The Swarm [VHS]

"And I never dreamed that it would turn turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friend."

So said a bemused Michael Caine in The Swarm, one of the last of the 70s disaster movies, that forgotten genre which crammed as many fading stars as possible into a large supporting cast and then wreaked havoc upon them. In this case, the great and good (Caine, Katherine Ross, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray) are up against a particularly violent swarm of killer bees.

Director Irwin Allen was the undisputed king of the disaster movies, producing both The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, the two most enduring examples of stars-in-danger, but his fortunes were going downhill by the time he directed The Swarm. Unfairly panned at its time of release, it's actually an enjoyable Sunday-afternoon film, perfect for a couple of hours mindless entertainment. The older cast members are a particular delight, and only Richard Chamberlain really lets the side down, overplaying his role to the hilt.

Highly recommended.

There's delusion on an epic scale on display in Irwin Allen's infamous The Swarm. It's not the worst of his oeuvre by a long way - Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out are both much, much worse - but it's become the poster child for all the absurdities of the disaster genre at it's hokeyest. But then capsized ships with atom bombs aboard or volcanoes threatening hotel complexes can't compare to killer bees destroying nuclear power plants and causing train wrecks on the Richter Scale of movie absurdity. And it's a curiously second- and third-hand construction too - structurally Stirling Silliphant's script is surprisingly similar to his script for In the Heat of the Night. Okay, there weren't any bees in that one, but from the beginning where big city cop Sidney Poitier is discovered at a murder scene and immediately treated as a suspect by hard-assed racist cop Rod Steiger until he gradually learns to respect his expertise, it's being used as a template, with sunflower seed munching entomologist Michael Caine discovered in a missile silo full of dead bodies by hard-assed xenophobic general Richard Widmark, who immediately suspects him of their deaths until he gradually learns to respect his expertise (how can you not love a film where Bradford Dillman asks "Can we count on a scientist who prays?" only for Widmark to respond "I wouldn't count on one that didn't"?).

But this isn't a film about trust or even narrative, it's about miscast and affordable stars getting stung to death in slow-motion by what look like bits of oatmeal painted black and fired at them by air-cannons. It's a film about hallucinating patients being menaced by imaginary giant bees. It's a film about military complexes with lots of flashing lights. It's a film about bad acting in the face of insurmountably inane dialogue ("Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?" "I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence." and "Billions of dollars have been spent to make these nuclear plants safe. Fail-safe! The odds against anything going wrong are astronomical, Doctor!" "I appreciate that, Doctor. But let me ask you. In all your fail-safe techniques, is there a provision for an attack by killer bees?" are just the tip of the iceberg). It's about bad fashion sense - this being the 70s, the decade that taste forgot, amid a preponderance of trouser flairs there are a lot of earth tones and oranges amid the costumes, so it's entirely possible that the bees simply mistook the actors for flowers waiting to be pollinated. And it's all done with a gloriously straight face and even, on a few rare occasions, some technical competence - Irwin Allen may have loved schmaltz, but he had a great visual sense when dealing with military hardware and there are some genuinely impressive shots in the picture when he gets to play with the toys. Unfortunately his handling of the actors is much more mechanical, with the old guard (Widmark, Olivia DeHavilland, Henry Fonda, Ben Johnson) faring better than poor old Caine and Katherine Ross. And, like many bad films, it's topped off by a superb score, one of Jerry Goldsmith's very best from his golden period. Much more fun than it's good to admit, the proposed remake has a lot to live up to.

The DVD is a fairly good value package - the extended two-and-a-half hour cut from the laserdisc release, a hokey 22-minute making of documentary and the original trailer ("It's more than speculation - it's a prediction!"). The 2.35:1 widescreen transfer is good, though the sound range is not quite as good as it could be.

THE SWARM (1978)
(Zone 2)
directed by Irwin Allen
Music composed by Jerry Goldsmith

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