Review of The Swarm (1978) by John B — 17 Jan 2008

The Swarm is the greatest disaster movie EVER made. Carve that into the moon with a diamond heat laser, because no matter what happens in span of human history that will never, ever change. The Earth could blow up from human negligence and futuristic holograms could capture ever minute essence of the entire horrifying moment and it still could not begin to compare to this 1978 classic. Why?

No friggin killer bees.

In the late 70s, Irwin Allen started losing the rest of his mind. Having already burned down a skyscraper in The Towering Inferno and capsizing a luxury ship in The Poseidon Adventure, he set his sights higher to bigger and better versions of the same: having big-named celebrities deal with the unholy wrath of an angry big daddy Jesus. Losing ground in the continuing disaster trend, he was up against stiff competition in the way of imitators such as Avalanche, Airport 77, and Meteor and the idea well of things that could actually happen to you, natural disaster-wise, was ruining a bit thin. Buying the rights to a little known killer bee spook novel by Arthur Herzog, he decided the best way to come out of the gate running would be to make the worst implausible story in movie history from a novel up until 2004 The Day After Tomorrow. (See my forthcoming article:(Fatwa on Roland Emmerich: "How Could You Fuck Up Godzilla So Bad?" for details.).

Not to give away the plot, because there isn't any, but the bees fucking WIN. Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Chamberlain, Richard Widmark, Katherine Ross run around Houston and the Texas countryside absolutely obliterating a small town's populace in the process of fighting killer bees that happen to: derail a train, take helicopters out of the sky, kill an entire elementary class, ruin the annual town flower festival (I wish I was kidding), and blow up a nuclear fusion reactor all in the span of a week. As the snowball of bad ideas tumble, we get into a much more desperate third act, where it seems the actors seem to have just gone crazy and decided this would be a good day to die and get the hell out of this movie. Henry Fonda injects himself with a lethal dose of bee venom to test the bee antidote (despite being the ONLY person who could have developed an antidote)---kills himself. Richard Widmark abandons a flamethrower and starts letting the bees have it with a machine gun---he dies. Richard Chamberlain gets swarmed by bees and doesn't try to miss the huge red self-destruct button built into all US nuclear reactor panels--good bye, Shogun. Michael Caine, the most power-crazed etymologist in the world, runs around delirious shouting to the streets of Houston, "The Africans are coming!" and sets the ocean on fire---manages to save the day. Hmmm...funny epilogue.

If you enjoy an oddly racist, dumb brick to the head of a movie by all means rent this piece of shit. It is golden.