When it comes to assorted creatures and creepy-crawlies that would make excellent horror movie villains, you can't get much better than bees. They're loud, they move in large swarms, and even at their regular size are responsible for many deaths every year. So why can't anyone seem to make a good horror movie about them? The best bee-related horror film that I can think of is Candyman (1992). And even in that film the bees aren't even the main villain! If I had to guess why it is seemingly impossible to make a good bee horror movie, it would be that the sight of people getting attacked by bees is always, without exception, hilarious (And, yes, I say this as someone who has been attacked by bees.). But the sight of people dying via bee attack is not the only reason why Freddie Francis' The Deadly Bees doesn't work. The film, which follows an exhausted pop singer who moves to a cottage in the country to recuperate, is completely devoid of suspense. The cottage is owned by a beekeeper named Ralph Hargrove who, unbeknownst to anyone else, has managed to isolate the human fear pheromone. He then goes about murdering people by secretly exposing them to the pheromone which, for some reason, causes the bees to savagely attack and kill them. Even though the screenplay was written by Robert Bloch, the man who also wrote the novel that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was based on, the film is dead on arrival. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that maybe Ralph the beekeeper has something to do with the killer bees. Oh well...maybe one day bees will get the horror movie that they deserve.
5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment