this is a hand-drawn illustration from a book…I mean, look, there’s a honeycomb in the background! Egads!)

Anyway, Crane points out a few features of the wing that are inherent only to the African killer bee and blah blah blah. Can we get on with it already? Crane places Hubbard in charge of the "Environmental Team"…whatever the hell that means and Krim, naturally, is put in charge of finding an antidote. Oh, and also in attendance is Mayor Tuttle of Marysville who glibly says that he’ll fix the air raid siren so the residents of Marysville can be warned if the swarm approaches. (Good idea, genius.)

You know, why don’t they just evacuate the damn town. Oh, and Mayor Tuttle: Cancel the freakin’ Flower Festival…you idiot!!!

Back at the hospital, Paul has surreptitiously contacted a couple of his friends who are now waiting for him outside on their bikes. Paul, still feverish from the venom, sneaks out of the hospital, hops on his bike, and the brave trio madly pedal off to deal with the bees mano a mano. (mano a wingo?)

As the boys ride off to meet their fate, we see the ever-amorous Felix walking over to the local cafe with a bundle of roses tucked under his arm. Once inside he takes a seat and orders a cup of coffee from the waitress, Rita.

Hey! Could it be the same Rita that the guys on the tape were talking about on the tapes back at the silo? Wow! What an intricate tapestry the threads of this plot doth weave.

The cafe’s owner, Mr. Harris, realizes that Rita is a bit depressed because, you know, her fiancé and father of her unborn child was stung to death by killer bees the day before, tells her go in back and take a break. (He didn’t even give her the day off?) Anyway, it’s a slow day at the Marysville Cafe, so Harris pulls up a chair and has a cup of coffee with Felix. Felix deftly turns the conversation to Maureen and the ongoing conflict with Mayor Tuttle and who she likes more and blah diddy blah diddy blah blah blah. Hilariously, you see Felix sipping coffee but when puts down his cup you can plainly see that it’s merely an empty prop.

Having a cup of Air-coffee

Anyway, Felix pays for his cup of air, takes his leave, and happens to meet Maureen coming out of a local street-side store. To the strains of romantic violin music, Felix offers the roses to Maureen, and in so many words, proposes has hand in marriage to the shocked schoolmarm. Maureen promises to think about it and heads off to school. (If this romance continues for much longer, I’m heading off to the toilet and puke.)

Back in the silo, Slater and Crane are squaring off yet again. A radar-operator has spotted the swarm heading towards Houston. Slater wisely suggests intercepting the swarm with attack helicopters. But does Crane agree? Noooooooo….not that. Slater’s suggestion of using "air-borne chemical agents" drives Crane into yet another frenzy. You see, by using chemical weapons, (giant cans of Raid?) the "native insect life" would also be killed.

Ahhh, yes, how would we ever survive if Houston were to lose some of its native insect life?

Crane shouts and rants about the bees, and how they are crucial to America, and blah blah blah. But hey, we’re talking about wiping out a swarm of bees near Houston, not every bee in the world. Seriously, does anybody have any common sense here?

Crane wraps up his tirade, "No! No, General! There will be no airdrop until we know exactly what we are dropping, and where, and how!"

Well, if I may be allowed to answer your questions, Dr. Crane,

1) We are dropping poison.

2) Around Houston.

3) By helicopter.

Crane, you eeeeeediot!

Oh, gee, back to Paul and his friends who have found the killer bees’ hive. (You know, isn’t it strange how the scientists have managed to find just a single bee (except for Crane’s cartoon textbook bee), yet Paul and his buddies find an entire hive while riding their bikes in a public park!? Very, very strange.

Anyway, Paul and his pals have made a few Molotov cocktails. (Now, I’m no expert in insect extermination, but this really can’t be such a great idea.) To my great non-surprise, the youth’s barrage of 3, count ‘em: 3, soda-bottle Molotov cocktails does little more than enrage the millions of killer bees. Seeing the swarm of brown pellets blowing out of the hive, the boys run back to their rally point and take cover under trash cans.

The three kids, each one hiding underneath his respective can, cower with fear as the bees swarm on the outside. After a few seconds, through the magic of playing the previous scene in reverse, the bees "un-swarm", and being severely pissed off, fly off to lay waste to Marysville. (Way to go, you morons!)

Cut to another boring "characterization" scene between Crane and Helena as they drive along a road in his van. (Um, and where might they driving to?) As the seconds drag by, Crane professes that he "likes being around" Helena. (Yup, now that was a powerful scene.) Suddenly, Crane spots the bee swarm high in the sky. "Look, they’re heading towards Marysville," Crane perceptively notes. Instead of, you know, radioing Marysville to warn them that the bees are approaching, Crane turns the van around and burns rubber. (You would think that since the President of the United States
has given him limitless powers, that Crane might have been issued a radio. Oh well.)

Back at the Marysville Elementary School we see Mayor Tuttle, a bouquet of flowers in his hand, sitting in the lobby waiting to see Maureen. After a few moments Tuttle is allowed in to see her where he proposes to Maureen and… C’mon already! Blah! Blah! Blah! Taken aback by Tuttle’s unexpected marriage proposal, Maureen promises to give both Mayor Tuttle and Felix her final answer "before the end of this school term." (Oh…no you won’t! Mwu-ha-ha-ha!)

Meanwhile out in the town’s plaza, we meet Character #56a: Hard-boiled journalist Anne MacGregor. She knows that the current events are more than "just [!] a story about a family killed by bees." She suspects that there’s "2omething going on. " (Yeah, like what? What the hell is she talking about?) Well, Anne’s hunch proves correct as Just At That Moment© Dr. Crane’s van comes tearing down main street with horn a-blowin’ and tires a-squealin’. Crane screeches to a halt in front of the Sheriff’s office, runs in, and breathlessly informs him that the bees are on the way. After having informed the Sheriff, Crane runs up and down main street like a madman shouting, "Get inside! The killer bees are coming! Get inside!"

The Sheriff calls Maureen to tell her to get all the children inside and off the playground. (In an uncharacteristically subtle bit of humor, you can see that Maureen has mixed the flowers from Felix and Mayor Tuttle into a single arrangement on her desk. Well, I thought it was funny. Ok, forget it.)

"Attention! Attention!" Maureen says into the school’s PA system, "A swarm of killer bees is on the way!" Alas, her warning comes too late as we see children writhing, screaming, and running blindly about the playground as the bees attack. (How did the bees get there that fast?) Once again, re-confirming this film’s distinct lack of subtlety, the camera zooms in on the body of a child holding a bee-covered lollipop. Why, yes, it’s the same kid that was comically staring at Mayor Tuttle in the waiting room.

The bees are no longer our friends.

Maureen watches helplessly from a classroom window as the kids are stung to death. Turning from the window, Maureen wails, "Nooooooooooooo,"…in slow-motion (!!).

"Get it all on tape," reporter MacGregor says with journalistic glee as she and her assistants jump into the news van. For some reason, there are a couple of cameramen filming from on top of the van. Needless to say, these idiots are quickly attacked by bees. (I’m at a loss for words here. Can anybody not comprehend that you need to be inside something when a swarm of killer bees is on the rampage?)

Anyway, Crane and Helena take refuge in the local diner, but Helena is stung on the neck before they can get safely inside. Hey, guess who’s working at the diner: Rita, the pregnant girlfriend of the soldier that was stung to death. Small world. In an incredibly stupid bit, the diner’s front door was locked (in the middle of the day?), so Crane breaks a window so he can reach in and unlock it. (Um, Crane, you realize that the bees can now come inside?)

Luckily for Crane and Helena, none of the gazillions of bees seem to notice the broken window and they all stay outside.

And you know, the same damned thing just happened when the 2 cameramen on top of the news van jumped from the roof, pulled open the van’s side doors, and jumped in: Not a single bee followed them inside! Maybe journalists and bees have a tacit professional courtesy since they’re both swarming, annoying pests.

Well, all isn’t going so well back in the diner. One of the locals, stumbling around covered in bees, staggers and tumbles through the diner’s main front window. Now the bees notice this missing window, and immediately fly into the eatery. Crane, Helena, Rita, and Mr. Harris run into the back pantry in order to take refuge in the freezer. Harris panics, pushes his way into the freezer alone, and locks the freezer door…from the inside (!).

Wait just a minute? There’s a lock inside the freezer?! Why the hell would anybody need to lock a freezer from the inside?

Anyway, Helena, Rita, and Crane end up hiding in the adjoining pantry, where it’s cool enough that the bees won’t want to come in (or something). As expected, Helena collapses from the bee sting she received earlier.

After the bee raid, the Marysville hospital is filled to capacity with sting victims. (Soldiers oh-so-discreetly simply pile up the body bags on the hospital’s front lawn!) Inside Helena’s (private!) hospital room Crane gets a phone call from Krim, who is still rolling around back at the missile silo doing God knows what. (In order that the viewer will ‘get’ that this scene takes place in a hospital, the table next to the phone has a bottle of "Alcohol" and a bed pan…hmmmm.) Krim has heard about Helena’s unfortunate bee sting and has called to check on her status. Well, she’s unconscious. ("Not good," Krim notes.)

"How are things there?" Crane asks.

"Damn unsettling developments," Krim replies. (Why are there so many "damn" things in this movie?) It turns out that one of the soldiers stung in the initial attack had nearly recovered before taking a sudden turn for the worse and dying. (I now dub thee ‘False Hope Venom’…since a victim will appear to recover before tragically dying for no reason except for dramatic effect.)

The situation in Marysville? Glad you asked: 216 dead, 33 stung.

Hey,look who just Happens to Show Up: Paul, looking a little sheepish since, you know, he’s directly responsible for 216 deaths. Up in Helena’s room, Paul confesses that "It’s all my fault, I threw fireballs at the swarm." (Once again, what is their relationship?)

Moving right along, Crane sees Slater in front of the hospital yakking into his car phone to "Warsh-ington". Yep, right on schedule: Another shouting match between Crane and Slater.

"Well Crane, it’s panic time from coast to coast!" Slater shrewdly begins, "If we’d gone after the bees right at the beginning…we wouldn’t be in this damn mess!"

Slater continues by saying that Hubbard has collected thousands of bee specimens from a nearby lake.

"Hmmm, thirsty and exhausted…well that’s good news," says Crane. (Thirsty and exhausted is how I feel as well.)

"Well I don’t see it that way," Slater counters, "When that swarm finds out that some of its friends have been taken captive [!], they might come back to Marysville."

"Are you endowing these bees with human motives?" Crane asks, "Like saving their fellow bees from captivity?" (Isn’t "fellow bees" contradictory?)

Slater straightens his shoulders and says, "I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence." (That’s got to be one of my favorite lines of the film. Oh Lord, is this great stuff here. Yes, this is Air Force General Slater in a battle of wits with honey bees.)

Anyway, Slater wants to spray "every bush and tree from here to the gulf." (The Texas desert is pretty sparse, but every bush and tree?) As usual, Crane refuses to approve Slater’s plans calling for the spraying massive amounts of insecticide into the air. Overruled yet again, Slater grits his teeth in frustration as they continue to give Crane’s plan a chance to succeed. (I’m still not sure what "plan" Crane has proposed, but, oh well, as long as he continues to butt heads with Slater…)

Out of the hospital runs Paul, looking really crappy to be honest; Pale, sweating, panting for breath. Why he hasn’t been re-admitted into the hospital is anybody’s guess since he was never officially discharged. All that aside, Paul stops Crane and confesses his role in the bee attack, i.e., it’s all his damned fault. (Damn! Now the movie has me saying "damn" all the time! Bastards!) Crane consoles him and tells him he would have done the same (?!). "Why don’t you go back upstairs and keep on eye on [Helena] for me," Crane says as he sends Paul back inside the hospital with a fatherly pat on the shoulder.

Later that day we see that Crane has returned to the silo and donned a white lab coat (He is a Scientist, ya know). The good doctor is examining the new research area that has been specially constructed for the crisis. Inside the new lab, Krim and Hubbard, dressed in white rain coats and motorcycle helmets (!), are experimenting with the bees and trying to discover an antidote for the False Hope Venom.

Crane puts on a white rain coat and motorcycle helmet and enters the room as well.

Upon Krim’s command, a large number of bees are released from jars and spread upon a metal grid that holds a small electric current. The electricity causes the bees to ‘sting’, thus Krim can collect the venom for further experiments. "Pesky devils!" Krim sourly notes.

Anyway, they collect a bunch of venom on a glass plate and exit the lab. By following the tight security precautions consisting solely of looking at each other’s back and using a hand-held brush to remove any "pesky" bees, the killer insects are contained in the unlocked research room instead of, say, escaping and killing everybody in the silo again.

Cut to another scene that I suspect was edited from the final release: It looks like Helena has been discharged from the hospital and has returned to work back in the silo’s infirmary. Maj. Baker, always on the look-out for something suspicious in Crane’s behavior, asks Helena if Crane has been acting suspicious.

"What I do in my spare time is none of the Air Force’s business," says Helena. (I don’t know if the "None Of Your Business Exemption" applies when you work in a ICBM silo, but, oh well.)

We return to the Marysville hospital to see Dr. Andrews (Character #62b) clumsily saying good-bye to Rita; whom he is deeply in love with. According to Rita, the town is being evacuated. Hey, thanks for telling us this before! (Stupid Swarm movie.) Anyway, Rita deftly deflects Dr. Andrew’s clumsy come-on’s and heads outside to take the bus to the train station. Yes, yet another relationship that doesn’t make a bit of difference.

Oh gee: The evacuation of Marysville. Seriously, what could have been an exciting, tense scene showing families fleeing their homes under threat of a deadly airborne attack, is reduced by Irvin Allen’s heavy hand into a banal shouting match between Felix and Mayor Tuttle as to who gets to carry Maureen’s suitcase.

After the Suitcase Drama plays itself out, we cut to see that Rita has arrived at the trains station. She immediately goes into labor and is driven back to the hospital. Well, look on the bright side: she won’t be riding on the Train of Death! Mwu-ha-ha!

"Let’s get the train outta here," Slater grumbles to Baker, "Those damn [!] bees could be back any minute."

Cut to see Crane and Helena strolling through the abandoned streets of Marysville. (I think it’s strange that it’s suddenly night time since it was noon in the last shot, but, ach! Forget it.) With nary a policeman in sight to prevent looting and vandalism, the quiet couple hold hands and wistfully peer into the empty buildings of the once bustling town.

"How sad," Helena observed, "How very, very sad." Why yes, Helena, the death of 230 adults, including 24 kids is a bummer. Helena continues to reminisce about growing up in Marysville and bladdy-bladdy-blah. A horrible scene which I’m pretty sure was cut out of the final cut, so let’s just skip to the action.

Return to the Train of Death. Sitting in their seats, Felix and Tuttle are still arguing and jibing each other, as Maureen stares quietly out the train window at the blue-screen projection of the desert landscape. Maureen suddenly turns and says that she has the feeling she’ll never see Marysville again. (Like I said, subtlety is not one of this movie’s strong points.)

As luck would have it, the 2 locomotive engineers must have been trained at the Marysville Home for Idiots. Despite the fact that there are swarms of killer bees marauding about the countryside, these two morons are driving the train with their windows open. A single bee lands on the driver’s hand and causes him to panic. Suddenly, through the magic of bad editing, the entire engine compartment is aswarm (is that a word? Dunno, but I like it) with killer bees. One of the engineers stumbles and falls against the accelerator causing the train to race along the windy mountain tracks at dangerous speeds.

Anyway the doomed train derails and plunges off a cliff. (Huh? I didn’t know there were mountains outside of Houston? Man, the things you learn.) For some reason, the train turns into an HO scale model, tumbles down a pile of dirt, and…Surprise!, bursts into a giant fireball.

So, yup, there goes Felix, Mayor Tuttle, and Maureen. I’m sure glad we spent so much time developing those characters.

Ok, I just want to think about all this for a minute. You have a train full of evacuees, fine. In addition, there is a very real threat that a swarm of bees may attack the train. Ok, I can believe that. How to get the train safely from point A to point B?

1) All windows, and I mean ALL windows, on the train will be locked and sealed. (That includes you, Mr. Train Engineer!)

2) An escort helicopter will scout the area in front of the train and give warning if a bee swarm is in the vicinity.

3) On a side note: bees fly at around 12 mph, maybe even slower when they are in a swarm…so couldn’t the train just outrun the damn things?

4) Once again Mr. Engineer: KEEP YOUR DAMN WINDOW CLOSED! You eeeeeediot!

Back at the silo, Crane and Slater get the news that only 17 of the train’s passengers survived. (Thank God that Felix, Tuttle, and Maureen were NOT among them.) As Hubbard and Krim look on (shouldn’t they be in the lab trying to find an antidote?), Crane and Slater start shouting again. This time Crane plans to drop poison pellets onto the ground that the bees will presumably eat. Or some such nonsense.

"Those damn[!] poison pellets of yours won’t get us anywhere!" Slater shouts for no other reason than to maintain dramatic conflict.

"Excuse me General," Hubbard butts in, "Those are my damn poison pellets and I think they’ll work!" (Ahh, yes, Hubbard’s Poison Pellet Project.)

To get to the point, the Preposterous Poison Pellet Project is to kick off in 30 minutes. I bet you can’t wait, can you?

Crane leans over to a computer operator and says, "Feed this into the computer: African bees attack a train seventy miles North West of Houston…Now give me a revised time fix." While the data entry technician tries to figure out just how in the hell he’s going to get that into a computer, Crane turns back to Slater and continues, "Right now we are ready to drop millions of lethal pellets without harming either the population or the plant life."

"I’ll support that," coos Dr. Krim.

"So will I," Hubbard chimes in.

(Ass kissers! Sheesh! Why don’t you guys just get a room?!)

As Slater once again swallows his pride and grants Crane the use of "every helicopter he has", the revised time estimate comes clattering in over the computer screen (A computer that ‘ratta-tatt-tatts’ as letters scroll across the screen?!). It looks like the bees will reach Houston in a little over 3 days. Oh dear.

Cut to see Crane directing operations from a command helicopter. As the vast force of 2, count ‘em, 2 helicopters fly around, soldiers are seen dumping white pellets from plastic bags. Since it looks like each bag holds enough pellets to cover an area of my backyard, I think it’s safe to say that it’s going to be a while before the entire desert is saturated with poison.

(In a funny bit, Crane peers down through a pair of binoculars and actually sees individual bees and pellets on the ground…all this from a height of several hundred feet. Absurd!)

"They’re not touching the pellets!" Crane radios back to headquarters in despair. As Krim and the others shake their heads in frustration, Crane continues, "They seem to sense that it’s something that will kill them."

Hey, why don’t you make flower-flavored pellets instead? Yummy! No killer bee could resist that! Seriously, how dumb can a movie get: The bees sense that something is fishy with the pellets?

"They’re brighter than I thought," Hubbard says.

"They always are," Krim sighs. (Huh? Who is ‘They’? The viewer who can spot all these plot holes?)

Back at Marysville hospital, Paul has had a relapse and lies unconscious in his bed. Helena sits at his side and watches over him because, hey, she doesn’t have anything else to do, like, oh I don’t know, take care of her patients back at the silo! Without warning, Paul flat-lines and all the little computers and monitors in his room begin beeping and all that cool medical stuff.

Oh gee. Paul’s dead. That’s sad. Add him to the list of ‘Dead Characters We Never Cared About’ along with Tuttle, Felix, and what’s her name. As expected, Helena has a conniption fit at Paul’s demise and falls into the arms of…Ta-Da! Dr. Crane, who just happened to walk into the room Just At That Moment.

Another scene with Crane and Helena driving around the desert gives us some back-story tidbits: Paul was Helena’s first patient way back when she was the town doctor. (So she was what, 18 years old back then? She can’t be more than 25 as it is.) What else happens in this exciting driving scene: Crane confesses that 3 out of 4 sting victims die; the others tend to fall victim to the False Hope Venom Syndrome. (When Crane spills the beans about the FHVS, Helena gets a bit upset. However, she does seem pretty plucky seeing that she’s been on night-time strolls, and has traveled back and forth to the silo several times in the past few days.)

