You won't be disappointed!

Undescribable Perfection

Such a frustrating disappointment

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I saw this at a local arthouse cinema that was showing a curated "Dystopia" series. This was a bit of a tongue in cheek selection. I kinda like 70's disaster movies and decided to see this even tho I was aware of it's bad reputation. I went in with open mind and was prepared to be positively surprised as I even own movies like Airport (all four), Towering Inferno, Rolleroaster, Earthquake etc, so I genuinely was prepared to like it.So, there was something good about it. It looks good, I saw an original 35mm copy. There are slow-mo shots that really look pretty good and the fx are really good. All of the bee shots are extremely well made, be it close ups or wides with the whole swarm. I guess they used real bees and a lot of them and the swarm was some kind of super imposed thing, but they really did look good. Music was ok, but nothing remarkable by Jerry Goldsmith.And the bad, almost everything else. The script is amazingly dumb. From dialog to anything that happens really. There were so many face palm moments that it makes no sense listing them. It's also very much politically incorrect with the "africans" as villains and all white cast, that alone would make this a bomb. I can't imagine it being ok even in the late seventies.Acting was bad, but that is mostly due to the dumb script and characters. Michael Caines character must be one of the worst protagonists ever. He's not very likable and he doesn't even make very good decisions in the movie.What bugged me a bit tho while watching this film was that part of the audience was clearly laughing because they thought this is a movie you have to laugh at every scene. To me it wasn't a movie that is bad enough to be laughable for the most part, it was just bad. Sure there were a few scenes which did spark a non intended smile, but some people were laughing their asses off when kids were dying in slow motion.Difficult movie to judge. They clearly knew that killer bees might be a bit hard to accept as a real threat, but there were scenes that had tension. It was mostly everything that happened between those scenes that made the movie bad. I saw the original "short" version and it felt really long. Glad they didn't show the longer cut as I would've surely fell asleep.

I have not seen many films by Irwin Allen, but I somehow get the idea that he was quite a primitive filmmaker. This, I think, is best shown when one reads that he was confused by the success of the original Star Wars, in that it had no love story or major stars and yet became the highest-grossing film of its time. The Swarm, one of the disaster movies that killed his career, could not possibly be more primitive. One of the problems it has is one that it shares with killer bunny movie Night of the Lepus: it has way too serious of a tone and yet seems to be filled with silliness, intentional or not.After a break-in at a military base, Dr. Brad Crane (Michael Crane) takes charge of an operation meant to get rid of a giant swarm of killer bees headed for the United States. That is as simple a story as you could get. Most of it is just repeated attempts to find a way to destroy the bees. However, there are a couple of sub-plots that have nothing to do with anything, such as the wooing of Olivia De Havilland's school headmaster by Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray; all classic movie actors who have seen better days. Another sub-plot includes Patty Duke being widowed due to killer bee attacks and giving birth to a child, after which she falls in love with her doctor. Neither of these go anywhere as Johnson, MacMurray, and De Havilland are all killed in a train crash caused by the bees before the latter makes a decision about who to marry, and Duke disappears after the birth of her child; none of these people even interact with Dr. Crane or his love interest, Dr. Anderson played by Katharine Ross from The Graduate.Other problems include the acting; it's downright awful. Even Caine, who is usually fantastic, seems dull and uninterested. He did get to buy his mother a house with the money he earned, so he got something out of it. Everyone seems half-hearted, and Ross competes with Caine in terms of dullness. With the characters constantly referring to the killer bees as "Africans," one can be excused for thinking the film is racist, or even anti-immigrant.The script even calls for the characters to do things that border on the hilarious. After losing his parents to the bees, a kid sneaks out of the hospital to throw Molotov cocktails on the beehive, which causes the bees to rampage in his town and kill over 200 people. The kid rightly acknowledges that he is to blame, but Crane tells him "I would have done the same thing." All I can say is, "No you wouldn't." This is an example of Allen's weak attempts to get emotions out of the viewer, along with the unneeded sub-plots and ill-defined relationships. Crane and Anderson are supposed to have a romance, but that hardly seems to come through in the movie. That kid who firebombed the hive is important to Anderson, but how? The film is also too long, as there is very little story to go on, even with an attempted conflict between Crane and Richard Widmark's General Slater, who only seems to dislike Crane because he is a typical tough-guy American general.One detail mentioned in the film is that the fight against the bees has been going on for 15 years. What I don't understand is, if the bees have been killing people for that long, why have they only just started to invade America? I'd say a flashback was in order.To conclude, The Swarm is a film I do not recommend watching, as it is not an enjoyable creature feature. Even Frogs, which was arguably a worse movie, was more entertaining. Irwin Allen has done good work in the 70s, such as with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, but The Swarm shows what happens if you try to be as pretentious and simple as possible and make money from an audience in a decade when people wanted their movies to be smarter and fresher.

