The Swarm

(1978) **1/2

The Swarm was directed by Irwin Allen, who had co-directed The Towering Inferno. Hoping to outdo his earlier effort, he threw in everything but the kitchen sink. It's blanketed with star actors, featuring Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, and the infuriatingly bearded Richard Chamberlain. Also, it's got an awesome villain: a terrifying swarm of mutant killer bees. Bees in this colony possess a poison strong enough to kill a human in 4 stings. Worse, the swarm is enormous -- by film's end, it's large enough to completely overwhelm the entire city of Houston.

Michael Caine leads the group assigned the task of taking the swarm down. He's quick to point out the basic conundrum of the bee problem: they need to be taken down in such a way as not to kill any of the world's normal bees, which we need in order to pollinate our crops. It's an insightful plot point. The Swarm seems to pride itself on its clever insights. Kind of ironic considering that the ultimate solution to the bee problem, as it turns out, causes an environmental catastrophe almost as bad as the problem it was meant to solve. If you ask me, I'll tell you what it is. Brace yourself though, it's ridiculous.

Believe it or not there's almost a feature length's worth of good movie to be found here. I did enjoy a side story about a boy who escapes a camp site while his parents are stung to death. He becomes MC's first living model for what happens to people who get stung. They meet in the boy's hospital room and MC spends the first few moments convincing the boy that the gigantic bee he sees floating in the middle of the room is a hallucination (see below).

Unfortunately for me, the 156 minutes I committed to watching this were not a hallucination. There's a feature length's worth of good movie to be found here, but with more than a feature length's worth of wheel-spinning attached to it. It just goes on and fucking on. Just when you think you're nearing the end of the movie, it's like "Christ, there's more movie." It's not simply that The Swarm is too long; it's that the story gets progressively less tidy as the minutes pass by. It opens up boxes simply to dump them on the floor -- to wit, 2 hours into a film is a terrible time to try to introduce a new major character, yet that's when we finally meet Dr. Andrews (Jose Ferrer). He's dead within 10 minutes of his first appearance.

According to IMDb, "Irwin Allen was so disheartened by the amount of money he lost on ‘The Swarm’ that he forbade any of his employees to ever mention it again. He even cut short an interview when a question was asked about it." I don't think Allen had to wait for the box office figures to come back to begin hating his own movie. The last hour makes it pretty clear he didn't care for it even while it was being scripted and shot.