Oh, and I want to thank the screen writers for clearing up Helena and Paul’s relationship…after he’s dead! Thanks!

Back in the silo Slater stares at a map of the Houston metro area. Bunches of lights flicker at various location on the map: What they indicate is anybody’s guess. (Bees? Swarms? Pellets? Porn stores? Somebody want to give me a hint? Anybody?) As Crane stares morosely at the Board of Little Lights, Slater can’t resist taking the opportunity to gloat over the failure of the Preposterous Poison Pellet Project, "Well, you dropped your poison pellets and the Africans spit at them…now they’re moving towards Houston faster than expected." (The pellets are moving towards Houston? Oh, the bees…)

The lights on this map indicate something very important.

A somber report from Major Baker reveals what lies in the path of the deadly swarm: Numerous towns, factories, steel mills, and…<BUM><BUM><BUM>…a nuclear power plant. Crane states that they all have to shut down and be evacuated…even the <BUM><BUM><BUM>… nuclear power plant. (Was that too subtle for you?)

"I can tell you right now we’ll have problems with that nuclear power plant," says Slater, "No way they’ll shut down voluntarily." Not to point out something obvious here, but wasn’t Crane granted unlimited powers by authority of the President? Can’t Crane just call and say, "Hey, Mr. Power Plant Manager: Shut down!" Oh well, I guess they forgot he can do whatever he wants. No problem though, Hubbard volunteers to visit the power plant and talk to the guys in charge:

"I know most of the key executives at that plant," Hubbard says with a smug look on his face, "I’ve fought them in court often enough on environmental issues." (Yes, the big BUG-A-BOO of nuclear power. We all remember how the West coast was turned into a nuclear slag heap because of all the reactor accidents in the 80′s right? You don’t? Oh, that must be because it’s never happened. I care for the environment as much as the next guy/gal, but don’t tell me about all the horrors of nuclear power while we strip mine the Earth looking for coal so we can burn it and fill the skies with poison fumes.) With Crane’s blessing, Hubbard scurries off to "jaw-bone some sense" into the guys at the power plant. (Nobody has yet explained just what kind of threat bees, I repeat…bees, pose to a nuclear power plant.)

Crane takes advantage of this pause in the action to take a stroll down to Krim’s lab.

"Everything we tried has failed," Crane confesses, "our last hope is your mass antidote." (Well, Dr. Crane, you haven’t tried any of General Slater’s ideas, now have you? Jerk.)

Krim, scooting around in his wheel chair, informs Crane that he’s tried the antidote on some rabbits but the venom "knocks hell out of them." (Is that a medical term?)

Krim insists that he needs just a little more time to work out an antidote, in fact, he’ll be ready to perform tests on humans the next day. Crane volunteers to be the first guinea pig.

"Forget it!" Krim says, emphatically poo-poo’ing Crane’s suggestion. Crane insists the first test should be performed on him since it will take too long to convince others of the need for human volunteers. (Huh?) Anyway, Crane goes off to…do something…leaving Krim alone to ponder the problem.

Ahhh, at last. Time for Krim’s moment of Heroic Self-Sacrifice©. Since time is short, Krim decides to inject a dose of False Hope Venom into himself in order to test his antidote. This plan is so idiotic it boggles the mind.

First: He’s an old man…shouldn’t he inject it into a younger person with a more robust immune system?

Second: Crane has Presidential authority to do whatever the hell he wants. Can’t he just order Private Pyle to roll up his sleeve and take one for the team?

Third: Krim is the only one smart enough to work on an antidote, so if this test fails and he dies: Who the hell will be left to find an antidote! GIVE ME A BREAK!

stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid

Krim leans over and speaks into a tape recorder so that Crane will have a record of what happens should events go awry. "I’m going to test the serum on myself," Krim recites, "Why? Because you’re just damn [!] fool enough to make me try it on you!"

"It’s my antidote, so it will be my risk," Krim solemnly concludes before beginning the test.

Krim begins by injecting himself with the same amount of venom a person would receive from 6 bee stings. Six?! Why the hell doesn’t he just start out with one dose and go up from there? What the hell is he thinking?! Argh!

As I said, Krim plans to inject himself with a dose of False Hope Venom equivalent to 6 stings, then, after 60 seconds, he will see if he still has the mental acuity and physical strength to utilize the "self-injector" and inject the antidote. (My head hurts. Why not just see if the damn antidote works first…before you start goofing around with injectors and all that nonsense. Why introduce so many unknowns into the first iteration of the experiment?)

OK, I’m going to make this short…Krim hooks himself up to an EKG machine and injects the venom. His heart starts fluttering and his muscles begin cramping as the venom courses through his veins. Somehow he figures an average person would need 60 seconds to be able to administer the antidote via the "self-injector", sooooo….we sit and watch Krim suffer from the poison for a full minute, but really, can’t we just move this along? And another thing, why couldn’t he have an assistant in the room in case he couldn’t use the self-injector? Then the guy could administer it for him and at least save Krim’s life so he can work on the antidote some more…Oh, dear reader, how I hate this crap.

Anyhoo, Krim struggles to reach the injector, and after a dramatic struggle laden with tension (sort of), he manages to inject the drug. After a short pause, his vital signs return to normal levels as the experimental antidote takes effect.

For some reason Helena enters the lab and sees Krim gasping for breath…"The antidote works," he proudly says after explaining to Helena the nature of his experiment, "My God…it works!"

As you know by now, it’s not called False Hope Venom for nothing. After a few seconds of respite, Krim’s vital signs turn abnormal again, even reaching some "spooky levels." (Another medical term, I suppose.) Helena watches helplessly as Krim’s heart poops out and he croaks. (How’s that for medical terminology?) Of course, Krim sees a giant bee in the room before kicking the bucket. (Do people that get stung by jelly-fish see giant jelly-fishes? Do people that get stung by scorpions see giant scorpions? Just curious, but I think you get my point.)

Well, with the country’s foremost immunologist out of the way, I guess we’re all screwed now. Thank you very much, Doctor Krim.

As an added bonus, Krim’s death gives Michael Caine a chance to ham it up some more…"Walter…oh….Walter," Crane says as he grasps Krim’s lifeless hand and weeps at his side.

Meanwhile, at the nuclear power plant, Hubbard tries to convince the plant’s Director that he has to shut ‘er down.

"Look at all this," The plant Director says, indicating a huge, pulsating, glowing red ball in the reactor’s floor.

Is that the reactor’s core?! I confess I don’t know everything nuclear reactors, but the lack of credibility shown here is stunning. I really wish there was a deleted scene on the DVD where the plant Director had said, "Look at all this hokey bullshit!"

When Hubbard insists that the power plant be shut down post-haste, the Director points out that "…we provide power over a five-hundred mile area…" The plant Director also intelligently points out that there is nothing about the reactor that would attract the bees in the first place. (True.)

"I wouldn’t be so sure of that," Hubbard smugly retorts, "the infrared rays could signal them…act like a beacon." (?!)

"No, no, no…see this," the Director continues gesturing towards the massive steel structures, "billions of dollars have been spent to make these nuclear reactors safe…fail-safe!"

"Let me ask you," Hubbard growls, "in all your fail-safe techniques, is there any provision against an attack by killer bees?"

Why no, there probably wouldn’t be a provision for such a thing…because it’s so moronic!!! How about a provision against an attack by killer water buffalos? That could happen too, right? How would we ever deal with that eventuality?

At that very moment, and I mean At That Very Moment, an alarm siren begins wailing. As the plant Director desperately tries to get a situation report, Hubbard looks down into the plant’s control room to see the entire chamber full of killer bees. (!)

Excuse me for a moment…

HOW THE HELL DID THEY GET INSIDE?!

We are now treated to a scene showing Hubbard and the Director running through a control room followed by a massive swarm of black and brown pellets. (Hmmm, the nuclear power plant’s control room looks suspiciously similar to the missile silo’s control room, if you get my drift.) As Hubbard and the other guy lumber around, in slow motion naturally, the bees do them in and, yes, the nuclear power plant explodes (!!!).

Back at the silo, the death toll from the nuclear meltdown scrolls across that inexplicably clattering computer screen: 36,422 deaths. (Proofreader Sean Ledden wondered why the nuclear blast didn’t wipe out the swarm of bees as well. Good point! However, the characters occasionally mention that there are in fact several swarms…yet another contrivance employeed to cover plot holes ‘on the fly’. So I must assume that one of the remaining swarms (or all of them? How many are there?) survived the blast and went on to attack Houston. Or something. You know just as much as I do.)

As Crane mutely stares at the screen, in stroll Slater and Baker. In his hand Slater holds a piece of paper which he contemptuously waves in Crane’s face. "I’ve been authorized by the President to close down your operation!" Crane announces with glee.

I have just one word to say: FINALLY!

Gee, ya think we should maybe go with Slater’s plans? Ya think?! After Crane’s plans have resulted in nearly 40,000 deaths, a train wreck, a destroyed town, and a nuclear meltdown…do you really think that maybe it’s about time we should give Slater a chance?

Although Crane is forced to relinquish command, he won’t give up. Oh no. Not Doctor Bradford Crane. Upon hearing that the bees will reach Houston in 17 hours, Crane says that he’ll fly there in order to continue the struggle. Hurrah.

Oddly, we next see Crane driving an official Air Force car towards Houston (wasn’t he going to fly?), with Helena in the passenger seat. Who on Earth gave Helena permission to abandon the silo and ride along with him? Who the hell gave Crane a government car…and, hey, where’s his van? I’m not trying to nit-pick this movie to death, but such displays of contempt for the viewer must be pointed out. Hey, don’t fool yourself: watching "The Swarm" is a battle between the viewer and the movie.

As they make their way towards Houston, Crane turns to Helena and says, "Who would have thought that bees would be the first alien force to invade America." (There are so many things wrong with that line…but I just don’t have the energy to begin…)

Crane and Helena eventually arrive at Air Force headquarters. For some reason Houston appears to be solely populated by soldiers walking around with M-16s and wearing either white bio-hazard suits or orange jumpers with matching motorcycle helmets. (I don’t recall anybody mentioning that Houston was evacuated, but this late in the movie nobody seems to care who-said-what anyway.)

At the top of an office building…sorry, Air Force headquarters <cough>, Crane and Helena meet General Slater who is now running the show. Slater proudly exhibits his new command center full of beeping computers and blinking lights.

"By tomorrow there will be no more Africans," Slater proudly states, "at least not in the Houston sector."

(The script has a tendency to refer to the African bees as simply "Africans", which results in some amusing lines to say the least.)

"This is really a dress rehearsal, a set procedure for any future African challenges." (?)

Slater guides Crane and Helena over to a display board. "This is Houston computerized," Slater explains as he shows off the display of about 40 lights and some random lines.

"Houston computerized"…uh-huh. Sure it is.

"The battle plan is to get them all into one area," Slater explains, "…and zap ‘em!"

(Excuse me, General, did you say…"Zap ‘em"?)

"You planned your arrival perfectly," Slater says to Crane as he watches the bees on a TV screen,"…here they come!"

"Prepare to use the Neutra-Cide!" Slater orders.

As usual, Crane objects on the grounds that the "Neutra-Cide" will render the ground barren for years to come. Of course this time Crane is all bark and no bite since he has no authority to stop Slater, so the plan proceeds. Cut to a computer display showing Vietnam era footage of airplanes spraying Agent Orange over the jungles. (I’m not an expert in geography, but I don’t recall Houston as being surrounded by jungles. But hey, the footage was free so why not use it?)

As Slater and Crane watch the screen and eagerly await the outcome of the poison gas, they are shocked to see the bees fly through it unharmed.

"They learned to live with it," Major Baker says.

"I was afraid of this…they’ve become immune to any pesticide [!!]," Crane adds.

They’ve become immune to all pesticides? When did this happen? Huh?! I feel that we’ve crossed over into the realm of the supernatural…these bees seem capable of just about anything! (As long as the plot requires it, I suppose.)

Slater and Crane plop into a pair of chairs and resignedly await their fate as air raid sirens begin to wail and the bees begin swarming into the city proper.

"So…the occupation of Houston has begun," Slater says, "and General Thalious Slater is your first officer in history to get his butt kicked by a mess of bugs!" (It’s not really Slater’s fault. Who knows what might have happened if they had followed Slater’s suggestions from the beginning instead of being forced to comply with Crane’s ridiculous, albeit environmentally friendly, ‘plans’.)

Faced with inevitable doom, Slater makes an effort to bury the hatchet between himself and Slater as he asks for some of Crane’s sunflower seeds. Cute. Very cute. You know, when push comes to shove, I guess we’re all cut from the same cloth.

A news bulletin breaks the silence: "The city of Houston will suffer massive man-made burning". Yes, you read that correctly: The plan is to burn Houston to the ground…using individual soldiers armed with flame throwers! Now, I’ve never been to Houston, but I have been to big cities before, and to think that they will attempt to literally burn down the city using flamethrowers (!) is…is…oh man, I’m getting a beer.

Cut to soldiers, dressed in white jumpers and matching motorcycle helmets (sound familiar?), taking to the streets of Houston armed with their hand-held flame throwers.

This is so stupid I just have to break in and ask: Why can’t they carpet-bomb the city with incendiary bombs? Why not just nuke it?

Anyway, we see that the squad in charge of burning Houston to the ground numbers 9 men, so given the size of Houston, I think it’s safe to say that this could take a while.

"Light ‘em up!" the Commanding Officer shouts into the radio as all the guys fire the flame-throwers into the sky. Although I’m sure Irwin Allen thought this looked cool, I don’t see how firing flames into the air is going to actually, you know, set anything on fire.

Obviously this whole sequence was filmed in some back lot (and I suspect it was the same set as used for the Marysville shots, just darkened so we can’t see it), so the guys obviously couldn’t actually burn the set up. Still, these guys are supposed to be burning down the city, so when nothing is actually, you know, on fire, it takes away some of the excitement.

To be fair, there are several shots of these flame-thrower guys walking in tight formation and shooting flames every which way; so kudos to those dudes for performing some potentially dangerous stunt work.

We cut to a control room somewhere in Air Force headquarters. (Oh, and by the way, isn’t the Air Force headquarters in Houston…i.e., the city that is currently being burned to the ground? Oh, never mind.) Crane helpfully exposits that the flame thrower teams have been at it for 24 hours now. As Crane rambles on about the superiority of the bees ("…they are the true inheritors of the Earth." Uh-huh.), Helena sits quietly beside a computer terminal, now inexplicitly dressed in civilian clothes.

As Crane listens to the drone of the bees over a loudspeaker, he is struck by a thought: What if he could electronically create a sound that could lure the bees to their doom? Crane’s excitement is quickly dampened as the False Hope Venom strikes Helena and she collapses to the floor.

OK, back with the flame thrower squads. Although they ostensibly have been working all night, it appears that they are still working on the same street that they started on. (Like I said, this could take a while.) Then for no other reason than to add "action" to this already bloated flick, an ambulance careens down the street with the driver madly swatting at bees that have managed to get inside the driver’s compartment. (Even though the previous scene was filmed at night, the editors spliced in ambulance stock-footage taken during day time. Bravo! You’d think that the filmmakers would have been able to manage the oh-so-complicated task of maintaining day-night continuity; but obviously not. On second thought, given the film’s budget, I’m sure capable editors were hired; they just didn’t give a damn.)

Blah blah, the ambulance crashes into a plate-glass window and, yes, explodes. (Ahhhh, a car exploding. I never tire of seeing that.)

Meanwhile, Helena isn’t doing so hot. Crane sits at her side and offers a quick prayer to the powers above. Slater and Baker happen to overhear Crane’s plea.

"Can we really count on a scientist that…prays?" Baker whispers.

"I wouldn’t count on one that doesn’t," Slater sagely responds. (Oh brother!)

Back outside things are also going from bad to worse for the flame-thrower crews. One soldier desperately tries to radio for reinforcements but he can’t get through because "…there’s too much interference from the damn bees!"

Yup, the bees can jam radio signals as well.

A couple of grunts are ordered to get back to headquarters and inform Slater of the dire situation. (I couldn’t help but notice a couple dead soldiers laying about. Since they’re wearing ‘bee proof’ suits, I’m not too sure how they died. I mean, if the suits aren’t bee proof, why isn’t everybody dead? Ack.)

Meanwhile Helena has become critically ill from the False Hope Venom. In her delirium, Helena hears a scratching at the door. When she opens it she sees, Ta-Da!, a giant bee. (Boy, I never get tired of seeing that special effect.) Helena screams "AHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh" and falls to the floor, all in slow-motion of course.

Returning, again, to the flame throwers, we see that the soldiers are making their way down the same damn street. Oh wait, it’s not the same street, this time there is a broken down fuel tanker parked by the curb.

<sigh> I wonder what this is going to lead to.

I’m not going to tell you whether or not the tanker explodes and kills a bunch of flame thrower dudes, I’ll leave that as homework. (Hint: See screenshot to the left.)

I hate beating dead horses, but I just want to ask again: Are hand-held flame throwers really the most efficient way to destroy an entire city?

Back at Air Force headquarters, we see Slater pensively staring out of a top floor window as the flames slowly engulf Houston. (Once again, General, shouldn’t you relocate to a city that you’re not in the process of burning down?)

"It makes you wonder…Houston on fire," Slater muses, "Will history blame me or the bees?" (!)

Well, if you want to know who I’m blaming, it’s Irwin Allen.

Although General Slater seems ready to throw in the towel, Crane reassures him that he’s working on a new plan. In fact, down in the computer room, Crane and a technician have managed to duplicate the bees "mating" sound. ("Sound Patterns Identical" a computer monitor helpfully displays in case you didn’t "get it".)

"What you are hearing now is the African bees’ mating sound," Crane explains. Thanks for clearing that up. Crane proceeds to explain why the bees attacked the missile silo (as if anybody still gives a shit by now). You see, the silo’s alarm sounded exactly like the African bee’s mating call, thus when the alarm system was tested, a swarm of horny African bees approached the base and killed everybody out of sexual frustration when they found out they wouldn’t be getting any.

Crane enthusiastically tells the others that he might be able to lure the bees out of Houston by recreating the mating call via loudspeakers. (This same idea was used a long time ago in Burt Gordon’s 1957 giant grasshopper ‘classic’, The Beginning of the End.) Slater takes a few moments to silently consider the plausibility of the plan (Tension!), but in the end he gives Crane the green light.

Cut to a hallway somewhere in Air Force headquarters (I think) where we see a couple of guys walking around with flame throwers. An elevator door opens and out tumbles a couple guys covered in bees. (Once again, the bees seem to have quite a knack for getting into elevators.) Since no disaster film is complete without showing somebody on fire running around and screaming "Ayyeeeeeee", one guy gets set on fire and runs around screaming "Ayyeeeeee". Staying faithful to the Disaster Movie Maker’s Template©, the burning guy tosses himself out of a top floor window and plummets to the ground. (Hilariously, you can see that there is a hanging plant on the wall outside the building…hmmm, I’d hate to be the guy who has to water that one. Way to pay attention to detail there, guys.)

Ah, yes, guys running around willy-nilly frying everything in sight, including Slater’s fancy-smancy control room. The idiocy of this whole scene is beyond description. They are just so many, many things wrong here…More homework for you.

Back in the computer room, Baker rushes inside and breathlessly informs the others, "The bees!…they’ve broken inside!" (How, exactly, do bees "break into" a building? I think a more likely explanation would be that some idiot soldier left the back door open after he came in from his smoke break…oh, or somebody probably left a window open as usual.) Anyway, Slater orders Crane to get the hell out of there and get his new sonic lure system up and running. Crane of course has to first rescue Helena.

All this nonsense leads to scenes showing Crane running down flaming corridors full of bees, yet he somehow avoids getting even a single sting. Amazing. Meanwhile, Slater and Baker try to make it down the very same hallway, but are quickly overcome by bees. Go figure. Reflecting on past experience, maybe the bees regard Crane as more of an ally than a threat.

R.I.P. Slater. We hardly knew ye.

Since there is no way in hell Crane and Helena could ever make it out alive from the flaming, bee-filled ruins of Houston, the director simply jump cuts to show Crane and Helena pulling up to an airplane at a local airport. (!) (You lazy, lazy bastards! They didn’t even try to come up with a suspenseful escape sequence. Were they worried about plausibility now…after all the crap we’ve already seen?)

From the control tower, Crane radios Airfield Whatchamacallit and orders them to load helicopters with loudspeakers and "spread the oil over the Gulf." (All that freakin’ time nixing Slater’s plans because of possible damage to the environment and now Crane is going to ignite a gigantic oil slick on the Gulf of Mexico??!!)

"To all Air Force tankers…spread your oil over the Gulf of Mexico!" a stern voice commands over the radio. (Air Force oil tankers? Wouldn’t the Navy be responsible for that? Ahhh, yes. I’ve just received confirmation from a secret source (ok, my proofreader), that the Air Force does not maintain a fleet of oil tankers.)

A jeep rushes Crane and Helena to an awaiting helicopter. When Helena notices the diminutive speakers being fastened to the sides of the choppers she looks worried and asks, "Won’t the noise of the helicopter drown out your sound?"

"No, it’s an entirely different sonic level [??]," Crane answers. Yeah. Whatever, dude. Let’s just get this over with.

From his command chopper, Crane coordinates the distribution of the sound buoys as Air Force helicopters fly around and drop them onto the so-called oil slick.

Once the loudspeakers begin blaring Crane’s "sonic signals", the bees quickly abandon Houston, fly out over the Gulf, and land on the water’s oily surface. Seeing that this may be humanity’s only chance for a victory, Crane hurries to the "firing point" in order to give the signal to ignite the oil slick. At Crane’s command (Crane gives the order to fire, naturally, because he is the hero), an Army rocket launcher fires a salvo onto the oil slick which results in an enormous explosion of billowing fire balls and thick black smoke.

As Crane and Helena stand on the beach and stare and the gigantic conflagration, Helena looks up and asks, "Did we finally beat them or is this just a temporary victory?"

"I don’t know," Crane says, "But we did gain time. If we use it wisely, and if we’re lucky, the world might just survive."

Crane and his environmentally friendly solution.

Crane and Helena embrace, turn to stare out over the flames and smoke, and ponder the future of the world.

Fade to black and…

The End.

Dennis Grisbeck (August 2006)

Read more about The Swarm at

Written and Directed by Jeff Lieberman

Tagline: “This was the night of the CRAWLING TERROR!”

Run Time: 92 min

“There’s a lot of spaghetti here…it may take us ten, fifteen minutes to finish it. Now that’s a bigger head start then you deserve!”
- Sheriff

What can I say? This movie seemed too bad to pass by. I used to think that the most ‘non-scary’ monster I had seen were giant grasshoppers in "Beginning of the End", but I was mistaken. In "Squirm", the antagonists are worms. I repeat: worms. I don’t mean giant worms…I don’t mean worms with mutated mouth-parts capable of rending flesh from bone…I speaking of worms. The kind that birds eat. The kind that wriggle around on the sidewalk on rainy mornings (that you desperately try to avoid stepping on…yech!)

Somehow, the writers thought that a worm’s obvious lack of threatening attributes could be compensated for by simply having more of them. In other words, if 1 worm can’t kill you, then 1000 worms could. This theory may hold true for other small creatures, ants, spiders, birds… but worms? To overcome this plot shortcoming, the story suggests that electricity can transform the worms into aggressive carnivores. How or why this transformation occurs is never explained, it’s simply a convenient method to advance the plot.

The story itself revolves around a lovely little shit-hole town in Georgia called "Fly Creek". (How charming.) One day, without reason, there is a terrible lightning storm which transforms the common earthworms in the area into cunning, aggressive killers that begin feeding on the locals.

The actors that portray the local (red neck) population ham it up pretty good. Almost every line of dialog has a "ya’ll" or an "over yonder…". The rural Southern dialects are so over the top it becomes distracting rather than convincing, leaving the viewer wondering if this movie wasn’t really meant to be a tongue-in-cheek spoof.

Take the terrible acting, the ridiculous dialects, the shaky plot, and toss in a huge amount of writhing worms (and not just worms, I did see not a few centipedes and millipedes mixed into the mess) and you have a recipe for a terrible film. So let’s get going!

The Cast:

	Mick (Don Scardino) The biggest wimp, geek, knuckle-head to ever make his way to Fly Creek. A "City Boy" from New York (yeah right!), he comes down to Fly Creek to visit Geri and take a look at some antiques. Gee. Sounds like fun.
	Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy) Miss "Flat-Butt", falls in love with Mick after he comes down to visit her. Only she could make a shower scene boring. Seems to have trouble keeping her ‘Southern’ accent from drifting into a pseudo-Elizabethian-Mark-Twain-hybrid dialect.
	Roger Grimes (R.A. Dow) Geri’s neighbor, and worm farmer, Roger is the quintessential "local yokel". Man, where did they dig up this dude. Roger is attacked by worms and turns into a crazed ‘worm man’. I wish I was making all this up but I’m not.
	Sheriff (Peter MacLean) Sleazy, sleazy, sleazy. Fly Creek’s one and only law enforcer, this guy makes my skin crawl. Not exactly a candidate for "Law Enforcement Officer of the Year", eventually gets devoured by worms while having sex in a jail cell.
	Willie Grimes (Carl Dagenhart) Roger’s father and owner of the Grimes’s Worm Farm. Old Willie gets eaten up by worms. I just wanted you to see this guy.

Our lovely feature presentation begins with an ominous wad of scrolling exposition:

"Late in the evening of September 29, 1975, a sudden electrical storm struck a rural sea coast area of Georgia. Power lines, felled by high winds, sent hundreds of thousands of volts surging into the muddy ground, cutting off all electricity to the small, secluded town of Fly Creek. During the period that followed the storm, the citizens of Fly Creek experienced what scientists believe to be one of the most bizarre freaks of nature ever recorded.
This is the story…."

Said exposition is confirmed by a montage of storm-and-lightning scenes that immediately follow the opening scroll, followed by the spartan title credit in bold red letters. Scary stuff. The credits appear over a mixture of stock footage storm scenes and various shots of the town of Fly Creek itself (and some odd looking worms dubbed with ‘screaming’ sounds! I kid you not!). (Oddly, nearly every building has lights on, despite being told that the city had lost all power.) There is also an odd song being sung in the background, which means that there could be a "Squirm" soundtrack (now that is terrifying!)

The credits continue…and continue..and finally end. Could so many people really want to be associated with this film?

Ahh, that’s better, the credits are over and we see a large yellow house (ok, a huge yellow house), bathed in the early morning sunlight. We segue inside and see our skinny, red-headed heroine, Geri, taking a showing (or at least her ‘stunt double’, her body is slightly obscured by the translucent shower curtain.) It’s hard to believe that watching a woman take a shower could be so boring, yet ‘Squirm’ accomplishes that feat…

Out in the yard, the local yokel, Roger, is busy pulling up weeds, or food, or something from the yard. Geri’s mother, Naomi, whom I will refer to as ‘Maw’ from now on, pokes her head out the kitchen window and offers Roger a cool drink; an offer he accepts as soon as he is finished with "…this buunnnch." (Try to say ‘bunch’ with the corniest Southern accent you can muster.)

Inside the palatial house, Geri and Maw are cleaning up in the kitchen. Maw complains that since the power is out the food will "spawwlll" in the heat. (It’s impossible to ‘type’ out these horrendous, hammed-up, Southern drawls that the ‘characters’ use in this film. It’s excruciating to listen to.)

Ahh, now we get to the meat of the movie, so to speak. It turns out that Geri has met a city-boy at the antique fair (!), Mick. (Oddly credited with no last name, simply ‘Mick’, while the other characters have 2 names…yup, that’s what I think about while watching movies like this.) When Geri mentions that Mick is coming down to spend a few days "in the country" (who the hell would want to spend 5 days in Fly Creek?), Maw drops the plate she was drying, and it smashes on the tile floor.

Geri, suddenly with a dust pan in her hand (nice editing), bends down to help clean up the porcelain remains. Maw doesn’t want to give Geri the impression that she doesn’t approve of Mick’s visit, so she blames her jumpiness of the previous night’s thunder (?). It’s just that Maw doesn’t want Geri to get her feelings hurt if Mick doesn’t show up like he said he would. (What? You mean he was just saying he wanted to visit her in Fly Creek just to get laid? Say it isn’t so!) In actuality, it’s not discussed exactly why Mick is coming for a visit (Note From Future: Mick’s there to look at some of Geri’s antiques. (Yawn.))

Maw walks to the door and looks out in consternation. You see, she can’t stop thinking about the storm, she goes on to say that there is "something evil about it"…Well, this is completely ludicrous. The storm, no matter how big it was, simply knocked down a power-line thus pissing off a bunch of worms. It’s not like some malevolent force sent the worms as a plague upon the good people of Fly Creek…the so called ‘monsters’ in this movie were created by bad luck, not by an evil power.

Anyway, down comes Geri’s sister, Alma. Geri wonders if Roger could borrow his truck so she can "cut through the woods and meet Mick on route 41…". Alma, who looks like she and a broom once took a trip through a Brendel transporter from "The Fly", responds with "I don’t know, ask Roger." Such insightful dialog! Auteur! Auteur! This movie is such a joy to watch!

At this junction, in walks Roger, apparently finished working with that last ‘buunnnncchhh’. He exchanges some witless dialog with Alma (Alma: "Where’d you’d get that shirt…out robbing corpses again?" Roger:"How’s your pimples?" Yes, this all makes no sense.), while Maw sits down to do some knitting. Geri coyly asks Roger to borrow his truck to pick up somebody "on route 41", but carefully avoids mentioning that it’s a man she’s picking up, so as to not stir up Roger’s jealousy.

Well, Alma lets the cat out of the bag and mentions that this mystery guest is in fact a man named Mick. Now that the secret is out, Geri abashedly asks Roger again if she can borrow his truck. He reluctantly gives her the keys, warning her to be careful with the "shipment" (a worm shipment, that is. He’s a worm farmer, dontcha know!). Geri takes the keys and makes a quick exit from this embarrassing moment. (Not like this scene successfully portrayed a sense of embarrassment, except for the awful acting and those ridiculous accents that they are using.)

Cut to Mick on the bus to Fly Creek. Unfortunately for the travelers there is a fallen tree blocking the flooded road. (Wow! A fallen tree and a flooded road! How will Mick ever get to Fly Creek now!?) The bus driver has no choice but to turn around and head back to Poolerville (or something..I don’t remember the name and I’m sure as hell not going to go back and watch that scene again just to find out!) Mick jumps out of his seat and says that he’ll just get off here. He pulls his luggage out of the overhead racks: a suitcase, fishing poles, and a tennis racket (??!!), and gets off the bus. (While disembarking, Mick unwittingly smacks nearly everybody in the head with his fishing pole, because, well, it’s funny.) The bus driver points out that Fly Creek is about 5 miles ("mahhlls") straight ahead, but Mick could take a short-cut through the woods, in which case it’s only a half-mile journey. (That’s quite a short cut! Why didn’t they just build the road in that direction?)

To further stress the ‘hero out of his element’ tone, Mike asks the bus driver if there is a restroom in the area. The bus driver gives him a look which says ‘stupid city boy’ and drives off in disgust. You see, any self-respecting country boy would just ‘whip it out’ while in the woods if he had to take a leak. Mick, being from the city, would never think of pissing anywhere else but in a restroom. Har dee har!

More hilarity ensues as we see Mick trudging through the woods, burdened with all of his useless city "stuff". Mike somehow manages to fall into a chest deep hole filled with water (?), and looks up to see Geri laughing at his misfortune. Mick hauls himself up out of the hole and pleasantries are exchanged. After walking for a while, I guess, they reach Roger’s truck that Geri borrowed in order to pick him up. Needless to say, the truck looks like a losing entry from the "Junk Yard Challenge" show. When Mick asks who owns the truck, Geri tells him about Robert, their neighbor, and the worm farm he owns. (Hmmm…a worm farm right next to Geri’s house…I wonder if that is going to be a factor in this movie?)

On the way home, Geri mentions that they have to stop in town to buy some ice because the electricity is still out. (Mick: "I like a good thunderstorm…it makes you feel…helpless.") Downtown Fly Creek appears to be a real shit hole. Just thought I’d mention that. (Ok, the film was filmed in Port Wentworth, Georgia, so please, if you live there, don’t send me hate mail. I never meant to deride the fine township of Port Wentworth, but if you allow a film titled "Squirm" to be filmed in your town, then you’re kind of asking for it.)

Instead of waiting in the truck, like any sane city person would do, he decides to pop into the local diner and get a feel for the local folk. Inside the diner is the sleazy, and I mean sleazy, Sheriff. (Credited simply as ‘Sheriff’. How imaginative.) The Sheriff is sitting, drinking coffee, and pinching the waitresses ass whenever she walks by. (How did they brew coffee without electricity?)

Sitting at the bar, Mick listens to the Sheriff and the Waitress discuss the damage from the storm. It appears that one of the huge power-line towers was toppled during the storm and is still ‘hot’, thus running massive amounts of electricity into the ground. (You would think the power company would have shut down power to that section of the grid, but what do I know?)

When a lull in the conversation comes around, Mick spins around on his stool a couple of times (??) and orders "an egg cream and a glass of water." (Ok! Ok, already! I get it! He’s a ‘fish out of water’…Enough!) When the waitress expresses her ignorance in the ways of making an "egg cream", Mick explains the process (basically chocolate syrup and soda water "with a shot of milk to give it a head"..gag) and she proceeds to whip one up for him.

Mick receives his beverage and takes a sip. He immediately throws down the glass in disgust and nearly jumps from his seat. Wriggling in the spilled chocolate milk is a worm. (It’s actually a centipede, but oh well.) We cut to a close up shot of some entirely different type of ‘worm’ complete with a dubbed ‘screaming’ sound. (Screaming worms??? Give me a freakin’ break!)

Now, before Mick takes a drink you can plainly see the worm laying on the bottom of the glass, so in reality, he wouldn’t have noticed there was a worm in his drink until he drank his way all the way to the bottom. Then again, in reality worms don’t scream and kill people.

Anyway, the waitress accuses Mick of being a "comedian" (which I can say he definitely is not) and insists that he put the worm there himself (?). The commotion has now come to the attention of the Sheriff (man, I wish they had given that character a name…), who saunters over to find out what this city boy is doing down in good ol’ Fly Creek. Mick manages to weasel his way out of the diner without causing anymore trouble, but he certainly has been targeted by the Sheriff for further harassment. (Oh boy. I can’t wait.)

With a potentially explosive situation now defused, we cut to see Mick and Geri have made it home without further trouble. Geri introduces Mick to Alma and Maw, but he can’t shake anybody’s hands because he’s carrying the big block of ice that Geri bought. (My sides! Stop! Ho! Ho!) After Mick puts away the ice, Geri remembers that they have an appointment at "the Beardsley place" to look at some antiques. Running late, Geri and Mick rush off to said location, but not before Mick plants a big kiss on her mouth; a kiss not entirely unwanted by Geri. (Yech)

As Mick and Geri are driving away in the family station wagon (one of those hideous 1970′s station wagon’s with the fake wood side paneling…), Roger runs up and starts chewing out Geri for ruining his truck load of worms. Not understanding what Roger’s so upset about, they park the car and run over to see what all the fuss is about.

Roger is standing beside his junker truck with the cargo doors open, revealing the horrible truth: all of his worms are missing! Standing beside the truck is Roger’s irate father, Willie, who’s pissed off because he lost over 100,000 worms, costing him nearly $300! (I do declare!) Roger explains the situation using some Classic Lines, but Geri and Mick insist that they had nothing to do with the missing worms. (Mick says that he certainly didn’t let them out, but Roger is not satisfied and inquires: "If younn didn’t, den who did?" (Please, please, shoot me now.)

For some reason, old man Willie puts the blame on his son Roger, and chews him out for letting the worms out. (I don’t know what’s happening here. It’s not like these characters are a group of Mensa members.) Roger gets his ass chewed out for a while for lending the truck to Geri while Mick and Geri watch in embarrassed silence. (It’s gonna take Willie nearly a whole week to replace the worms. How does somebody replace 100,000 worms anyway?) After chewing out Roger (blowing his lines a couple times in the process), Willie stomps off leaving Roger to mull over what’s happened. Geri apologizes again before she and Mick pile back into the station wagon (blue with fake wood panel, ack!) and drive off.

Upon reaching the Beardsley manor (a rusty tin-roofed shack, of course, because you know, nobody in Georgia has a house) they find that Beardsley is not at home. Not wanting to miss out this golden opportunity to see the renowned Beardsley Antique Collection, Geri looks around back while Mick peers into the front windows. Suddenly, a scream from Geri sends Mick scurrying around the house to see what the trouble is.

Mick and Geri a startled to find a skeleton laying half-submerged in the goopy Georgia mud. Mick probes the bones with his finger (yuch! C’mon dude!) as he and Geri try to figure out who it is. (Duh!) They eventually come to the conclusion that the best course of action would be to fetch the Sheriff.

Cut to see the Sheriff pulling up to the Beardsley place. Geri and Mick lead him "out back" and show him where the skeleton is laying. <Gasp!> The skeleton is gone! The Sheriff immediately suspects that Mick is playing another ‘game’. (Really though, why the hell would Mick want to do something like that?) The Sheriff tells Mick to get the hell out of Fly Creek (can they do that?). Fortunately for Mick and Geri, the Sheriff decides to let them off with a warning since "it’s too hot" (!!). As the Sheriff turns to leave he gives Mick one final incomprehensible warning: "Now, if I see you even one more time…you won’t even be able to call a city lawyer…because the all the phones are dead!" (??) OK. If you say so.

Next scene. Moving right along now. Looks like Mick and Geri have tracked down Roger at the local watering hole. Mick apologizes about the whole worm ‘incident’ by solemnly saying he’s "sorry about those worms." Fair enough. In an effort to mend some fences, Geri and Mick invite Roger along for a fishing trip. Roger enthusiastically heads off to the bait shop in order to "get some stuff and things."

While Roger is at the bait shop, Mick and Geri go out to the truck to try and figure out what happened to the worms. (C’mon, would Mick really give a crap about what happened to a bunch of damned worms?) Mick opens the back doors and pokes around inside only to reveal a skeleton! (The same skeleton from the Beardsley place.) Along comes old man Grimes with some boxes, so Mick covers the skeleton back up and hides on the other side of the truck. Grimes tosses the boxes into the back of the truck and stomps off again.

So, does Willie Grimes know about the skeleton? Is he the one who moved it there? Do you care?

Geri suggests telling the Sheriff, but Mick poo-poo’s that plan by saying "Tell him what?" (Huh?)

Anyway, the opt to go fishing with Roger instead. Aha! The fishing trip is only a ploy to keep Roger occupied until Mick can make his way back to the Grimes house to investigate. (Or something. Don’t ask.) Out on the boat, Mick takes on some bug spray (because he’s a city boy) while he comments on the stench of the water. Geri explains that it’s low-tide…and she doesn’t even understand how the fish could live in the rank water. Roger, with his rapier wit, retorts, "Maybe they come from New York!" Get it? You don’t? Me neither.

Mick takes out a box of worms and offers Roger the honor of setting them on the hooks since he’s a "professional." Roger demurs, noting that he hates worms…in fact, he finds them disgusting! Ok, whatever. Geri finally takes charge and hooks her own worm. Not to be outdone, Mick grabs a chubby night-crawler from the box and is promptly bitten! In fact, the thing takes a good chunk of his arm and gives him a nasty wound. (How did a worm manage to do that?) Roger, calmly watching the whole nasty episode, mentions that he’s seen worms bite like that before…allow me to quote Roger’s terrifying tale (please imagine this dialog spoken in an wayyyy over the top Southern dialect:

When I was little, my daddy just started the worm farm, experimentin’ with ways of gettin’ em out of the ground. Tried electricity. Took my train transformer and hooked it up. Then he wet down the ground, and set back, and waited til it get dark…They come out of the ground all right! Like roaches up a drain pipe! And pretty near cut off all my thumb.

At the conclusion of this riveting tale, Roger shows him his left-thumb which is missing the end joint. (You mean to tell me worms bit off the end of his thumb? Gimme a break!)

It suddenly dawns on Mick that this would be a good opportunity to slip away and do some sleuthing, so he says he wants to go to shore and put some antiseptic on the worm bite and to also "take a nap." (!) Geri, not particularly enthusiastic over the idea of spending the afternoon fishing with Roger, reluctantly agrees to the plan as Roger rows Mick to shore. Mike gets out of the boat, cradling his wounded arm (it’s a freakin worm bite, you big wussy!), while Roger cheerfully paddles off with a none-too-excited Geri.

Safely out of sight, Mick scampers back to the Grimes place to investigate. Seeing that the coast is clear, Mick hops into the back of the worm truck, closes the doors, and flicks on his lighter to take a closer look at the remains.

For some unexplained reason, Mick first pops off the bottom jaw from the skull (!), and then twists off the skull itself (!!). What information he could possibly glean from this act of corpse desecration is beyond me.

Having found what he needs, (Ok, I get it. I think he’s taking the skull to the Sheriff for proof. Maybe.) Mick jumps out of the truck and is startled by Alma. (Um, who just happened to be poking around the Grime’s worm truck?) Mick tries to hide the skull under his shirt (!), but this clever ruse is quickly discovered by the alert Alma who says that "Roger isn’t going to dig" the fact that Mick took the skull from his truck. (Huh? Did I miss something here?) Anyway, Mick, with Alma tagging along, scurry off to find the Sheriff.

I’m not even half way through the movie yet.

That’s a little depressing.

But not as depressing as having to watch Roger the Worm Farmer putting the moves on Geri "Flat Butt" Sanders.

Yes, as Geri half-heartedly fishes in the mucky water, Roger cuddles up behind her and unloads his heart to Geri. What they don’t notice is that the worms have crawled out of the bait box and are making their way across the boat and over to their feet. (Is this suppose to be ‘scary’?) Roger, in an effort to swoon Geri, even has a surprise ("soo-prize!") for her. Having distracted Geri with talk of a "soo-prise", Roger tries to kiss Geri, an advance that she quickly rejects. The now hot and frustrated Roger roughly grabs her and says that if Mick comes near her again he’ll "bust his liver loose!" (Sounds painful!)

We see that the worms are still crawling towards them (boy! Scary!), and now a strange noise is played on the soundtrack to indicate that the ‘worms are coming’ or something. Roger now forces a kiss on Geri (I really didn’t need to see that), but is quickly thrown down to the floor of the boat by the enraged red-head. Roger lands with a thud, lets out a scream of pain, and…and…we cut to see…

Mick and Alma pounding on the door to the local dentist office. The dentist’s office is closed because of the power outage, so Mick forces open a window and breaks in. ("Wow! Just like in New York!" shouts Alma with glee.) After Mick enters, in climbs Alma as well, giving us a much unwanted view of her patch-work covered rear end. Here, you can enjoy it too:

Just sharing the full "Squirm" experience with you

After looking through the dentist’s file for, oh, 7 seconds, Mick finds the X-rays that match the teeth in the skull: Aaron Beardsley.

Yippee.

Oh yeah, Mick sets the skull on a tray and a centipede crawls out of the eye socket. Oooooo! Scary!!!!!

(Cut to a quick shot of a live power line sweeping back and forth across the forest floor. So…the power company still hasn’t cut off the power to the downed lines? Isn’t that like the first thing they do? Stupid movie.)

Now we see that Mick and Alma are making their back home. Walking along the side of the road, Mick cradles the skull in his shirt…yeah…don’t want to draw any attention to yourself.

You’all don’t pay no mind to us…

As they reach the front yard, Geri bursts out of the house crying hysterically. She tries to tell Mick about Roger but sees the skull and runs back inside. Mick hands the skull to Alma and calms Geri enough so she can tell the story. As it so happens, Geri tells Mick that "the worms attacked Roger" and then he went screaming into the forest. (Um, since you guys were out fishing in in the river when it happened, I guess you were kind enough to row him back to shore so he could run into the woods?) Mick reassures Geri that she did the right thing by not chasing after Roger, noting that "If Roger can see, he’ll make it home too." (Huh? If he can see? What?)

At this point, in comes Alma and wants to know what they’re going to do with Beardsley’s skull. Geri freaks out when she realizes whose skull it is ("He was a beautiful person!"…oh brother!) All the commotion brings in Maw, forcing Alma to hide the skull behind her back. (Is this supposed to be funny?)

Geri defuses the situation by pretending they were arguing over who was going to fix dinner. Maw suggests Alma should do it, and oh yeah, make an extra side dish because Roger was also invited to dinner. (Was that in the beginning? Whatever. I’m not going back to see.) Maw exits the room, but not before saying in a sultry voice that "It’s been a long time since we’ve had…two hungry men over for dinner." (Talk about squirm! Yuch!)

As Alma stays behind to fix dinner, Mick and Geri drive over to the Grimes Worm Farm to see if Roger managed to make his way home. Nobody appears to be home, but Mick does discover the body of old man Grimes. Mick notes a ‘squishy’ sound coming from the corpse and pulls back the shirt to reveal that the entire torso is being eaten away by worms. Mike freaks out and bashes the worms with a shovel a few times before running back to the car. He shoves Geri into the passenger seat and takes off with tires squealing. (On a dirt road?)

Mick races into town and finds the Sheriff having dinner at a particularly sleazy looking Italian restaurant. (How is a restaurant still open with no electricity?) As the Sheriff and his date (the actress playing the ‘date’ is credited as "The Sheriff’s Girl". Wow! ) dine on their spaghetti dinners, Mike retells the story of how he found Grimes’s body…covered by flesh eating worms! (Talk about no social grace.)

Now the Sheriff has had enough of Mick’s BS. He raises his fork and points it at Geri and Mick saying, "There’s a lot of spaghetti here…it may take us ten, fifteen minutes to finish it. Now that’s a bigger head start then you deserve!"

Nice continuity error. From one angle there is a piece of spaghetti hanging from the fork tines, while from the other angle the fork is clean. Ahhh…the small diamonds in the rough. It’s the small ‘high-points’ like these that make writing these reviews worth it.

Mick takes the hint and drives back out to the Beardsley place. (Can we please get on with it!) I have no idea what he’s looking for. With Geri in tow, he points out a closed door on the side of the house. He turns and asks Geri what’s behind the door, to which she replies, "I think that’s where he keeps his well water." Not satisfied with that answer, Mick responds queries "Any candles?" (Candles? What the hell? And how would Geri know where Beardsley kept his candles?)

Well, Mick reaches to open the door, stops, and then goes back to the car with Geri. (Yep. You figure this all out.) Via Mick’s thorough sleuthing, or lack there of, he deduces that Roger must have taken Beardsley’s skeleton and put it in the worm truck. Of course! "That must have been the surprise he was telling me about on the boat," shouts Geri. It turns out Roger was going to sell the skeleton at an auction (!!) where he "that thing could bring a hundred dollars…He was talking about going into the business!" (Huh? Um, isn’t the skeleton, um, what’s it called: evidence! And what "business" are you talking about Geri? The skeleton selling business?)

When Geri enquires as to who killed Beardsley in the first place, Mick drops the bombshell: "The worms!" (Ahhh! So that’s why the movie is called "Squirm"!)

Back at the dinner party, the somber guests (sans Roger, of course) are gathered around the table. Maw suggests that somebody run over to the Grimes’s to see where Roger is, but Geri comes up with the excuse that he "probably had to work late at the worm farm." (What? Was there a dead-line he had to make?). Satisfied with that, Maw and the others sit down and half-heartedly begin to eat dinner.

OK. Why are they keeping all this a secret from their mother? Why the deception? Who cares?

Just as they begin to eat, a gigantic tree topples over and crushes the dining room where they were sitting. (!!!) The shot showing the exterior of the house shows the tree falling onto an obviously bogus addition to a real house. Also, the sloping roof of the, ahem, dining room in now way matches the completely flat roof shown in the interior scenes. Just so you know.

And yes, the room that was destroyed is shown from the inside where you can see that the roof is indeed made of paper!

Fortunately, nobody was injured (or maybe I should say ‘unfortunately’). While Alma escorts a shocked Maw into the living room, Geri and Mick investigate the fallen tree. Sure enough, the entire root system has been eaten away by, yes, worms. In fact, the ground underneath the tree is a teeming mass of wriggling worms and centipedes. Mick runs to get some gasoline, but just as quickly as he can get a can from the shed, the worms disappear back into the ground. (Totally impossible given the number of worms they showed in the previous shot. Completely, utterly impossible.)

Mick jumps to the conclusion that the only thing "holding them back" is the light. (Hmm, can you please explain how Roger was attacked in the middle of the day while he was fishing?) Anyway, Mick is going to run out to some abandoned sawmill and fetch some plywood in order to board up the house. Mick vetoes Geri’s plans of accompanying him, instead suggesting that she stay at home and take care of Maw who looks "like she’s going to crack." (I can understand any actor appearing in the film being in danger of a nervous break down.)

Well, Alma decides to take a shower. (The thought of a shower scene featuring Alma is enough to give me a nervous breakdown.) When she turns on the faucet, the expected flow of water is nowhere to be seen. Assuming that the pipes are clogged (guess what they’re clogged with…), Alma angrily returns to the living room where her freaked out mother is staring up into a hole in the ceiling. (Go figure.)

Meanwhile, Mick is returning from the sawmill on foot, lugging a bunch of old plywood on his back. Out of nowhere (literally) out jumps Roger and shoves Mick down into a hole (where do all these holes come from?) Mick staggers up but immediately collapses from the pain of a sprained ankle. Looking up, he sees that Roger is now, well, how shall I say, he has worms hanging out of his face and he’s all green . Yup. Worms will do that to you sometimes.

Roger is somehow infected or infested or something with the worms and is out of his head. (Well, even more so now.) Before stalking off to deal with Geri, Roger points down to Mick and says, "You’re gonna be spoiled now! You’re gonna be the worm face!" (Sometimes I feel like I’m missing something.) Roger picks up a piece of plywood and throws it down on Mick, knocking him unconscious (?). Whatever.

Back home, night has fallen. (That was fast.) Oh yeah, Alma left the ‘water’ on and the bathtub is filled to the rim with worms that have forced themselves up through the pipes. (How exactly did the worms get into the water system?) Alma, hearing the ‘squishy’ noises coming from upstairs exclaims "I can’t wait to wash my face!" and scurries up to wash. When Alma turns the door knob, the door bursts open from the pressure of the mass of worms that have filled the entire bath room! Man, this is supposed to be scary, but c’mon, how many worms can there be?

Mick, meanwhile, has managed to free himself from the sheet of plywood and is attempting to get to his feet. (It’s also noticeably brighter again. Strange how that happens in bad movies.) Mick pulls out his handy dandy lighter and sees that worms are crawling out from the sides of the hole now that evening has fallen. (Well, fallen here, back at the house in the previous scene it was already pitch black outside.)

Mick takes off his shirt, wraps it around a fallen branch, and lights it with his lighter, scrambles up the side of the hole, and runs back to the house. (Just so you know, when Mick waves the ersatz torch at the worms, they creep back into the earth. This effect is realized by simply playing the original ‘creeping out of the earth’ footage in reverse.)

While Mick has been struggling in the hole, the Sheriff has just finished, er, ‘getting busy’ with his date. Their locale of choice for making love is none other than the town jail (this guy’s a real Romeo). As they bathe in the after-glow of love, we cut to a shot of a worm’s POV. No really. A worm’s POV as it’s crawling along the hallway of the Sheriff’s office. Man. This is exciting stuff.

Well, it turns out that while the Sheriff and his ‘girl’ have been lost in the embrace of Eros, thousands, scratch that, millions of worms have made their way into the office and are now pushing their way through the bars of the jail cell. At this point, there are so many worms that the film makers no longer used real worms. Instead, they’ve opted for some sort of length of pink rubber, which of course is the same length and color for every worm, making the ‘mass’ of worms look just like what it really is: a big pile of pink rubber worms.

As they two lovers cuddle in the jail-cell bed, the Sheriff’s girl begins to giggle and say, ‘C’mon now…stop doing that!’ I hope you can see where all of this is going…the Sheriff says "Doing what?" blah blah. As if worms could somehow coordinate an ‘attack’, the girl screams and the worms shoot into the cell en mass. Scratch the Sheriff and his ‘Girl’.

Yes, the viewer must endure another "Worm POV" scene at the diner. A bunch of teens are sitting around eating and drinking by candle light since there is still no power. One girl hears something ‘weird’ and her boyfriend takes a candle and illuminates the floor with it. Sure enough, the floor is a mass of wriggly pink plastic worms which somehow manage to kill everybody, even those that have jumped up on top of the bar counter. Who cares. Let’s just get this over with.

Oh goodie! Back at Geri and Alma’s house, we see that night has fallen (again). As Geri makes her rounds with the candle (they still haven’t told Maw about the whole ‘worm thing’ that’s going on…), she notices that a few ambitious worms have forced their under the front door. (What she didn’t see was Worm-Roger peering through the window behind her.)

What is with Worm-Roger? Why don’t the worms eat him? Have they vested him with some sort of supernatural worm-immunity? The whole ‘Worm-Roger’ idea is so stupid and distracting it makes me, well, squirm.

Ok, nearly done here. Geri asks her mom if she’s closed all the doors. Sure she has, except Maw left the back door open to "get some fresh air". (Doh!) Geri goes to close it and is grabbed by Worm-Roger who has surreptitiously made his way into the house via the unsecured back door. Worm-Roger stifles Geri’s cries with his hand and extinguishes the candles because the light hurts him. Because he a Worm-Guy now. Or something. I guess.

Mick, on the other hand, is doing better. He has made his way back to the house by use of his shirt-torch. (However, we are now subjugated to scenes of Mick without his shirt on.)

Ok, moving along, Mick sneaks through the house, looking for Geri and/or Alma. He notices a ladder leading up into the attic, peeks up to have a look, and all of a sudden Worm-Roger jumps out of the darkened doorway and attacks. If I wrote that last description in a way which evoked no excitement whatsoever, then I have accurately described the scene.

For some reason, Worm-Roger has bound and gagged Geri in the attic and is now intent on whooping Mick’s ass. Mick tries to run downstairs but sees that the entire first floor of the house has been filled with worms. No kidding. The entire first floor of the house is full of worms. Wait a minute. Before you think that this scene might be ‘icky’, it’s simply a room full of those pink plastic ‘fake worms’ being churned around by something under the surface, so it’s just not particularly scary.

Ok, Ok, I got sidetracked there. Mick and Worm-Roger get into a ‘choking-match’ on the stairs. Somehow Mick overpowers the much larger (and worm-infested) Roger, tossing him down the stairs and into the mass of worms. Roger struggles briefly before disappearing beneath the surface.

Now who’s gonna run the worm farm?

Finished dealing with Worm-Roger, Mick makes his way upstairs and rescues Geri from her bonds. The two knuckle-heads make their way back upstairs and climb out onto a tree limb which conveniently reaches over to a second-floor window. The branch twitches, and almost breaks, but no, Geri and Mick are still safely ensconced up in the tree. (That was a close one! Whew!).

Fade to the next day. Mick and Geri are sleeping in the tree (!) when a power-company employee walks up below them and wakes them by saying that the power is turned back on and everything is "OK". Power-company guy walks back to his truck and drives off…to somewhere.

Cut scenes. The camera pans through the house, and settles on an old steamer trunk laying on the floor. The truck shudders and shakes and out bursts a mass of flesh-eating worms! No wait. It’s Alma. She apparently survived the worm attack by hiding in the trunk. (Damn.)

Mike and Geri scurry down from the tree and back into the house. Camera fades out to medium exterior shot of the house. Pan to ground. Zoom to grass and closing credits.

Blah.

Stupid movie.

Dennis Grisbeck (May 2005)

EDIT: October 2008: This review was cleaned up (sort of) and proudly submitted as part of the B-Movie Extermination Roundtable!

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1977 was a banner year for science fiction with the release of two true classics, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And on the other end of the scales it also brought us a delightfully awful piece of Hong Kong lunacy called “Mighty Peking Man.” (It’s Chinese title is Hsing Hsing Wang which translates as “King Orangutan.”) The Peking Man was born when the venerable Shaw Brothers decided to cash in on the financial success of Dino DeLaurentiis’s wretched 1976 King Kong remake. With an eye for the international market, the famously uninhibited filmmakers pulled out all of the stops and gave the world a lavish epic brimming with jet-fueled melodrama, ketchup soaked violence, and schmaltz so naked it should have qualified the movie for an XXX rating. When you throw in the dated 1970’s pop aesthetic, the result is a piece of jaw-dropping, industrial grade Asian Fantasy Film camp. Let’s sit back and enjoy.

THE PLOT

After the Shaw brother’s wonderfully old school logo promises us a cinematic treat in “Shaw Scope!” we cut to a college library where a group of unidentified men gather around an old newspaper article. The leader, I guess, a smoothie in business suit and indoor sun glasses, recounts how witnesses have seen the “prehistoric Peking Man” somewhere in the Himalayas.

Wasting no time at all, we cut to a toy village in the Himalayas. Gentle villagers go about their drab little lives when, “one day, without warning, there was an earthquake.” Actually, that’s not true. Watching the movie you notice that thunder and lightning proceed the earthquake (!?), thus giving the villagers about 5 seconds of warning. Sadly, it is a warning that most of them fail to heed. For while the smart ones dash into their uselessly flimsy huts, most just gawk up at the dramatically threatening skies and so are caught by the earthquake completely unprepared. (Let me be bluntly honest here and say that this foolish irresponsibility cuts deeply into the sympathy I would otherwise feel for these hapless villagers. After all, what can you do with people who “won’t help themselves?”)

The earth heaves and buckles as we cut between a set crowded with running extras and a Japanese Monster Movie-style model village. A styrofoam mountain crumples, and out steps the 60-foot tall Mighty Peking Man himself! To celebrate he stands over the upward facing camera and flaunts his anatomically incorrect crotch at the audience. – Watching on my TV at home, I can only imagine the impact this scene had on the big screen! Straight away he strides thru the earthquake-ravaged village, freely stepping on any buildings and/or peasants who get in his way. Especially memorable are the close-ups of his rubber face, with a mouth stuck open in a perpetual roar and eyes so bulging you fear he has a serious medical condition.

The villagers overact to this new situation and attack the Peking Man with spears and primitive wooden catapults (was this village preparing to declare war on Tibet??) Sadly, this only inspires an escalating round of violence and the Peking Man destroys what little is left of the village. (I’d like to take a moment here and note that although we are told the Mighty Peking Man is 60 feet tall, depending on the shot his height seems to jump from around 20 to 100 feet throughout the movie. Hats off to director Ho Meng-Hwa for boldly eschewing foolish consistency, which, as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, is “the hobgoblin of little minds.”)

