A funny thing happened to the sci-fi horror B-movie Invasion of the Bee Girls on its way to the trash heap of cinematic obscurity. In fits and starts, it became a cult B-movie of some repute, and its latest resurrection or larval emergence is Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray. How did this happen, and what is a Bee Girl?
As written by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Denis Sanders, Invasion of the Bee Girls was produced in 1973 by a shoestring company called Sequoia Pictures and released by an equally obscure distributor called Centaur Releasing, and we’ll explore an in-joke there. At its release, critics made predictable jokes about “bee movies”.
By the decade’s end, two Chicago film critics named Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel became media stars by hosting a PBS series called Sneak Previews, in which they reviewed several new films per week. They occasionally hosted themed programs, and some episodes highlighted their concept of “Guilty Pleasures”.
One of Ebert’s choices in a 1981 installment was Invasion of the Bee Girls, which he called “the best schlock softcore science fiction film since probably The Vengeance of She in 1967.” He added, “It has beautiful women, strong dumb men, a plot to rule the world, and a secret laboratory with lots of neat machines with flashing lights. What else do you want in a guilty pleasure?” He also summarizes it as “about women who use radioactivity to turn into queen bees, and then go out, organize the workers and make them drop like flies.”
That was probably the moment in popular culture when curious film buffs began seeking out this strange B-movie on VHS, and it’s gone through multiple incarnations on video ever since. While Ebert’s response is campy and superficial, Invasion of the Bee Girls rewards at least a slightly deeper analysis. Don’t get the idea that we’re talking about an aesthetic or intellectual masterpiece, though. Nicholas Meyer’s script is rapid but haphazard, pushing the plot from Death A to Death Bee (we’ll try to watch the bee puns) without making too many licks of sense.
William Smith plays a federal agent named Neil Agar, whose name is probably a wink to John Agar, a prolific star of low-budget and, well, okay, schlocky sci-fi B-movies. Agar arrives in a California town called Peckham, a name presumably coined to resonate with words like “pecker”, “henpeck” and “pecking order”. He’s there because one of the male scientists in a government-funded facility called Brandt Research was found dead of “extreme sexual exhaustion” in a motel room while his wife sat at home wringing her hands.
Before we can take a breath in this B-movie, naked dead guys are being found all over the landscape in the space of a few days. We glimpse a few mysterious incidents involving nude women and a droning sound. We sense that they’ve all been lured by a taste of honey. (We’ll stop, we promise, before you get too much of a buzz.)
Agar and the befuddled sheriff (Cliff Osmond) are as lousy at investigative procedure as the men of Peckham are lousy at keeping it in their pants after hearing that men are “dropping like flies”. (Hmm, there’s another pun there.) Amid the spectre of a sexually transmitted epidemic, the government calls in the military to quarantine the town, a move that infuriates the citizens while attracting no outside attention.
One boffin, Dr. Henry Murger (Wright King), makes the mistake of uttering in public that he has a wacky theory he can’t mention yet, and five minutes later, he’s run over by a car. In a genuinely interesting revelation, Agar learns that Murger was a closeted gay man living with a trucker who was someplace called Herm’s Bar (or Hermes?). Neither are effeminate stereotypes and Agar doesn’t express any hetero-revulsion at the information. Mind you, Murger has a gaudy secret room with a unicorn statue and some whips. In other words, Murger is impervious to the town’s danger, except automotively.
We quickly learn what’s been obvious. The “iceberg” Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford), a svelte bombshell never seen without enormous Foster Grant sunglasses indoors. She methodically rounds up the science widows and forcibly subjects them to a bee-covered makeover from which they emerge with enormously long mascara’d eyelashes, huge black eyeballs, and compound-eye bee-vision, which the camera adopts now and then for psychedelics’ sake.
Meanwhile, Smith enlists a young librarian named Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri), who hasn’t yet been subjected to the bee process but barely escapes attempted rape by three thugs. It’s a good thing Smith is there to pound them to a pulp. She’d already characterized Peckham as “just like any other place” and said that bored people get up to wife-swapping and all kinds of kinks. Indeed, we’ve witnessed the more than casual sexism of just about every man in town, not to mention the sexual frustration of their wives. This is a grim image of small-town America.
In other words, the B-movie Invasion of the Bee Girls is a “war between the sexes” variant of the ever-popular “body snatcher” concept in which people are replaced by doppelgangers or brainwashed into new selves. This concept has been handy for everything from vampires to alien invasions. More importantly, it applies this idea to the sexual revolution and what’s now called “second-wave feminism”, an undercurrent in many horror and science fiction projects of the early 1970s.
