Invasion of the Bee Girls

It’s hard to believe that a team-up between a (two-time) Academy Award winner such as Denis Sanders and a capable jack-of-all-trades like Nicholas Meyer (he wrote the screenplay) could produce such a muddled mess. What was originally intended to be a provocative work steeped in feminist passions turns out to be a blah example of sci-fi/horror (s)exploitation with no particular rhyme or reason.

The film is plagued by dismal overall sloppiness, capped off with clear ineptitude when it comes to managing the pacing. The result is a feeble, repetitive story totally incapable of sparking any interest. The decision to rely so heavily on the erotic component might be understandable if it hadn’t all been reduced to a collection of bared breasts in a milieu packed with moronic actors.

There’s no lack of weird elements, and the one that aren’t recycled – insect POV shots had already been seen in classics such as “The Fly” (1958), for example – will be far more intelligently employed in sci-fi films later in the decade (the mutant girls’ totally black eyes are identical to those of the android women in “The Stepford Wives” from 1975, for example).

The dialogue certainly matches the film’s depressing style, regaling us with locker-room talk along the lines of: “We balled, and we balled, and we balled… till he dropped dead“. And: “There’d be a few seconds of ecstasy, and then, oblivion. Just think about it, boys: coming and going at the same time“. Or: “Me, for one, ain’t going to give up what little pleasure I get from screwing my old lady, or anybody else for that matter!“.

Warning: the film closes with the music of Strauss, à la Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It’s enough to take a good five years off the life of a true cinephile.