Back at the library, our unidentified men stare at a newspaper photo showing a giant footprint. “The evidence looks conclusive then,” says one of them. (What evidence?) At which point Mr. Smoothie proposes they go out and capture the giant then get rich by stuffing and displaying him back in Hong Kong (Boooo!) But who will lead this expedition? One of the unidentified men knows just the guy, a “hunter here in Hong Kong. An explorer. He just lost his girl and wants to get away.” (You know, one of the things that a Hong Kong movie makes you appreciate is exposition. There’s so little of it that whenever it does appear you feel like you’ve just won $25 in the lottery. OK, it’s not worth that much, but its very rarity makes the occasion special.)

Cut to a bitter, angry, drunken man passing out at a bar while a cynically jazzy saxophone wails in the background. That’s our hero! Mr. Smoothie enters and rouses him by saying, “Hey, come on John.” This is very exciting as we finally know somebody’s name! Will John agree to lead the expedition to capture the Mighty Peking Man? Will they get him? Will it all end tragically? I’m not telling!

Now that we are all up to speed, up come the titles, all of which are overlaid on interesting footage of Indian village and city life emphasizing the exoticism and poverty to be found there. The lean bodies, worn faces and grim expressions of the people in these shots have a sober reality that contrasts sharply with the surrounding fantasy of the rest of the movie.

Freshly arrived in India, our heroes are assaulted by the local press. Everybody talks at once in this scene so it’s nearly impossible to understand what’s being said, but the gist seems to be that John, or Johnny as everyone calls him, says, “trust us, we’ll tell you something when we have something.” Hmmm. I’ve been with these guys since the start of the movie, so I guess I know them better than anybody – and I trust them about as far as I could throw them. The local press, however, takes them at their word. (Pause for dramatic effect.) ….And I still don’t know who the hell these expedition people are!

Cut to ox-drawn wagons bravely trudging along a dirt road and up blares some full-blooded adventure music. Drums pound with excitement as our heroes smile, smoke

cigarettes and watch monkeys play with themselves in trees. Horns shriek with adrenalin as a bear sits on a stump. More horns scream with anxiety as the wagons negotiate gentle slopes and shallow streams. I’m so keyed up with tension that I nearly faint when one of the wagons gets stuck in the mud.

Finally, the expedition arrives at a deathly quiet village. And a good thing too, as the blaring music was starting to give me a headache. Loitering about the seemingly deserted village the explorers are electrified to hear the roar of the Mighty Peking Man himself! This so startles an off-camera crewman that he throws an armful of chickens up into the air. But wait, it’s not the Peking Man but a whole herd of rogue elephants! Angry over some unexplained thing they storm into the village and begin pushing over huts and stepping on native members of the expedition. This gives our “heroes” a chance to use their guns, and Johnny proves himself a brave man by shooting an elephant to death. (Boooo!) While full of cheesy effects, this sequence is surprisingly eye-catching because the filmmakers hired a herd of real elephants and had them push over real huts. What were the salary terms? I don’t know, but I can just imagine the producer laughing to a pal in a bar back in Hong Kong, “…and the best part of it was, they worked for peanuts!” (Rim shot. Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week!)

Just as suddenly as it all began, the attack ends and the elephants storm off back into the jungle, enabling the expedition to continue. And as our gang enjoys a quiet moment around the camp fire that evening I’d like to mention that everybody is dressed just like Indiana Jones. And for once this isn’t a case of blatant copy-catting because “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was still 4 years away at the time of this movie’s production.

Noticing that Johnny is off by himself looking depressed, two unidentified members of the expedition walk over to him. “Johnny, what’s wrong?” they ask, and with a cheerful laugh add, “Is it about your girl friend?” I guess in Hong Kong getting your heart broken is a merry joke to your friends. Anyway, Johnny begins to reminisce about the girl he was about to marry, “then brother Charlie had to show up. He’s a TV director. She had one great ambition. She had to get to the top.”

Soft fade to one of the most stunningly generic romances ever put on film. While a freshly opened can of Time-Life grade music oozes over the sound track Johnny and his girl try hard to look like they’re having fun as they run along a beach on a drab, grey day. They ride a hand-rowed launch out to one of those big floating restaurants where he playfully pushes a live lobster in her face. Being a girl, she makes an “icky” face and slaps ineffectually at the air around her. (It’s a laugh riot!) At a nightclub dripping with 70’s glamour & polyester they slow dance and look blankly into each other’s faces while the string section kicks into over-drive. (This is possibly the most moving 17 seconds of film I’ve ever seen! I felt like I knew these people.)

“One day I came home early,” says Johnny. Uh oh. Prepare yourself, because not only is Johnny happily skipping up the giant, palatial staircase of the mansion he seems to share with his fiancé, but he’s carrying a gift box of roses. This is going to be bad. “I heard voices,” he continues, and opening the bedroom door is shattered to discover his own brother locked in a “passionate” embrace with his fiancé. She collapses in tears while brother Charlie explains it “began as a joke,” (ha ha ha!)– but this doesn’t cut it with the narrow-minded Johnny, who rages “I hate her!” throws the roses at his now ex-fiancé, and storms out of the room.

“And so you decided to get away, and lead an expedition to the Himalayas.” says unidentified colleague number one, thus helpfully telling us something we already knew.

“Look, you’ve got it made.” smiles unidentified colleague number two. “All you have to do is grab the monster, then you’ll be known around the world. You’ll be a hero. Why worry Johnny? You’ll be able to get any woman you want.” Good point, why should he worry? All he has to do is GRAB THE MONSTER!!! What could be easier?

Johnny, apparently unhinged by his recent emotional trauma, chuckles and agrees, saying, “And if we’re going to catch him, we need our sleep.” What a guy!

The expedition continues the next day when (shrieking music!) a tiger attacks from out of the jungle. Tragically, unidentified colleague number one jumps into a pit of quick sand and disappears forever. He is, however, instantly forgotten because we have another amazing animal sequence on our hands as a stunt man, or an extra, or somebody they just pulled off the street wrestles with a full-grown tiger. Johnny leaps into the fray, proving that actor Danny Lee had courage and an extremely well developed work ethic. I’m pretty sure they drugged the tiger before shooting the scene, but it’s still eye-popping in a way that modern CGI effects can never be. (And I just pray that the production didn’t abuse the tiger, but I’m not too confident about that.)

The tiger is driven off, but not before he tears off the (rubber) leg of a porter with a big squishy sound. Mr. Smoothie then subtly confirms our suspicions that he’s a villain by shooting the poor man. No need to waste time trying to save him that way.

The over-excited drums and horns return as our expedition begins to scale the cliffs of the mighty Himalayas. Tragically, unidentified colleague number two and several other expedition members fall off the cliff and plunge to their deaths in – the ocean! I think we’re meant to assume it’s a river, but ocean waves are clearly visible, and even more interesting, the sound of the waves hitting the cliff face has been left on the soundtrack!

Mr. Smoothie, being cowardly as well as greedy, makes a fuss and wants to quit, but Johnny rallies the troops and they press on. They are rewarded by a brief glimpse of something with blond hair running thru the jungle, the discovery of a giant Peking Man footprint, and more shrill horn work on the soundtrack. Things are looking up. Only they’re not. Mr. Smoothie sneaks away into the night with the remaining expedition members leaving Johnny alone in an empty camp. Discouraged, but undaunted, Johnny soldiers on. Walking along by himself on a soundstage, Johnny seems to admire the plastic foliage and beautifully painted studio sky when suddenly, out of nowhere, comes the giant gorilla arm of the Mighty Peking Man!

This scene is both ridiculous and effective. After all, Johnny is supposedly a hunter, and yet he fails to notice a 60-foot gorilla standing just off to his left!? Still, the image of the giant arm reaching out and grabbing him has a surreal, dreamlike quality that, well, grabs you. Ha ha. You know what’s even funnier? It’s that Johnny planned to grab the monster, but now the monster’s grabbed him! (Oh the irony!!)

But enough levity, for Johnny, having been dropped by the giant shrieking ape (butterfingers), is now running for his life, only to fall and hit his head on a rock. Mighty Peking Man sees his helpless target and prepares to crush him with a boulder when we hear a lusty female-Tarzan yodel, and out of the jungle swings a blond vision dressed only in a deer skin bikini and glamour make-up. Played with endearing earnestness by good-sport Evelyne Kraft, we’ve just met the goofiest, most exploited, most likable character in the movie. Let’s call her Nature Girl. (I’m not trying to be sexist here, but the character, a kind of holy innocent, is just too young & naive to be called Nature Woman.)

Speaking some sort of jungle dialect to Peking Man, she convinces him not to crush the unconscious Johnny, but instead to carry him to her Gilligan’s Island-style cave. There Johnny awakens and meets his beautiful savior, and so begins a whirlwind of scenes distinguished by their cheesy 70’s pop music (love it!), sentimental clichés, soft core porn imagery, and psychotic mood swings.

First we get the language lesson, (“Who are YOU? -Who ARE you? -WHO are you??”)

Then comes “Born Free, Part I,” when, happy and smiling, Nature Girl takes Johnny to see her “papa” and “mama” – whom she knows are dead. A disco beat throbs in the background as the athletic Nature Girl teaches Johnny to swing on vines and run thru the jungle with a joyful abandon that those of us trapped in “civilization” can only dream about.

The Tragic Back Story arrives when we abruptly come to the wreckage of a small airplane. Pointing to two styrofoam skeletons in the cockpit Nature Girl says, “Papa. Mama.” and begins to sob. Rifling thru the charred interior Johnny finds a mint condition photograph of little Nature Girl and her parents, which he promptly shows to her. This inspires her to give us a chunk of exposition, “No! Ravf! Ravf! Ravf!! Zzzz. AAAAEEEGGGHH!!”

And thus comes The Flashback. We see a model airplane in flames crash into a (pretty decent) toy jungle. After that it’s hard to tell what’s happening because the effects department got carried away with the superimposed flames, but somehow mom and dad don’t make it, and young Nature Girl is left alone in the jungle. Happily the Mighty Peking Man comes along and adopts her, even picking jungle fruit for her to eat. (Hey, he’s actually a really nice guy!) Returning to the present, Johnny says, “It was Peking Man. He took care of you.” (For some reason this movie feels a need to repeat every flash back in the dialogue.) He has also discovered a diary, unburned, that tells him Nature Girl’s real name is Samantha.

Seconds after recounting her personal tragedy Samantha is again happily running thru the jungle, Johnny in tow, for “Born Free, Part II.” Only this time Johnny is menaced first by a tiger, then by a leopard. But not to worry, they are Samantha’s friends, and we see Evelyne cheerfully hugging both of these dangerous cats. (Yikes!) Then more running thru the jungle, this time to mellow 70’s pop as Samantha teaches Johnny how to eat the ubiquitous jungle fruit. Life is good!

Only it’s not, because now we have the Deadly Snake Attack as a cobra, at the urging of the director, makes a beeline for Samantha and bites her on the inner thigh. Johnny leaps into action and sucks out the poison while Samantha thrashes and moans on the ground below him. This inspiring scene of medical first aid somehow reminds the viewer of another kind of activity – the kind that can give a movie an XXX rating. Producer Run Run Shaw sure was a sneaky little devil! Oh well. As all this excitement is happening the heroic leopard, whom I’ll call Larry, kills the nasty snake in retribution. Samantha stops screaming and passes out. Then up walks a friendly elephant who carries her and Johnny back to the cave! There she continues to writhe and moan in delirium until the Peking Man brings Johnny some magic leaves that cure the poison.

From this scene of natural, bikini clad innocence we cut to the fleshpots of civilization and a man frolicking with two bikini clad women in a hotel swimming pool. The contrast is striking. And good heavens, the man is none other than Mr. Smoothie, who subtly re-confirms our suspicions that he’s a villain by laughing it up with a bunch of babes after he left Johnny to rot in the Jungle. On a roll, he next laughingly tells the local press that Johnny doesn’t stand a chance getting out alone because “he doesn’t know the jungle,” – So, Johnny is a professional hunter who doesn’t know the jungle. And he’s the man Mr. Smoothie chose to lead his expedition – into the jungle. Interesting.

Back at the cave Samantha is fast recovering, and to prove this she gets up and staggers towards a shirtless and sweaty Johnny. She’s doing great, but oh no! She stumbles against him. He catches her, they gaze into each other’s eyes, they embrace, and a Roberta Flack imitator starts singing on the sporadically garbled soundtrack:

“Oooooh, something something something
showed me a thing or two
I guess I saw it in your eyes
And the look of love upon your face
Is too hard to disguise
Maybe just a smile will
Something something something”

Doesn’t that just say it all? And there’s more as the refrain begins!

Could it be something something
Could it be something something
Baaaabyyyyyy?
Could it be something something
Could it be something something
Maaaabyyyyyy.

Having left the cave of love we now see Samantha and Johnny frolicking thru the jungle, again, this time in slow motion. It’s an orgy of happy smiles, flowing blond hair and undulating breasts. And it gets better, for as the love theme continues to pulse along in the background here’s Larry the Leopard, and Samantha is actually swinging him around on her shoulders, in slow motion! Then we see Samantha and a half naked Johnny petting the leopard, in slow motion. Then we see Samantha spinning the leopard around, again!, with Johnny skipping around beside them, in slow motion! Thank God this doesn’t end up in a 3-way!

But what’s this? Oh no, here comes the Enchanted Waterfall Scene. “Are we to be spared nothing!?” I cry shaking my fist towards the heavens. Apparently not, for here they are swimming laps in a pristine jungle pool as nature’s bounty splashes down around them. Finally, the red hues of the setting sun tell us we are nearing the end of our lover’s montage, and so we’ll leave Samantha and Johnny to enjoy their night of passion.

Of course, I can’t speak for the Mighty Peking Man. He’s busy peeping into the cave where Johnny and Samantha are doing it in a scene that manages to be poignant, creepy and ridiculous all at the same time. Heart broken (ick!) he wallows in self-pity and flails about in the moonlit landscape. Fortunately, Samantha awakens and reassures him of her continued affection by nuzzling his outstretched hand.

You’ve got to hand it to Evelyne Kraft. She actually carries that last scene off. And although she is ultimately overwhelmed by the movie’s sleazy voyeurism, her good-natured commitment to the role almost redeems it. That’s saying something because Samantha is so obviously nothing more than a prurient straight-male fantasy. (Alas, prurient gay-male fantasies are rare in Hong Kong movies of this era.)

Back to the movie, where nice guy Johnny proves himself to be a very dim bulb by convincing Samantha to bring Peking Man to Hong Kong. “Don’t worry, he’ll be alright,” he assures her. (Oh boy.) Samantha, having somehow learned to comprehend English, agrees. And that’s great, only now she has to say goodbye to all of her animal friends. And this is really devastating. I mean, the elephant is in tears, and the leopard is so depressed he can’t even look her in the face. And it gets worse when he follows after her and pulls on her bikini strap in an effort to stop her. Because…you see… Warry the Weapard weally weally wuvs her! – And oh God, now I’m starting to choke up, so let’s just move on, shall we?

Cut to a city in India and the awesome site of Mighty Peking Man towering over the buildings while hundreds of screaming extras run for cover. Samantha calms the panic by directing Mighty Peking Man to lie down just as Mr. Smoothie drives up and exults,

“I’ll find a large freighter, and in a week we’ll put that stupid animal on show in Hong Kong!” (Boooo!)

Johnny, whom I’m tempted to start calling Mr. Stupid, somehow remains blind to the sleazy, abusive, and exploitive nature of the man who abandoned him in the wilderness and continues to go along. So cut to a miserable, storm tossed ocean voyage, with Mighty Peking Man chained on deck and Samantha in a general freak out. Happily, Johnny cheers her up with the gift of a two-piece leather hot-pants and bodice combo, which, hilariously, is as tight and revealing as her dear skin bikini. Even so, child of nature that she is, she finds this artificial garb, so appropriate for “civilization,” too restrictive and throws it out the port window. Naked, innocent, and free, she falls back onto her bed and stares blissfully up at the ceiling. (Hey, it’s almost like she’s….oh, never mind.)

It’s also on this voyage that Johnny shows a glimmer of conscience and adult understanding when he expresses doubts to Mr. Smoothie about exploiting the Peking Man for money. (Now? Now you’re having doubts!) Mr. Smoothie, however, has no trouble at all steam-rolling over this potential obstacle.

Once in Hong Kong you can feel the excitement as crowds of extras point out into the bay in time to a disco boogey beat, and a badly superimposed Mighty Peking Man floats by on a model boat. Cut to good old Brother Charlie at work in a TV station. Beaming into the phone he asks Johnny to come by for an interview and Johnny cheerfully accepts. Now remember, the last time these two saw each other Charlie was having sex with Johnny’s fiancé, in Johnny’s bedroom. So how does their reunion go? Like this:

Charlie (beaming): “Johnny…It’s good to see you! How are you?”

Johnny (smiling): “Ah, you look just the same!”

This surreal exchange left me scratching my head until I realized the infidelity that broke Johnny’s heart was all her fault. I mean, you can’t blame a guy for screwing his brother’s fiancé can you? Anyway, Johnny continues:

“Hey, want a big surprise? Here she is. (Johnny pulls over Samantha, still dressed in her deer skin bikini!) This is Samantha. She was raised in the jungle.” As if he really needed to say that…

Samantha smiles at Charlie, but for once Evelyne’s charm deserts her and her smile seems less a friendly welcome then the come on of an expensive hooker. For his part Charlie is so overcome with lust he can’t speak, only ogle the bodacious blonde his brother brought back from the jungle. (Sheesh, would someone throw a bucket of cold water on this man, please?)

As Johnny and Samantha enter a studio to watch a musical production in progress Johnny’s ex-fiancé catches sight of him, and the storm clouds of future melodrama descend over the movie, crushing the spirit of the hapless viewer. But as we wait for the hammer blow to fall lets check out the “musical production.” A woman dressed in red polyester sheath dress and yellow feather boa belts out a plagiarized version of the “Love Boat” theme while stranded atop a rickety set of steel girders. A small number of studio lights sporadically blink and flash in a forlorn attempt to give the number a sense of excitement. – Now that’s entertainment!

OK, here it comes, Johnny gets a note from his ex, and goes to meet her in her dressing room. Heavy looks filled with hurt and regret lead to tears on her part, and she begs Johnny to take her back. Johnny, proving himself to be not only stupid, but faithless, forgets all about Samantha and kisses his ex. Samantha, of course, picks just that moment to open the door and look in. Shocked and grieved, she runs off into the city. Johnny gives chase, but being stupid, is easily shaken off.

Meanwhile, Peking Man is also having a very rough time as, covered in chains, he is tormented in a variety of creative ways before a packed stadium of shouting, jeering rubes. (Back in the 70’s low-brow movies could get away with a bleak depiction of human nature. Today only bad guys are bad.) Catching sight of the spectacle on a storefront TV, Samantha breaks into tears. Then, in one of my favorite scenes, she runs up to a well-dressed British couple and blurts out:

“You take me to Hoo-Tong. You take me Hoo-Tong yes?” and points to a poster showing the Mighty Peking Man.

“Oh yea, the Peking Man.” Says the British wife. And then, without batting an eye she and her husband let this strange, jungle-bikini clad woman with the vocabulary of a two-year old into their car, and off they go!

Once at the stadium Samantha finds the Peking Man in a cage being abused by the keepers in between shows. She struggles with them sending Peking Man into a frenzy. This scares the keepers off and lets the two of them share a quiet, tear-filled reunion. Mr. Smoothie, looking smooth indeed in a white suit and dark glasses, chooses this moment to come to Samantha. (Actor Ku Feng is very good at making you hate him the moment he enters the frame.)

“Samantha, he’ll be alright. Don’t cry…Come on. Come with me.” He’s been leering at Samantha for some time now, and the ugly prospect of a rape scene now becomes a certainty.