For example, Ira Levin’s 1972 bestseller The Stepford Wives posited that restless and rebellious women could become perfect 1950s-style sitcom housewives if only they were turned into literal robots. The film version wouldn’t be made until 1975, as directed by Bryan Forbes and scripted by William Goldman, but it’s interesting that the iconography of the Stepford robots – smooth skin, large dead eyes, immaculate coiffure – is also the imagery of the housewives transformed into Bee Girls. The side effect of the bee work, we learn, is sterility caused by radiation, and this leads to unexplained death-sized sexual appetites.
B-movie Invasion of the Bee Girls inverts the Stepford trope since it imagines the triumph of what’s more or less a lesbianic cadre of super-women who receive a kiss of power from Dr. Harris after she peels off the cocoon of the honey facial, which resembles a beauty spa treatment. The sexual subversion places Meyer’s screenplay in the vicinity of Harvest Home, a 1973 bestseller by ex-actor Thomas Tryon (a closeted gay man, by coincidence?), filmed as the Bette Davis TV movie The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978). In that and another TV production, The Last Bride of Salem (1974), women form a coven dominate the town’s men.
Bert I. Gordon’s Necromancy (1972), co-written by Gail March, also features an isolated California town of women who try to recruit the heroine into witchcraft. These ideas were percolating in B-movies and novels that tease the audience with promises of a new sexual order of one variety or another. In some cases, a reactionary ideal is longed for. In others, a revolution promises to upset the status quo of power and must be quelled.
Or not. The audacious final scene of Invasion of the Bee Girls dares to appropriate Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, indelibly associated with evolutionary transformation at the ending of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Just after Agar asserts his male supremacy over a talkative woman, the music kicks in as the camera cuts to increasing numbers of bees that appear to be having sex with flowers. This startling moment anticipates one of my favorite insectile freak-outs of the ’70s, Saul Bass’ ant-ridden Phase IV (1974).
Meyer was at the start of his career. The year after Invasion of the Bee Girls, he became a bestselling novelist with a Sherlock Holmes tale, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which he adapted for Herbert Ross’ 1976 film version. He then successfully directed several science fiction films: Time After Time (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and the nuclear-war TV film The Day After (1983). In story and budget, these are one or two quantum leaps beyond his script about Bee Girls, but one has to start somewhere.
Meyer is quite well known, while director Denis Sanders isn’t. Nevertheless, Sanders won two Academy Awards during his very interesting career. When a student at UCLA, he caught attention with A Time Out of War (1954), a Civil War story that won an Oscar and other prizes and has been drafted into the National Film Registry. His short documentary Czechoslovakia 1968 (1969) won another Oscar.
His other films as director include War Hunt (1962), named one of the year’s ten best by National Board of Review; One Man’s Way (1963), a biopic starring Don Murray as Norman Vincent Peale; the horror film Shock Treatment (1964), which is also about medical conversion of troublesome people; and two significant concert films, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) and the Ghana-filmed Soul to Soul (1971). He spent the rest of his career at San Diego State University.
Here’s a bit of trivia worth knowing. Sanders’ mother was a notable American artist named Altina Schinasi. Among other things, she’s known for inventing the Harlequin eyeglass frame, more popularly known as cat-eye glasses. Invasion of the Bee Girls has its converted women wearing giant round Foster Grants everywhere. I had assumed that Sanders didn’t seem too personally engaged by the material, but we’ll have to rethink that.
I promised an in-joke. In a scene where Agar wants to know if it’s possible to splice human and animal genes, he first asks if a man could be crossed with a horse. We have no idea why his thoughts tend in that direction, but he’s told it would be a centaur. By either in-joke or coincidence, Centaur Releasing is the distributor.
B-movie Invasion of the Bee Girls boasts a groovy score with abstract female vocals composed by Charles Bernstein. The cinematographer is Gary Graver, who worked on several horror films and, most importantly, had a long association with Orson Welles in his final years. That’s probably how he prefers to be remembered, though he also was honored in the Adult Video News Hall of Fame (as Robert McCallum) for prolific contributions to porn.
Kino’s Blu-ray features a commentary track by film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (who calls the film “gleefully horny”) and Josh Nelson. They point out that Invasion of the Bee Girls‘ champions include Andrew Sarris and Jim Jarmusch and that Meyer complained his script was rewritten. The commentary expands upon many ideas I’ve touched on here, so I want it on record that I wrote this whole review (save this paragraph) in a fevered rush before listening to it. Great minds run in the same channel. Please pardon that bee in my bonnet.