Lots of stars, major and minor, can't lift this shoddy piece if commercial garbage out of the dismissible category. But it DOES have one thing in common with "Hamlet" in that almost everybody of importance dies.It's not really fun watching watery-eyed Henry Fonda inject himself with a bee venom antidote and see his EKG rise to "really sssspooky rates." And it's positively embarrassing to see Ben Johnson talk about love to a plump Olivia De Havilland, who resurrects her Melanie accent from "Gone With The Wind." We can cover the special effects with the observation that everyone dies in slow motion and that buildings, trains, and automobile blow up.The structure of the tale is awful. Every attempt to kill the monster swarm is ineffective until, at the very end, Michael Caine as the requisite scientist springs a new weapon out of nowhere. And what a weapon. Now, I'm no apiarologist or apiariatrist. I'd be the first to admit it. But I'd bet the house my ex wife got that bees don't have a mating call, not being moose. Some kind of scent, a pheromone, might get my attention but this movie loses its organoleptic thread when it introduces portable hummers.It should be shown in all film appreciation classes as a bad example.

Such an incredible trainwreck! And, yes, there is a trainwreck in the movie! You can say that it is at that point in the movie where the movie goes off the rails. (Get it?)First, I have to tell you perhaps the funniest story of my movie-going life. It was summer 1978. Our family had rented an RV, and were about to go to Colorado. I loved disaster movies, and still do! Well, back then, with a truly great movie like "The Poseidon Adventure," and recent silly, but still likable ones like "Airport '77," I was ready for Irwin Allen's latest! Like, really ready!Now, I couldn't just see it. I had to see it on the BIG SCREEN! That meant the Grandview II, with two 550-seat auditoriums, in St. Louis' North County, 30 or so minutes away. So, I basically dragged my mother and brother up on the opening day afternoon to see "The Swarm!" And, it is as delightfully awful as you know!So, instead of getting ready for our trip, I had the three of us spending hours in going up and back and seeing this crazy movie! You can bet that I didn't hear the end of it for a while. And, the thing is? I didn't care! I loved it. It's awful, it's gloriously insane! It all-but-immediately ended Irwin Allen's career!Plus, I got to read the terrible one-star (at best!) reviews all during our vacation!Everything else you know, if you've seen it. The hilarious actor's reactions to being killed by bees. The endless disasters within disasters: the aforementioned trainwreck, the nuclear plant magically blowing up (!) because bees got into the control room (what?!). It goes on and on.Plus, introducing all these characters, just to kill them off for the heck of it! And, the only-here-for-the-paycheck actors of the requisite "All-Star Cast." Lastly, you have to LOVE the way they deal with the bees at the end! The one thing I can unequivocally endorse is Jerry Goldsmith's score. 1978 was his greatest year, with one great score after another (plus, another Oscar nomination for "The Boys from Brazil") Here, Goldsmith again provides a score as if he is providing music for the greatest film ever! I love this movie, as impossibly bad as it is! Please, please, remaster this and release it on Blu-ray. After all, we could all use a good laugh these days!******* (7 Out of 10 Stars)