Over in Mr. Smoothie’s private room a truly distasteful scene unfolds, made worse by the fact that it’s filled with plenty of “eye candy.” (Oh, the shame of it all.) The key point, however, is that during the struggle Samantha pulls back the curtains allowing Peking Man, whose just across the street, to see what’s happening. Enraged past endurance he breaks free and stomps over to the scene of the crime. Once there, however, he seems to lose steam and merely flails about, allowing Mr. Smoothie to run off with Samantha as a kind of hostage. Once the two have left the scene in a sports car Peking Man finally lets loose and destroys the building. (Yea!) This is the official kick-off of the movie’s Dai Kaiju style rampage. And while it’s marred by plenty of shoddy double-exposure work, the model buildings are well designed and surprisingly detailed, so overall it’s a lot of fun.

More and more buildings are photogenically destroyed as Mighty Peking Man pursues the speeding sports car carrying Samantha into the heart of Hong Kong. We constantly cut back and forth between Peking Man’s path of destruction and Samantha’s totally pathetic attempts to escape from Mr. Smoothie. (She is, after all, only a girl.) We also get a little comic relief as some panicked white yahoos (Shriners and their wives, I think) bump into each other in a hallway and exclaim:

Yahoo Number One: “What’s wrong?”

Yahoo Number Two: “ There’s a gorilla. A giant gorilla!”

Yahoo Number One: “Ah, stop worrying. My wife is a giant gorilla too!”

Yahoo Number One’s Angry, Frumpy Wife:

“Why, what do you mean talking like that!?”

It’s all a wonderful advertisement for marriage, but we can’t linger as we cut back to the mayhem on the streets. Then to Mr. Smoothie dragging Samantha into yet another seedy hotel room. Once inside they are first surprised by a couple having sex in the bedroom (And in the afternoon too!), then by Peking Man’s giant hand smashing thru the window! Peking Man finally manages to do something right and grabs Mr. Smoothie, dangles him before the horrified gaze of some office workers, drops him onto the ground, and then steps on him. You, like me, might feel like applauding the demise of this rotten, two-dimensional villain, but Samantha, gentle child of nature that she is, appears horrified. (!?)

Cut to military HQ where the counter-attack against Mighty Peking Man at last begins, and then to model tanks rolling thru the streets. Then to more building-smashing and people-smushing. Then to Johnny running around with a bunch of police officers. Surprisingly, they know who he is. And when he claims to know a way to capture the Peking Man they listen to him! (By the way, what happened to the tanks?)

“There was a girl out in the jungle as well.” Johnny says, “He obeys her. Does whatever she says. If we could locate her he would settle down immediately.”

“Where is she now?” asks the police chief.

“You’ll have to mount a search. The only thing I know is that she is dressed entirely in animal skins.” Then he adds, “That ought to narrow it down a little.” (Only a little!?)

The search is on and a public announcement goes out describing “a certain girl.” Back on the streets Samantha suddenly stops being invisible to the people around her and a mob chases her to the top of a light pole. Seemingly trapped she displays the athletic prowess that deserted her during the rape attempt and escapes.

Back we go to the monster rampage as the tanks finally catch up with the Mighty Peking Man, and an epic battle takes place at an industrial factory site.

Suddenly it’s nighttime (?), and Johnny is in a police car searching for Samantha, who, “dressed entirely in animal skins” is still on the loose!

The battle between Peking Man and the military gains force as armed soldiers, tanks, and helicopters pepper him with bullets and noisy explosives. An orchestra sobs to life as, shot again, and again, and again, he staggers about like a wounded Julius Caesar on the steps of the Roman Senate. Seemingly down he rallies and, you got it, climbs to the top of a skyscraper. This inspires the military to hatch a hare-brained scheme in which they’ll use gasoline and explosives to blow him to smithereens while up there. “Never mind about the building!” barks the commander to his subordinate officer.

Down in the streets Samantha and Johnny manage to run into each other and then head off to the scene of the battle. Gazing up at the terrible spectacle Samantha, in tears, again, cries, “He’s hurt. He’s hurt.” Rushing over to the commanding officer they convince him to order a cease-fire and give them a chance to calm Peking Man down.

Once on the top floor of the building Samantha and Johnny speak to Peking Man thru a hole punched into the roof, and Samantha, crying, lies down in his hand and promises that they will go back home to the jungle. Peking Man, mouth agape and tears running down his rubber cheeks, gives Samantha the same enigmatic expression he’s worn from the start of the picture. It’s at this point that the movie officially becomes a tragic downer, because, you know, the Playboy cartoon and the man in the polyester monkey suit never will make it back to that jungle. (And oh damn, now I’m starting to choke up again….)

Right on schedule the maniacal commander breaks his word and orders a renewal of the attack. Practically foaming at the mouth he bellows, “Your orders are to shoot! All units shoot. Do you hear? Shoot to kill!”

More gun fire. More explosions. More thrillingly bombastic music. (Which a musician friend of mine says is an edited version of Shostakovich’s 5^th symphony!) More tragic roars from the Peking Man as he is shot again, and again, and again. Samantha is also hit and wounded, and I’m beginning to suffer from shell shock. Down below Johnny discovers soldiers rigging explosives around the top floor and demands they stop, but to no avail, because, as one of the soldiers sneers, “It’s a wild animal. The quicker we kill it the better.” Worse, “The fuse has already been set.” The clock is ticking down, but at least the Peking Man manages to crush a couple of the callous and insensitive soldiers even as the commander continues to bark, “Attack! Attack him again!”

More gun fire. More explosions. More bombastic music. (The movie’s not over and I’m already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.) Samantha is hit – again! But she still manages to run around like an Olympic athlete. And as she clings, sobbing, to the leg of the weeping Peking Man, a dismayed Johnny jumps up to the roof and tries to drag her away. Now Johnny gets hit! Yet he still struggles with the crying Samantha, who manages to push him down off the roof and into the building as Peking Man continues to bellow, and the helicopters continue to circle and “Attack! Attack him again!”

With a final shot of the timers counting down to zero the rigged explosives detonate in a deafening yellow blaze of pyrotechnic fury. Flames erupt around the screeching Peking Man. His polysynthetic fur catches fire as the explosions continue. And continue. And continue. Finally, as I slip into a catatonic state of shock, the great ape, still on fire, looses his footing and plunges down to the ground far below, crashing into a model building and causing, yes, another explosion.

Back at the top of the skyscraper Johnny nimbly leaps over a stairwell railing, then remembering to limp on the leg that was shot, he hobbles over to Samantha’s prone figure and discovers that she is dead.

Cut back to Mighty Peking Man who, oh my God, is still moving! Wringing every last drop of pathos out of his tragic death scene he lifts his battered, tear-soaked rubber head off the ground, glass eyes staring up into the night sky, reaches out, as if for some far off salvation, then finally collapses back to the ground – dead.

Back again up topside, and accompanied by a thundering crescendo, an agonized Johnny stands in the wreckage of the bombed out skyscraper holding the body of his dead love. Despairingly, he stares out at the lights of Hong Kong, which seem to mock him with their serene, uncaring beauty. Then I too begin to sob, with relief, for this is, finally,

THE END

Sean Ledden (August 2006)

Read more about Mighty Peking Man at

Directed by Bill Rebane

Written by Robert Easton

Run Time: 84 min

Tagline: "Creeping!…Crawling!…Crushing!"

Other Titles: "Invasion of the Giant Spiders"

“Sometimes the only way I know you’re alive is when I hear you flush the toilet!”
- Ev

Bill Rebane is no stranger to schlock B-movies. His epic "The Giant Spider Invasion" is the pinnacle of 70′s schlock…believe you me. An outrageous story, nonexistent acting, horrid special effects, along with a bizarre white-trash cast of characters combine to produce an awful movie. (Rebane was hoping to primarily distribute the film in the Southern US, so he hoped to widen the movie’s appeal by creating red-neck characters…at least the only explanation I can come up with.) There are many who defend the movie, noting that although it is a bad movie, it’s still fun. Well, I agree. It is fun…but boy is it also bad! B-A-D!

Now, I’m sure that Rebane didn’t delude himself into believing that this movie would ever win an Oscar. Rebane himself said that he often made monster movie ‘quickies’ in order to generate money so he could produce more serious flicks. Remember that back in the 70′s, there were thousands of drive-in movies, and cheapy monster flicks could be made quickly and distributed to a massive audience relatively easily (read: profitably). In addition to "TGSI", Rebane has pumped out Invasion from Inner Earth (1974), Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake (1975) (also known under the lurid title of Croaked: Frog Monster From Hell), The Capture of Bigfoot (1979), and his last effort, starring the ukulele-playing Tiny Tim (!), Blood Harvest (1987). I’m hoping that you’ve noticed I’ve left out one film in particular: Yes, Monster A-Go Go, from 1964. You can’t really blame Rebane entirely for that mess. (You can read more about the film following the link above.)

The story? Well, let’s see: A meteor crashes in Wisconsin and opens up a black hole. Out of this black hole comes a giant spider that starts controlling all the other local spiders. Oh yeah, the meteor crash scatters a bunch of geodes full of diamonds… and more spiders. Red necks get eaten and spiders run around until a couple of space, <ahem> experts arrive on the scene. They decide to drop a bomb on the black hole and close up the inter-dimensional rift, thus causing all the other spiders to melt and explode. (Well, it’s certainly a creative story line.)

I read an interesting interview with a guy who lived in the town where one of the scenes featuring THE giant spider was filmed. As everybody knows, the ‘main’ giant spider was a VW Bug decked out with fur and long, hairy legs that never really reached the ground. (If you look carefully, in some scenes you can see tire tracks in the grass behind the ‘spider’!) Two large glass globes were placed over the headlights as eyes. The eyes were then painted yellow with large red lightning bolts for pupils. The guy in the interview also recalled that some vandals had spray painted profanity on the back side of the ‘spider’, thus forcing Rebane to film the beast only from the front and sides. (The paint couldn’t be washed off…) Just as funny is the fact that in some scenes the spider had to be ‘pushed’ by extras in order to make it ‘walk’, thus you can see groups of ‘victims’ running with the spider as they push it along, screaming in ‘fear’.

Man…I love this job! Let’s get started!

	Sheriff Jeff Jones (Alan Hale Jr.) Yup, it’s the Skipper! With his first line of "Hi, little buddy!", you know this movie can’t be all bad…Well, yes it can. Alan hams it up big time, even going so far as to deliver a joke directly into the camera. Small World Alert: Alan Hale Jr. also played a local sheriff in The Crawling Hand (1963)…another crappy movie.
	Dr. J.R. Vance (Steve Brodie) Played by B-Movie veteran Steve Brodie. (His real-life son, Kevin, also appears in this film as the local reporter Dave. Oddly enough, Steve’s wife, Sue, is the film cast’s hair stylist. Go figure.) Steve has graced the silver screen in over 80 films, including The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Wild World of Batwoman (1966), Jerry Warren’s terrible Frankenstein Island (1981), and the oddball The Wizard of Speed and Time (1989).
	Dr. Jenny Langer (Barbara Hale) Barbara Hale is best remembered for her role as Della Street in the popular Perry Mason TV series. She’s also appeared in dozens of films, mostly Westerns, and nearly 30 TV guest star appearances. Film Bonus Points: You get to see Barbara roll down a hill with Steve Brodie when they are attacked by a giant spider!
	Dave Perkins (Kevin Brodie) Son of actor Steve Brodie. Before "TGSI", Kevin appeared in a handful of other minor movies. Kevin eventually moved on to write, produce, and direct a terrible ‘sorority house’ version of the popular Animal House movie called Delta Pi (1985). Oh yeah, he also appears in Delta Pi in a role credited as "Party Stoner". Go figure.
	Dan Kester (Robert Easton) The film’s writer, Robert Easton, is no stranger to the screen. With over 70 films and 50 TV guest appearances under his belt, he’s still going strong. Trivia: Robert appeared in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) along with Steve Brodie. A bond that can never be broken.
	Ev Kester (Leslie Parrish) Leslie began as a model and moved on to acting in 1955. Small World Alert: Leslie played ‘Zema’ in the "Cat-Women From the Moon" rip-off entitled Missile To the Moon (1958).

Opening credits overlayed over a star field. Check.

Comic looking ‘meteor’ flying through space accompanied by a high-pitched <swooshing> sound. Check.

Yup, this is gonna suck.

Jump cut (like every cut in the film) to the office of Sheriff Jones. In strolls the local news hound, Dave Perkins, snooping around for a story to print. (As a wink to the audience, Rebane has Sheriff Jones greet Dave with a "Hi little buddy!". Ahhh, what I wouldn’t give for 90 minutes of Gilligan’s Island instead of this…)

Nope, no news today. "It’s pretty quite around here," the Sheriff remarks in an ironic observation since, you know, this quiet town is soon to be invaded by inter-dimensional giant spiders from a black hole. Wow. Talk about foreshadowing. I’m getting goose-bumps. After some shameless exposition, we learn a few more character’s names, which I won’t get into now since I haven’t seen any of them yet. Well, OK. We learn that Dave has a date that night with Terry. But watch out…Terry lives with her brother-in-law, Dan Kester, who’s a "strange man…and he’s working up a big head of steam" (?).

Cut to the Kester place…a tin roof shack, complete with chickens in the yard and pick-up truck in the dirt driveway. Get the picture? Anyway, Dan’s aheadin’ into town for a revival meeting at the local church. His wife, Ev? She’ll stay home and drink, as usual.

As Dan jumps into his battered truck to leave, Ev delivers some classic parting words, "Sometimes the only way I know you’re alive is when I hear you flush the toilet." Ok, Rebane, I’ll give you this much: I did laugh at that line. Cheers!

Moving right along, Dave shows up at the Kester place and waits on the stairs outside with Ev while her sister, Terry, pretties herself up inside for her date. Not wanting to be out of character, Ev offers Dave a drink which he politely declines. More Classic Lines are exchanged until Terry finally emerges from the house’s tattered screen door.

Once Dave and Terry leave, Ev has a fit because there’s no more booze in the house. She makes a desperate call to the local cafe owner, Dutch, and asks him to bring over some booze. When Ev says she’ll be "mighty appreciative" if he would, Dutch quickly agrees.

Back with Dan now where we spot him leaving a woman’s trailer (Ahhh, Dan you bad boy! You didn’t go to the revival, you slept with this woman! God’s going to send a giant inter-dimensional spider after you!). The woman tells Dan that he forgot something then she runs back inside and fetches Dan’s "back brace" which she proceeds to set into place after he drops his pants, exposing his red long-johns. (Rebane, um, wtf?)

When Dan returns home, he is met by his suspicious wife waiting for him on the front stairs. After a few Classic Lines, a meteor falls out of the sky and lands behind the house in an explosion of cheap cartoon effects. As is usual when a meteor lands, a cold wind blows over the entire town, lights go out, and cars won’t start. You know, normal stuff that always happens when a meteorite hits the ground.

Oh gee, it gets better. A lone motorcyclist loses control of his bike and slides to a halt in some gravel. For some reason his motorcycle explodes (well, the bush behind the bike explodes, I don’t think they had the money to blow up a real bike), and the cyclist runs off on foot.

Anyway, despite the massive explosion in his back yard, Dan decides to just go to bed. Great. I guess if he did do what 99.9999 % of every other person on Earth would have done, i.e., gone back to investigate, the ‘black hole’ plot point would be revealed too early in the film. Brilliant scripting here.

Later that night, Dan hears a noise in the kitchen. Armed with a shotgun (and dressed in his red long-johns and corsett…echh…), he switches on the lights to find Terry sitting in the kitchen alone. You see, she couldn’t sleep because of the "weird" things that happened when she was out on her date. (I guess she considers ‘wind’ weird.) Deciding not to waste his trip to the kitchen, Dan sets aside his shotgun, pulls out a plate of cold fried chicken, and plops down on a chair beside Terry. Some inane conversation ensues, resulting in Dan getting angry with Terry and shouting, "Why, I outta put you over my knee, pull down your britches, and spank the hell out of ya!" (He speaks to his sister-in-law like this?!) To the strums of a banjo on the soundtrack, Dan chases Terry out of the kitchen and returns to his midnight snack. Good old’ country fun.

Cut to an observatory where Dr. Jenny Langer (Barbara Hale) notes that something strange is happening. "We’re getting gamma ray showers and the barometer has dropped an inch in less than twenty minutes." Oh…gee…and that’s bad, right?

Another deftly executed jarring jump cut takes us to…someplace with a big rocket. Ah yes, now we get to meet Dr. J.R. Vance (Steve Brodie). I assume the stock footage of a rocket on a launching pad was used to convey the fact that the following scenes take place at NASA headquarters. Well done, lads.

"There’s more freaky stuff happening in Northern Wisconsin", reports one of Vance’s subordinates. ("Freaky"? Doesn’t sound just a bit non-scientific? See Classic Lines for the full report.) Vance remembers other reports of ‘freaky’ going-ons, and travels to Horton, Wisconsin to have a meeting with Dr. Langer. (I wonder if those two will fall in love. Ahhh, nothing more entertaining than watching 2 scientists in their late 50′s falling in love…)

OK, boy, there really isn’t a hell of a lot happening here. Vance and Langer meet, at which point Vance just can’t believe that Langer is a scientist because she’s, you know, a woman. (Ouch. Didn’t this kind of "humor" go out in the 50′s?) They exchange a lot of mumbo-jumbo, and boy do I mean a lot. Zzzzzz. Get yourself a beer or two at this point, you won’t miss anything. Langer takes Vance up to her lab (which is obviously, and let me say obviously, a high-school science class room), where she proceeds to print out a bunch of stuff from an adding machine. The print out from the adding machine indicates that the radiation levels are still high. (How an adding machine measures radiation is beyond me.)

Back with the always enjoyable Kester family. Dan and Ev are stomping around their land looking for whatever smashed into the ground the other night. Although they are standing in an open field, Ev manages not to see a severed cow’s head directly at her feet until she ‘falls’ and lands immediately beside it. "There’s another one!" Dan shouts, referring to a bloody cow skeleton at the bottom of a hill. Ev, worried that they’re going to lose a bunch of money because of the dead cattle, asks Dan what they should do. Dan, always the entrepreneur, says he’ll just cut up the meat and sell it anyway. (I wonder how much meat he’s going to get off a cow skeleton…idiot.)

Ahhh, the excitement mounts as we jump cut back to Vance and Langer. "I’ve never seen so much fouled up data in my life," Vance exclaims as he waves a handful of adding machine printouts, "It’s against every known law of physics!" Realizing that they won’t get anywhere by just "brainstorming", Vance suggests that they take a Geiger counter out into the woods and look for the crash site themselves. Now this is going to be exciting! Steve Brodie with a Geiger counter!

Meanwhile, Dan and Ev stumble across a bunch of strange round rocks scattered all over their field. Walking around for a few more minutes yields and exciting discovery: A huge impact crater! (Well, somebody dug a big hole in the ground and threw a bunch of geodes on the ground at least.) Sensing that something unique in the history of science may have happened in his own back yard, Dan takes a bunch of rocks back home to "bust ‘em open." When he and Ev get home, Ev grabs a beer while Dan takes a few whacks at one of the rocks with a hammer. After a few blows, a rock rolls off the table and cracks open on the floor, releasing a rather startled looking tarantula. (Of course, Dan and Ev manage not to "see" the spider…because you know…it’s a bit too early in the story for that.) "Those look like diamonds!" Dan shouts with glee. To test his theory he pops out one of the crystals and scratches up his kitchen window. Yup. They’re diamonds all right. After collecting a bunch of the, <ahem>, diamonds, Dan plans on taking them over to cousin Billy’s rock shop for an appraisal. (Cousin Billy’s rock shop?)

Over in Dutch’s Cafe, Dr’s Vance and Langer meet with Sheriff Jones. To give you an idea of the quality dialog that takes place, I’ll provide you with a sample:

Sheriff: "What’s that?"

Vance: "A Geiger counter."

Sheriff: "Why, we don’t have any ‘geigers’ around here! <haw haw>"

OK, when you stop laughing, here’s another one:

Langer: "I’m sure [the Sheriff] has taken physics."

Sheriff: "I used to take physics, now I find that prunes do the better job!"

