Review of The Savage Bees

**SPOILERS** Growing up in the 1970's I remember that many local new broadcasts would routinely report on the encroaching threat of Africanized honey bees (aka "Killer Bees"). All of this over-reporting led to the production of several killer bee movies. On November 22, 1976 the NBC Movie of the Night was The Savage Bees starring ageing Western Movie Actor, Ben Johnson. The Savage Bees was produced by Don Kirschner, the famous Rock promoter who infamously abused Neil Diamond's song writing abilities to make hit records for the Monkeys. This made for television movie utilizes a script which steals many plot elements from Jaws and is rather silly and illogical. Worse still, this is not a very well shot film. Even given leeway that the print we watched on YouTube may be inferior to the original broadcast, this film is mostly shot in the dark and incorporates very generic backgrounds. Unfortunately, much of this film was shot at the Universal Studios back lots in California and at Iverson Ranch in Los Angeles instead of the purported location of the story, New Orleans. I took my family to the Superdome in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana in 2014 and it was gorgeous; this film fails to take full advantage of the spectacle of Mardi Gras. Want to see a good use of New Orleans from the same era, then watch the James Bond film, Live and Let Die. The Director of The Savage Bees, Bruce Geller, seems to go out of his way to avoid filming many sequences during the Mardi Gras parade. In fact, The Savage Bees writer, Guerdon Trueblood, conveniently has his characters make the climatic journey to the Superdome on Ash Wednesday, the one day that he could film the car travelling down boring nearly empty streets. Imagine how much cooler that ending would have been if the bee-covered Volkswagen would have had to navigate its way around the revelry and parade of Mardi Gras. Imagine the chaos and spectacle of the parade being crashed by a car full of killer bees. You don't have to imagine too hard, go watch the film Animal House (filmed just two years later) to see how entertaining a ruined parade can be. Or, if you want to see a huge festival (like Mardi Gras) disrupted, then watch the 2012 film, Spectre and see what Director, Sam Mendes, did with his Mexican Day of the Dead festival sequence. The one thing this movie has going for it is the use of actual bees. Norman E. Gary was the Bee Wrangler used in this movie and he did most of the stunts that required a man to be covered in Bees. He later plied his trade in many other Hollywood movies using bees such as the Candyman horror movies. This movie spawned a sequel two years later, Terror out of the Sky. This made for television movie brought back only the female lead character, Entomologist, Jeannie Devereaux. Curiously, they cast a different actress to play Jeannie Devereaux in the sequel. The male lead, Dr. Jeff DuRand, is played by a young Michael Parks, who later went on to become a regular in several Quentin Tarantino films. James Best plays Deputy Mayor, Pelligrino, but most people my age remember him best as Rosco P. Coltrane from the Dukes of Hazard. This movie has more than a few plot holes but here are some of my favorites: · Why did a costume sword do enough damage to tear a protective suit specially designed by world renowned bee expert, Dr. Horge Mueller? · If a single bee separating from the deadly swarm and joining a different hive of harmless American honeybees would cause an ecological and financial disaster, then how does Dr. Mueller's plan of switching the queen Killer Bee with a harmless honey bee queen make any sense? Wouldn't the Africanized killer bees just corrupt the genes of that American honey bee queen's offspring like they did to the Italian honey bees in Brazil? · How is the audience supposed to suspend their disbelief and accept that the temperature of the enormous Superdome could plausibly be lowered to 45 degrees in a matter of minutes? · Ben Johnson's character, Sheriff Donald McKew, is rather curious. Why does he just assume that his dead dog was intentionally poisoned by the townsfolk? Do the townsfolk hate him? They don't seem to have a negative opinion of him throughout the film. Why is he so respectful of the Voodoo dead chicken? Why does he assume that he is going to be able to convince somebody, on Ash Wednesday when everything is mostly shutdown, to open up the Superdome and allow a Volkswagen to be driven onto the field. He announces to the other characters that he is going to drive ahead and get them to open up the Superdome door and then a few minutes later the Volkswagen drives right up to the Superdome and the door is open. How did he accomplish that?