Hee Hee Ho Ho Ho Hoooo!

(Just shoot me now.)

Later that day, Ev is sitting in the kitchen drinking. "I feel terrible…this house is full of spiders," she growls as she smacks one of the creepy-crawly’s with a fly swatter. Dan assumes she’s just drunk again and shouts at her to lay off the booze. Another quality scene. Cut to the Sheriff’s office.

Yes, the wife of the motorcyclist has called Sheriff Jones to report that her husband has been missing ever since he went on his motorcycle ride. The diligent Sheriff promises to "take a look around". Hmmm.

Well, as Dan is out gathering more of those strange rocks from his field, he spots the missing motorcyclist’s bloody body. It appears that half of him has been reduced to a skeleton, but he still has all of his clothes on. Go figure. Dan does the sensible thing as always, and simply buries the remains in the ground and continues collecting geodes.

More footage of tarantulas crawling around the Kesters’ filthy kitchen. A lot more footage. And a lot of filth. Time for a lame gross-out scene. A spider slips into the blender as Ev fills it with booze and some strawberry stuff. In stomps Dan, looking pretty upset after discovering the body, at which time Ev chugs the drink. (I can just imagine the 70′s kids in the audience shouting "Ewwwwwww!") Dan doesn’t want to mention the body to the police because of the diamonds and "all the grass were growing." (Oh gee. Thanks for bringing up that plot point a good 45 minutes into the movie.)

Blah. After telling Ev he’s heading over to his cousin’s place, Dan sneak over to have a quickly with the woman he’s seeing on the side. Ev, on the other hand, goes off to bed for a drink. No, not a drink before going to bed, but gets into the bed and starts drinking from a bottle of booze on the night stand. After some fairly innocent (and blatant) ‘tush’ shots of Ev’s underwear and a spider crawling closer..closer…closer…Ahh, just before it puts its legs on her butt, Ev gets up, for no apparent reason, and walks over to her dresser. When she opens the top drawer, an enormous set of puppet spider legs pops out and tries to grab her. How in the hell that spider got in and closed the drawer behind itself is never explained. To make a long scene short, Ev runs from the bedroom, gets covered in webs that are now (suddenly) all over the house and makes a really smart decision: hide in the barn. Needless to say, inside the barn is a giant spider puppet that some off-camera stage hands toss onto the screaming actress. After catching the spider puppet, Ev falls to the ground, pulls the ridiculous contraption over her (note the wires dangling behind the puppet), and screams as the spider ‘eats’ her. Fade to black.

The next day Dan heads into town with his "hot rocks". Dan’s cousin, Billy, is every bit as sleazy as Dan. (Yes, it’s possible.) In another charming scene, Billy looks at the diamonds and asks Dan to come closer so he can tell him how much they’re worth: Zilch…as indicated by Billy ‘razzing’ Dan right in the face. Oh, how I love you, Rebane.

OK, let’s see if anything exciting is happening…nope. Sheriff Jones takes a trip out to the Kester place to ask about the missing motorcyclist. Vance and Langer hire a helicopter to fly around the crash site. …hmmm…anything else? Nope.

As Vance, Langer, and reporter Dave sit beside their car (talk about a slow news day!), the helicopter pilot reports back that he’s "found a radioactive source." (Just how he did that is not revealed.) Well, the impact site is confirmed as being around the Kester place so Vance tells the helicopter pilot to take a picture of the crater.

Back at the lab, in a absolutely delightful science mumbo-jumbo moment, Langer holds up what looks like an ink blot against a large map of the region. After peering at the map with a magnifying glass, Langer calmly declares: "It fits…that’s a space warp allright…this must be the only energy photo-gram of it’s kind." (!!)

I love crap like that. I really do.

Oh, yes, now it’s Vance’s turn to recite a bunch of nonsense when Dave asks him what a space warp is:

"A ‘space warp’ is a gravitational pull so intense that it makes a black hole in space."

"There’s only one thing I know of that can cause a space warp like this," says Langer.

Vance nods and completes her thoughts, "A miniature black hole."

There you have it folks. Bill Rebane’s condensed version of Stephan Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’.

Ohhh…this is rich, yes, even more:

Langer: "If a dead star collapsed all its masses [sic], the star would gradually shrink to a point…"

Vance: "…and disappear into another universe…"

Langer: "Right. A parallel universe with a door back and forth…"

Vance: "…That sucks everything up!"

Langer: "…And throws everything out!" (Huh?!)

Are you getting all this?

Back at the Kester farm, Dan is out once again gathering rocks. This time however, the giant spider gets manages to sneak up behind him and eat him. Sorry if that description of the action left out a lot of details, but that’s pretty much how it happened. One second he’s sitting on the ground wiping his forehead, the next moment he’s in the spider’s mouth.

Boy, I’m sure gonna miss that guy.

OK, more lame comedy between Dutch and his waitress, Helga (!). (Helga is played by German bomb-shell Christiane Schmidtmer. Christiane was a model and actress (posing in Playboy from time to time), but she is probably most famous for her role as Miss Dietrich in the 1971 women-in-prison exploitation film The Big Doll House.)

OK, time to dispense with more superfluous characters. Now it’s time for Cousin Billy to meet his 8-legged fate. Billy is driving down a completely flat and straight road, but manages to not see a gigantic spider-web stretched across the road, nor does he spot the bus-sized spider perched in the middle of it. After a confusing sequence of scenes, Billy manages to free the car from the web but then crashes into a gas station. Do I need to mention that his car, the gas pumps, and the gas station itself all explode in a massive fireball of flame? I don’t? OK, thank you.

Cut back to Terri. After a gratuitous booby-scene, Terri is attacked by a bunch of tarantulas that have begun to burst out of their little geodes. Oh, OK, enough of that scene I guess. Cut to Dutch’s cafe. Reporter Dave tries to get ahold of Terri on the phone, but the lines are dead. Worried because of all the "strange things" that have happened recently, Dave decides to take a trip out to the Kester’s and see if she’s OK.

Oops, OK. Cut back to Terri, running through the house dressed in panties and a cut-off t-shirt (sans brassier, of course.) The entire living room is filled with webs now, which makes me wonder when that occurred because she obviously had to walk through the living room to get to her bedroom so she could flash her boobs. But…oh well. As she screams and tries to act ‘scared’, a giant fuzzy spider leg reaches through a window and grabs at her.

Once again, I would like you too take a peek at the screen-shot to the right. Yes, the giant spider is on top of the Kester’s house…and nobody notices this kind of thing?

Meanwhile, Dr. Vance and Dr. Langer are walking through the wilds with a Geiger counter, trying to find the exactly location of the black hole, sorry, I mean "space warp".

Cut to Dave, who roars up in his car at Terri’s house and notices two things which are out of the ordinary: One, the house is demolished. Two, there is a giant spider in the backyard. Dave reaches into the car’s back seat, pulls out a rifle (!), and starts firing madly at the giant spider which is strolling around the Kester estate for a bit of exercise.

Oh boy, Vance and Langer hear the rifle shots and run…somewhere…ok, up a hill. When the reach the top, big Old Eight Legs is there to greet them and we are treated to a hilarious scene of Steve Brodie and Barbara Hale rolling down a hill as a giant spider waves its legs at them and makes weird ‘squeaking’ sounds.

I love this job.

Vance and Langer rush back to town and tell Sheriff Jones about their most unusual encounter with the interstellar arachnid. (See Classic Lines.)

Langer, battered and bruised after Vance rolled over her on the hill, says in a concerned voice, "It looks like our black hole has turned into a doorway to Hell…God knows how many monsters might come through…" After picking up a flare gun (!) from the desk sergeant, Vance and Langer return to the lab with a couple of geodes in order to "run some tests" on them. Oh Joy.

Oh boy, oh boy. Vance and Langer discuss ways to solve their little problem. I now bring to you some more great mumbo-jumbo:

Vance: "How are you going to kill a monster like that…an alien energy pattern…we haven’t even found the impact area of the black hole."

Langer: "And that’s undoubtedly where the spider’s coming from."

Vance: "The energy pattern has to feed off of the gravitational field of the black hole."

Langer: "Could we soak up the energy?"

Vance: "We could feed it so much extra mass, we could choke it."

Langer: "We could shower it with neutrons!"

Vance: "A neutron initiator…it just might work!"

There you go! It just might work!

Vance calls his buddy back at NASA headquarters and asks him to send over a "Cal-Tech neutron initiator."

Umm…a what?

"Have them set it with a six-hundred gram charge and set the pattern at three-hundred and sixty degrees!" Vance orders.

Meanwhile, Dutch has organized a lynch party to "Go kill that spider!". Boy, if you want to see a group of small town, rifle-toting Wisconsinites from the 70′s, well, here you go. Despite Sheriff Jones’ pleas for them to calm down and return home, the posse rides off, packed into 3 pick-up trucks, to go do battle with the spider.

Cut to "Gleason Days", the yearly summer fair in, yes, the city of Gleason. Kids, sun, carnival rides, beer-chugging yokels…the perfect place for a giant spider attack. Wow! I was right! Out of nowhere, and really, how could people not see this giant spider, here comes our star: The giant spider from outer space. Some people run in fear while others courageously push the spider so it can ‘move’. (Try not to notice that the spider’s legs never really touch the ground.)

Next we see Vance and Langer out at the impact site in the middle of the night. I’m not sure when that time-warp took place, since it was the middle of the afternoon just 2 seconds ago. (Actually I’ve read that Rebane filmed these scenes with the wrong type of film, thus it was so underexposed that it just looks like night time.) Anyway, Langer and Vance make their way back to their car after seeing bunches of spiders coming out of the crater. (I couldn’t see that because the shot was so dark, but we’ll just assume that’s what they saw.) Langer stumbles over another corpse. Once again, the corpse is a completely clothed skeleton…boy I’d love to see how the spider did that.

OK, back to daytime. Vance informs the Sheriff of the growing number of spiders coming out of the hole. No wait, it’s night again and the mobs are getting out of hand, and Sheriff Jones has called in the National Guard to help maintain order. "I got a man from NASA and he knows what he’s doing!" Sheriff Jones shouts to the angry mob in an effort to disperse them.

Sheriff Jones raises Vance on the radio and reports that the mob is out of hand and is "hellbent on destroying that beast."

"The bomb is on the way," Vance assures him, "Just try to keep the spider there!"

Hoo boy.

Not really knowing how to keep the spider "there", the Sheriff drives his car in front of it and starts honking the horn. (If you really want to know, the spider killed Dutch.) Faced with a barrage of car horn honking, the spider retreats back to the forest.

Truly, these are some of the most underexposed shots I’ve ever seen in a ‘movie’. Imagine how scary it is to see a huge black spider walking through the woods in the middle of the night. Yeah, it’s that scary.

Back out in the fields, Vance spots the spider and orders the helicopter to drop the neutron "gadget" (!) into the hole when he fires up a flare. This is a great plan except that Vance forgot the flares in the car. (Idiot.) Langer runs back to get the flares while Vance runs off into the woods. Something like that. I really can’t understand what’s happening now. I don’t think Rebane knew either.

Oh gee, the Sheriff (?) runs up and fires his pistol into the spider. When that doesn’t work, he undoes his pistol belt and throws it at the 50-foot arachnid. (!) Needless to say, the spider devours the hapless lawman, with a little help from some stage hands in the spider itself that have to help pull the actor into the mouth. (By the way, there are several reviewers that think that the guy who just got eaten was the Sheriff. It is obviously not Alan Hale Jr. But whether it’s supposed to be an entirely different character, or whether they just couldn’t find a stunt man who looked like Hale Jr., is unclear. I mean, the guy that gets eaten has a full mustache! However since we never see the Sheriff again, I do think that this scene was supposed to be the Sheriff’s death.)

Langer returns with the flare gun, Vance fires up a flare and an explosion engulfs the giant spider. Then we see the explosion sequence run in reverse, which I assume indicates that the black hole is now closed. OK. The spider starts to burn, then melt, then sort of just dissolves in a puddle of goo.

As the end credits roll up the screen, we hear a preacher shouting something from Exodus about flies, spiders, and locusts.

The End.

Dennis Grisbeck (Dec 2005)

Read more about The Giant Spider Invasion at

Classic Lines

“Sheriff…if your stomach can handle it…there’s a fifty-foot spider on the loose!”
- Dr.Vance breaks the news to Sheriff Jones

“It’s too bad there’s an age difference between us, if you were five years older, I’d jump ya!”
- Ev having small talk with Dave on the porch

“We have a heavy gamma ray shower, an incredibly fast drop in barometric pressure, an aurora with no sun activity, and an amazingly potent unknown ground-level X-ray source nearby.”
- NASA Scientist reporting "freaky" happenings in Wisconsin

“It fits…that’s a space warp all right…this must be the only energy photo-gram of it’s kind.”
- Dr. Langer comes to her conclusion

Directed by Al Adamson

Tagline: “It’s a real monster mash when they clash!”

Run Time: 90 minutes

Dracula vs Frankenstein is a film that will leave you scratching your head and saying, "Huh?" It might also make you say a lot more than that…things like "I want a refund!" and "I’m NEVER buying anything from E-bay again!"

Our title feature is one of many low-budget… Wait. The words "low budget" infer that there was an actual budget. Let’s start over.

Our title feature is one of many No-budget creations spewed out by schlockmeister Al Adamson during the 1960′s and 1970′s by his production company / grind house / sludge factory Independent-International Pictures (co-founded with fellow producer Sam Sherman). Adamson is responsible, and I use the word ‘responsible’ in an accusatory sense, for cheesy zilch-bombs in a wide variety of genres: from Westerns such as Female Bunch (1969) and Blazing Stewardesses (1975) to Blaxploitation flicks like Black Heat (1976), Black Samurai (1977), and Death Dimension (1978). (Not even space movies were safe from Adamson’s hands as clearly indicated by the much maligned ‘space comedy’ Cinderella 2000 (1977) nand the bizarre Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970) aka Blood Creatures from the Prehistoric Planet!)

On a macabre note, Al Adamson was murdered by his live-in contractor Fred Fulford in 1995 at age 66. After being reported missing, police discovered Al’s corpse buried in fresh concrete under his newly refitted bathroom. Nice.

Despite his reputation for churning out crappy movies, Al’s productions typically attracted a cast of eager, if not washed-up and/or talentless, actors and actresses. One such familiar and fading ‘name’ actor that Al frequently employed in order to give his films ‘star’ weight was Lon Chaney Jr. Yes, the guy who played the original wolfman way, way back in 1941. (Do yourself a favor, skip this film and see that one instead.) However, by 1971 Cheney was a sick old man struggling with liver disease and a variety of other ailments. Chaney’s formidable physical limitations were not enough to stop the ever-creative Adamson from using him in this movie: He simply cast the enfeebled actor as a mute, idiot ax-murderer named Groton who merely stumbles around swinging a plastic axe. As fate would have it, Dracula vs Frankenstein was to be Chaney’s last film. He died of liver failure a little over a year after the movie’s release.

Appearing alongside Chaney is film icon and veteran actor J. Carrol Naish. Mr. Naish plays the evil, twisted, and gabby Dr. Duryea, who is actually…are you sitting down?, the last living descendant of the Frankenstein family! Wow! What will they think of next!? Oddly enough, as with Lon Chaney Jr., this film turned out to be Mr. Naish’s last cinematic appearance: he too died a year later in 1973.

Coincidence?! (Cue evil laughter.)

Much like Monster A-Go Go, our feature film is a patchwork of two completely unrelated films that Adamson clumsily and dispassionately wove together to create a confused, incoherent final product. This film was originally intended to be a follow up to Adamson’s semi-successful (relatively speaking of course) exploitive biker flick Satan’s Sadists (1969), but he ran out of steam (i.e., money) and deciding to cash in on the newly rekindled popularity of horror movies. You may be wondering how you could turn an incomplete biker flick into a ‘monster’ movie as lurid as this one. Well, I’ll tell you: he merely tossed Dracula and Frankenstein into the mix and simply combined the older footage with the newer stuff resulting in one big mess. (This blending of unrelated films explains the odd manner in which the bikers seem to pop in and out of the story without really doing anything or having any real effect on the plot. Oh wait. I just described all the characters. Amusingly, the actors also appear older and with different hair styles towards the end of the movie due to the time lapse between filming.)

Open in the "Oakmoor Cemetery" and a very, very blue night, i.e., slap a blue-filter over the lens and pretend it’s nighttime. (Sure everybody does it, but man, this is one really blue night.) After a quick pan across some forlorn graves, we see our main man, Count Dracula, ripping open a crypt and removing the lifeless corpse of what I can only assume to be Frankenstein.

By the way, wasn’t Frankenstein’s monster consumed in a gigantic conflagration at the end of Bride of Frankenstein? Well, I guess the good people at Independant-International probably didn’t give a shit about small details like that. But I will give Adamson credit for showing both Dracula and Frankenstein within the first 30 seconds of the movie’s runtime! On the downside, it’s all downhill from here, baby.

As luck would have it, an unfortunate night watchman stumbles across Dracula in flagrante delicto and is quickly dispatched with a routine neck bite. (A special shot is inserted at this point showing the bite marks on the guard’s neck being approximately 1 inch apart which in no way match the distance between Dracula’s fangs. Maybe that’s being nitpicky, but come on, how difficult can it be to maintain even such a banal level of consistency as this?)

At this point in the film we get our first close look at the Count (played by "Zandor Vorkov", who also appeared in Adamson’s Brain of Blood before mercifully fading back into obscurity). Dracula, as realized in this film, now has a curly afro, goatee, and goofy plastic teeth that you can purchase along with your prank pepper gum and fake dog shit from any local novelty store. Not to mention that his face is painted completely white while his arms have a nice, brown California tan whenever the sleeves of his jacket creep up towards his elbows.

Cut to a Stock Footage Amusement Park where a young woman clambers down some steps and enters a foggy area on the beach. Why she chose to walk here, and why the hell she doesn’t just turn and leave when she hears a strange noise is not explained. (What did you expect? Something that would make sense?) Anyway, she hears somebody behind her and turns just in time to get her head chopped off by an unseen assailant wielding a plastic axe. (I would have taken a screen shot of the goofy ‘head’ but the scene was too dark. Damn. It was pretty funny.)

A quick jump cut to some Vegas footage indicates that, yes, we are now in Las Vegas. Man, these guys really had their act together. A voice-over of a woman singing immediately caused me to break out in a sweat from the fear of, <gasp>, cutting to a song-and-dance number. Alas, my fears were founded, as we are forced to watch some sort of cabaret where Judith Fontaine (played by Al Adamson’s real-life wife Regina Carrol) performs a cheesy stage number…and do I mean cheesy!

After the performance, Judith receives a telegram informing her that her sister, Joanie, is missing. Being the good sister that she is, and because the plot requires it, Judith immediately packs her bags and flies to sunny California to investigate.

Upon arrival, Judith meets with police Sgt. Martin of the Missing Persons Bureau. After perfunctory, lifeless introductions, Martin gives Judith the bleak truth: there has been a rash of missing people in the area… and none of them have been found. (Well, I guess that would explain why they’re still ‘missing’, eh?) Tossing down a pile of papers on the desk in front of Judith, Sgt. Martin remarks that Joanie was living with "a bunch of hippies out near the beach."

"It seems that living near the water brings out the best…and the worst in us," Martin continues. Yeah, boy, you get a bunch of hippies by some water and look out!

As Judith listens with mock attention, Martin tells her about a seaside amusement park that serves as a gathering place for "pushers and white slavery operators". (!) Martin concludes his anti-hippie tirade by blaming people’s evil behavior on their subconscious and…the scene abruptly ends. I guess they ran out of film.

Cut to see a pair of hippies meandering around the local amusement park. The guy, appropriately named Strange, is walking hand-in-hand with his girlfriend Samantha. On a whim, the amorous couple decide to pop into the "Creature Emporium". Strange and Samantha pay the midget barker (who eats the dollar bill that was given to him, so, uh, hmmm. I can’t figure out that one either) and proceed through the gloomy entranceway.

(In the "It’s A Small World Department", Strange is played by none other than Greydon Clark, future sleazeball producer of Hobgoblins and other crapola.)

Once inside, the diminutive guide (played by 2′ 11" tall Angelo Rossitto) proclaims the horrors of "Dr. Duryea’s Creature Emporium". These, er, horrors, include a mannequin woman being attacked by an equally lifeless stuffed gorilla, I think, and another dummy (no, not Greydon Clark) getting its head chopped off by a very hokey guillotine.

As the terror reaches its climax, well, not really, but you get the point, the Emporium’s curator, the wheelchair-bound Dr. Duryea, rolls out of the darkness and reassures the scared youngsters that all that they have seen is merely an illusion. (WHEW!)

"The greatest mysteries of the world are not mysteries at all unless we take the time to become familiar with them," he says, which really doesn’t make any sense at all, but hell, the writers probably thought it looked pretty good in the script after smoking a joint.

Having had enough ‘horror’ for now, Strange and his girlfriend leave the park to get ready for the upcoming protest.

"What are we protesting?" Samantha asks.

"I don’t know," Strange answers with a vacant grin, "but it’s going to be fun!" (Ahhh, to be a care-free hippie.)

Meanwhile, Dr. Duryea descends down into the Emporium’s basement where he has built himself a gigantic laboratory. Donning a lab coat, Duryea proceeds with his latest experiment while the idiot (I use that term in the literal sense, not as a pejorative) Groton smiles, pets his puppy, and looks on with a dumb grin.

(This shot is a sad, cringe-worthy ‘homage’ to Lon Chaney Jr.’s portrayal of Lennie in the 1939 classic Of Mice and Men. Even though this flimsy bit of characterization was certainly a kind gesture given to Chaney, it really only serves as a glum reminder of how far this actor had fallen by this late point of his life.)

Dr. Duryea pulls back a sheet to reveal the girl who recently had her head chopped off on the beach (and yes, she is Judith’s sister, Joanie. Sorry about the ‘spoiler’, if you could ever really have a spoiler in a movie as transparent as this one.)

Anyhoo, Joanie’s head has been sewn back in place and she’s alive, although comatose or something. This movie really doesn’t make much sense, but I’m going to give it go: You see, Duryea believes that if a person suffers a traumatic death…"a terrible shock that is inconceivable to the human mind"…the blood obtains some sort of special property that can then be used to create serum that does something or other…and that was the clarified version of what Duryea said. So if you feel you can make more sense of all this, then by all means, rent the movie and see it for yourself.

After some more nonsense, Duryea gives Groton an injection which doesn’t seem to really do anything other then give him a bad case of the hives, but I guess it was meant to be significant. After glowering into the camera for a bit, Groton sneaks down the secret trapdoor onto the beach with his axe in hand, ready to hack some more people.

"Walk silently," Duryea says in parting, "and walk well."

Walk well?!

Later that evening , Duryea receives a visit from none other than Count Dracula himself. Boy, it’s a small world, eh?

"Doctor Duryea, I presume?" The Prince of Darkness queries. In a burst of creativity, the director chose to have all of Dracula’s lines post-processed and given an ‘echo’ effect that was presumably meant to be ‘cool’. Needless to say, it’s pretty much just distracting, not that there’s anything to be distracted from, but still, it’s just goofy.

After Dracula introduces himself, he suggests that they could both be of use to each other. Curious with what Dracula has to say, Duryea invites him into the lab for a talk; and if this scene sounds completely absurd then I’m right on the money with my description.

Upon reaching the laboratory via Duryea’s private elevator (I wonder what they chatted about on the way down? Or did they just keep quiet and watch the lighted numbers until they reached the correct floor? It makes you wonder…) Dracula reveals that he knows Duryea’s true identity: "The last living member of the Frankenstein family." (<GASP>)

Anyhoo, Dracula suggests that he can restore Duryea to a position of power, fitting for a man of the esteemed Frankenstein lineage. To sweeten the pot, the Count promises to kill a few scientists that had a hand in discrediting Duryea and causing the "accidental fire" that sentenced him to a life in a wheelchair. One name is mentioned in particular: Doctor Beaumont. It turns out that this former co-worker was the back-stabbing researcher who buried Frankenstein’s remains in the cemetery without telling Duryea and…you know what? This doesn’t make sense, but I swear, I’m relating this to you almost word for word in an attempt to clarify people’s motives and it’s all just coming out sounding insane. Really, the plot is pretty much a complete mess. Let’s just say that Beaumont is singled out for a special on-screen death at the hands of the Frankenstein monster because he screwed over Duryea the most. (NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: At this point Dracula doesn’t explain what he wants out of the deal. It turns out that Duryea’s serum can help the Count create a race of "indestructible vampires"…whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.)

Meanwhile, out on the beach, an young pair of nameless characters fall prey to Groton’s axe.

Why? Who knows?

Who are they? Who knows?

Does this scene have anything to do with the plot?

Nope.

On the other side of town, Judith makes her way to a hippie bar in order to see if anybody has seen her sister lately. Her inquiries raise the waiter’s suspicions who suspects that Judith is an undercover cop. The waiter slips into the back and informs Rico, the local biker hood (played by none other than Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story fame!). Upon hearing the news, Rico orders the waiter to slip some drugs into Judith’s drink. This sets up the required ‘freak-out’ scene where Judith basically goes a little nuts, dances around, hallucinates, and eventually (but not nearly soon enough) blacks out. (I found it amusing that Judith sees vivid images of Groton climbing down out of a trapdoor even though she hasn’t met that character yet!)

Just as things get really, er, psychedelic, Strange pops into the bar and immediately realizes that this woman requires a little help before things go really wrong for her. Being the kind gentleman that Strange is, he sweeps her up off the dance floor and drags her outside to crash out at a friend’s house.

Back at Duryea’s lab, things are in high swing. Dracula has delivered Frankenstein’s body as promised and his also hooked the corpse up to the perfunctory array of wires and electrodes. What a nice guy. A close up of the monster’s face reveals a remarkable make-up job. Simply astounding in its faithfulness to the original Frankenstein monster:

Yes, I was being sarcastic. He’s just, hmmm, really lumpy looking. And stupid, too. I mean, what the hell happened to him?

Anyway, an electrical storm coinciding with a passing comet (!!!) are just what’s needed to stimulate the monster back to life.

By the way, I read on IMDB that the equipment shown in this scene was some of the actual equipment used in the original 1931 Frankenstein film. I sincerely doubt that Al Adamson had that kind of pull. Think about how much those kinds of original classic props would be worth to a film memorabilia collector…and you think the owners would just hand it over to Adamson to use in this ridiculous venture? (You may or may not know that Mel Brooks did in fact get permission to use the original equipment in his classic spoof Young Frankenstein.)

With Frankenstein successfully resurrected, Dracula and Duryea send him out to kill Dr. Beaumont. (This bit part is played by sci-fi icon Forrest J. Ackerman.) To make a long scene short, Dracula somehow teleports right inside Beaumont’s car as he’s driving home from work.

"I am known as the Count of Darkness," Dracula explains, "Lord of the Manor of Carpathia…Turn here."

(God, I love that: "…Turn here." Now that’s something you wouldn’t expect Dracula to say.)

The Count forces the understandably puzzled doctor to drive…somewhere… where Frankenstein grabs him and crushes the hapless man in a mighty bear hug. Boy, the excitement just doesn’t let up. And by the way, how did Dracula transport Frankenstein to the edge of town without anybody seeing him? Just curious.

Early the next day, Judith awakens in the "pad" of one Mike Howard, your basic good-guy and Friend of the Hippies, who happens to live in a really kick-ass beach bungalow. How he could afford such a residence is never explained.

Mike immediately notes that Judith must be Joanie’s sister. ("Your upturned nose…and full lips," he says to Judith. Whatever, dude.) Judith, now hoping that Mike can tell her something about Joanie, suggests that they take a stroll on the beach and talk. When Judith presses Mike for information, he explains how Joanie started hanging out at the amusement park.

"She used to have fantasies about being a freak," Mike says.

"A freak? I can’t believe that," says Judith.

"Two heads, an eye missing, an elongated spine…anything that was grotesque turned her on."

(Man, does this guy know how to talk to a lady or what?)

Anyway, Mike mentions that Joanie started hanging around Duryea’s "Creature Emporium" just before she disappeared. Curious to see if there is any connection between the 2 incidents (duh!), Mike, Judith, Strange, and Samantha decide to pay Duryea a visit and try to get some more information. They eventually make contact with him inside the house o’ horrors and show him a picture of Joanie. He pretends never to have seen her…but Judith sees through the ruse…"He’s seen her," she says after Dr. Duryea takes his leave, "I just know it!"

We are soon presented with another pointless scene where Rico and a couple of his tough-guy pals harass Strange and Samantha in a back alley. Out of the blue, Sgt. Martin drives up in a patrol car and Rico and his buddies take off. Yeah, that was really a crucial plot advancement.

Speaking of pointless scenes, we cut to see Mike and Judith walking along the beach while a ‘romantic’ song plays in the background, which is kind of strange because they were supposed to be walking on the beach before they went to visit Duryea. Hmmm.

"What do you think of my little hideaway?" Mike asks as they sit in the middle of a wide-open public beach.

Well, they end up kissing and it’s about as titillating as a getting a broken filling drilled out of a tooth in the rear of your mouth.

Back in Duryea’s lab, the good Doctor is busy squirting colored fluids into test tubes containing other colored fluids, so it’s totally, totally convincing me that this is all very scientific. As Duryea babbles on and on about how his serum is almost ready, the serum that will "make us all alike" or some such nonsense, really it’s all quite hard to follow because Duryea changes the purpose of the serum from scene to scene. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Groton begins transforming into something (giving Lon Chaney Jr. a chance to relieve his Werewolf days…really, it’s sad to see him this far down in the gutter), so Duryea gives him an injection of the beta-version serum which reverses the transformation process. (In an earlier scene Duryea’s serum was the cause of Groton’s transformation…I guess the script writers forgot that little plot point.)

Meanwhile, Mike deduces that all of the "strange occurrences" in the last week center around Dr. Duryea’s "Creature Emporium".

Oh, sorry, I was going to continue describing that scene but in a demonstration of awesome editing skills, we fade while Mike is talking in mid sentence and cut to see a boy and girl making out in a car somewhere. Wow, that’s a quality job there guys.

Whatever. Frankenstein kidnaps the girl and kills the boyfriend and a couple of cops who happen to stumble along. What a bunch of idiots. Ok, let’s see what’s happening now…oh wait. Too late. Jump to the next scene. You gotta move pretty quick to keep up with this movie.

Later that night we see Mike and Judith at the pier snooping around under the Creature Emporium. After about 2 seconds of investigation, Mike discovers the secret trapdoor leading up from the beach into Dr. Duryea’s laboratory. Actually, Mike had to employ all the powers of deduction at his disposal to figure this one out. You see, the planks that make up the trapdoor itself are set perpendicular to the rest of the boards under the pier.

"It just doesn’t look like the rest of it," Mike ASTOUNDINGLY concludes:

AMAZING! Sherlock Holmes…Look Out! There’s a new kid in town and his name is Mike!

"I believe that Doctor Duryea is a collector of humans," Mike notes.

"Oh! That’s….horrible," Judith replies.

Mike goes on to blow a few lines of dialog and then plants a completely emotionless kiss on Judith’s lips. Yadda yadda yadda cut to Samantha, sitting alone on the beach when Rico and his boys come up and chase her under the pier. (How small is this beach anyway? It’s like if anybody takes more than 5 steps in any direction they’re suddenly underneath the Creature Emporium. It’s getting to be a little annoying.) Anyway, the three nogoodnicks grab Samantha and throw her to the ground. Just as they are about to tear off her clothes and well, you get the idea, Groton magically teleports into the scene and hacks the three would-be rapists to death. Samantha is spared, but faints, or falls asleep or something, for she is shown lying unconscious next to her dead assailants. (They also appear to have simply fallen asleep. How hard can it be to convincingly play dead for cripes sake?!)

As Groton carries the motionless Samantha back up through the trap door (and how Groton could fit through that tiny door, let alone while carrying another person over his shoulder, is a mystery), Mike looks over to Judith and says, "Did you hear that? It sounds like a chain unwinding!"

First of all, I have no idea where Mike and Judith are in relation to the pier. But given my early hypothesis, they are no more than 5 paces from it. Second, would hearing an unwinding chain be cause for alarm? It’s like me sitting around with my wife out on the patio and then she suddenly jumps up and says, "Did you hear that? It sounds like a garden hose unrolling!" I mean…so what?

Mike’s curiosity gets the better of him ("I’ve heard that sound before and now I think I know what it is!" he says. Yeah, like, maybe…a chain unwinding?) so he stands up…and I SWEAR TO GOD…he takes 5 steps and he’s immediately under the pier!!! (My theory was correct! I’m vindicated!)

Suspecting the worst, Mike and Judith run from beach, through the amusement park, and into the Creature Emporium. Once inside, Mike forces his way past the crippled Doctor and down into the laboratory. You can cut the tension with a knife at this point, can’t you?

Anyway, once downstairs Judith immediately spots her zombie-fied sister (is that a word?) strapped into a coffin-shaped container leaning against the wall. (Her head has been reattached after Groton had chopped it off…Damn! Duryea is good!)

"You see," Duryea says, "she is alive and well…and no harm has come to her." (Well, except for the whole head-chopped-off-with-an-axe-thingee.)

Duryea blabs on about how his new serum will change the human race and blah blah blah. Mike eventually spots Strange’s girlfriend, Samantha, laying on a gurney in a state of zombification. (No, that word wasn’t in my spell checker but I’m using it anyway.) Apparently, her recent shock at seeing Rico and the other hoodlums being chopped to bits (sort of), has done something to her blood making it perfect for the completion of Duryea’s serum. (This makes no sense to me either.)

After more ranting and raving Mike decides to end this madness by grabbing Duryea. The crippled doctor, however, pulls out a pistol and takes a few potshots at Mike as he turns tail and runs for the door. While Mike keeps Duryea busy, Judith runs for her life with Groton in hot, shambling pursuit. (Duryea’s midget assistant jumps with glee on top of the trapdoor…doh. It opens and he falls to the beach on top of the axe he was carrying. What an idiot.)

In a twist of fate, Duryea wheels himself around the Emporium looking for Mike who is hiding in the shadows. In his fervor, the Doctor bumps into the guillotine display, and falls from his chair directly under the blade. Swish—chop! Oh, the irony. (And, yeah, sure, this old dude could propel himself fast enough that he would literally launch out of his wheelchair when he hit the base of the display.) Well, anyway, Duryea’s dead.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Martin and Strange have also reached the Emporium and are poking around. (If you look closely, Strange now sports a scrubby goatee because the closing footage of the movie was shot long after the original opening shots.) Looking up, Strange spots Judith on the Emporium’s roof with Groton stumbling after her. Martin pulls out his pistol and shoots Groton, which transforms him into a mannequin causing him to plummet to the ground. (Why did Martin shoot Groton? All he did was see him on the roof, and he has no idea that Groton is in fact behind the murders. Oh well, it was ‘cool’ and the script required it I suppose.)

In an oh-so-touching seen, Groton’s puppy comes up and licks his face. It really reminded me of the closing scene from Beast of Yucca Flats, only without the intense emotions that only Coleman Francis could evoke from his viewers.

Anyhoo, as Judith catches her breath, Dracula sneaks up from behind and grabs her. (To be honest, I actually forgot about him! Man, now that’s a sign of a well written story.) Instead of killing Judith outright, Dracula hypnotizes her and leads her up to the top of a tower. (Just how high is this Creature Emporium anyway?!)

"Your fear will fully electrolyze the molecular structure of your blood," Dracula chortles as he binds Judith to the railing. How Dracula acquired so much knowledge in biochemistry is not clear. Maybe he took night classes. Get it? Night classes, because he’s Dracula, and vampires don’t like sun…oh, never mind.

Sensing that the movie is almost over, Frankenstein decides to make an appearance on top of the tower as well, cause, you know, his name is in the title too.

Meanwhile, Mike sees what’s going on, grabs a flare (!) from (the recently-vanished) Sgt. Martin’s police car, and runs up to help Judith. I’m guessing Sgt. Martin and Strange have teleported back to the police station because they have totally disappeared from both this scene and the rest of the movie. I must also commend Mike for keeping his composure after just seeing both Count Dracula and Frankenstein (!!!) accosting his girlfriend. You’d think that it would at least give one pause to see something like that, but not Mike. Hi-ho! I’ll save ye, oh fair Judith!

From atop the tower, Dracula spots Mike making his way up the stairs and sends Frankenstein over to whoop his ass. Mike lights the flare and shoves it into the shambling monster’s face which forces Dracula’s basically worthless accomplice to retreat in fear.

For some reason the flare confuses Frankenstein and he attacks Dracula instead. (What a freakin’ idiot.)

"No…him! HIM!" Dracula shouts at Frankenstein, which I thought was pretty damned funny.

All this confusion gives Mike a chance to untie Judith and run down the stairs with her. Alas, Dracula somehow regains control of the muddling monster and turns just in time to zap Mike with his magic Dracula Ring. Needless to say, the special effects are woefully chintzy, i.e., hand-drawn cartoon ‘electric beams’ over a freeze-frame shot of Dracula. But then again, it’s all par for the course.

Unfortunately for Mike, Dracula scores a bulls-eye and transforms him into a cartoon burning-man. Judith can’t take anymore of this nonsense and faints.

We next see Frankenstein carrying Judith to Dracula’s abandoned church. (Complete with about a zillion pre-lit candles. How romantic. And also, you have to wonder just where Dracula has been hiding for so long in Huntington Beach, California.)

With Judith tightly bound atop his coffin, Dracula can now complete his plans to electrolyze her blood with fear, or whatever the hell he said. Frankenstein, however, takes a look at Judith and falls in love with her. (Yes, I’m going to say it: Oh BUH-ruther!) Dracula realizes what has happened and gets into position to zap Frankenstein with his ring, which to be honest, is something he should have done a long time ago just to be rid of this pest.

Somehow Frankenstein gets away, which is quite a feat since he moves at around 5-inches per hour. Nonetheless, Dracula chases the meandering monster into the woods where a wild melee ensues. (Note that it’s high-noon out, which is odd since vampires can’t tolerate sunlight. Oh well.) After tussling about for a bit, Dracula proceeds to rip off one of Frankenstein’s arms, which, I swear to God, looked just as cheesy as when King Arthur did the same to the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail. (To be fair, Frankenstein vs Dracula came out 4 years before Monty Python’s movie, but I just wanted you to imagine how woeful the special effects are in this film.)

After removing the other arm, Dracula finally tires of Frankenstein’s shenanigans and handily pulls off the monster’s head. (Which does have the unexpected benefit of putting a stop to whoever’s voice it was on the soundtrack shouting ‘rarrghghghggggggh’ for the duration of this idiotic fight.)

With that being done, Dracula looks up and realizes that the sun is coming up; which is strange because the sun has been up since the start of the fight, but never mind.

"Must escape burning sun!" Dracula shouts to himself with a puzzling sudden loss of definite articles.

I hope you’re sitting down as I describe the super-unexpected surprise ending: Dracula doesn’t make it back in time. Nay, gentle reader, he collapses onto the steps just in front of the entrance to his murky sanctuary. Oh, bitter, bitter irony. Anyway, at least the special effects team got to blow whatever pocket change they had left from their budget as Dracula transforms into a styrofoam skull with a white wig (!) .

Unbelievable.

If you haven’t thrown a beer bottle through your TV set by now, you’ll see that Judith has managed to wriggle free of her bonds and escape into the woods. Blah.

The End.

Dennis Grisbeck (Feb 2008)

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