The Swarm (1978) - film review

When the personnel at a top secret nuclear missile base in Texas are mysteriously wiped out, the military are at a loss to explain what may have happened.  The most likely explanation is a chemical or biological attack by a foreign power, but this is soon discounted.  Dr Bradford Crane, a scientist from England, suddenly appears from nowhere with a theory too fantastic to be taken seriously.  It was the bees what done it, he reveals.  And not just ordinary bees, oh no.  The culprits are not the friendly indigenous bees that pollinate our crops and give us honey but a nasty species of immigrant bee, from Africa.  Whilst Crane and the base commander Major Slater get to grips with the situation, mainly through a series of rather pointless shouting matches, a young family are attacked by the bees whilst having a picnic.  Having seen his parents stung to death by the vicious insects, the boy Paul escapes in their car to the nearest town and receives medical attention from Helena Anderson just in time.   Despite being the world’s leading authority on bees, Dr Crane is flummoxed and calls in Dr Walter Krim, another renowned entomologist, but of the decrepit wheelchair-bound variety, to find a way to destroy the bees before they destroy us.  Meanwhile, the bees have swarmed into the town where the boy Paul is recuperating and start slaughtering everyone they can find.  They then wreck a train taking evacuees from the town, before blowing up a nuclear power plant.  And now the busy little blighters are heading straight for Houston for more fun and games.  Unless Krim and Crane can find a way to defeat them, these hyper-intelligent bees will go on spreading death and disaster across the globe, until either they get bored or the human race is extinct.  Can nothing defeat the black and yellow peril...?

Disaster movies were a big thing in the 1970s, almost invariably star-studded blockbusters that attracted huge audiences who needed some light relief from the harrowing real-life prospects of nuclear obliteration, economic calamity and Eurovision.  Two of the most memorable such films were The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1978), which were both produced by Irwin Allen, who is perhaps best known for the TV sci-fi shows he made in the sixties, notably Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost In Space.   Allen’s third foray into the disaster movie genre was to have been his masterpiece – an epic struggle for survival between man and bee, with a cast of literally millions (mostly bees).  Unfortunately, it proved to be an altogether different kind of disaster movie to the one that was intended...

The Swarm had the potential to be a great film.  The concept was sound, Allen had the kudos to attract some of the best talent in the business (on both sides of the camera) and audiences loved disaster films of this kind.  But what should have been a sure-fire hit ended up as one of Allen’s biggest flops, reviled by the critics and shunned by the cinema-going public.  It was thanks largely to this film (and some of Allen’s subsequent offerings) that the disaster movie rapidly began to go out of fashion.  With such a strong premise, how could it all have gone so wrong?

The main culprit is the script, which is bad even by the generally low standards of the disaster movie.  Indeed, some of the dialogue in this film is so atrocious you can almost see the actors struggle to contain the urge to vomit and spit their teeth out as they deliver such masterfully composed crud as:  "We’ve been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years...  I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees. They’ve always been our friend." or "Houston on fire... Will history blame me, or the bees?"  Best of all is Crane’s explanation for how he came to be at the missile silo: "That’s a complicated story. It begins a year ago. But let’s skip that."  I defy anyone to sit through the very last scene (in which Michael Caine sombrely reflects on man’s victory over bee-kind) without collapsing into foam-spitting hysterics of the kind that can get a person institutionalised.

The Swarm has other faults beside its woeful script.  The performances are way, way over the top (every scene featuring Michael Caine and Richard Widmark seems to end in a shout-a-thon that would look O.T.T. in a Christmas pantomime performed by Prozac addicts).  Many of the action scenes are poorly choreographed and appear so unintentionally funny that you’d swear the whole thing was being played for laughs.  And whilst some of the special effects are genuinely impressive, there are others that are totally unconvincing and look as if they were painted on by an uninspired toddler.

Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray stretch the limits of our endurance for cheesy low-grade schmaltz to the limit as they enact one of the corniest love triangles ever committed to celluloid (outside a 1980s soap opera).  How happy we are when all three of them get totally obliterated a few scenes later.   Equally satisfying is the comeuppance of Richard Chamberlain, a nauseating know-it-all scientist who gets atomised in a nuclear explosion (an effect that is marginally less convincing than one you would find in an average episode of Space 1999).  Slim Pickens somehow manages to escape being zapped by the psychopathic insects, but you can’t have everything.   By way of recompense we have Michael Caine as the self-proclaimed expert in bees who hasn’t a clue how to deal with them and spends most of his time railing against authority and mulling over matters metaphysical.   The bees should have counted themselves lucky they weren’t up against Harry Palmer.

All this would suggest that The Swarm is a grade A turkey that no one in their right mind would ever want to watch.  Yet, as imperfect as the film is, it is remarkably entertaining, and far more watchable than most other disaster movies from the seventies.  You’d almost think that it was intended as a parody of the disaster movie – the characters are stereotypes who are so shallow that you can practically see straight through them, many of the death scenes are so badly realised that they cannot fail to elicit a laugh, and the dialogue is so unremittingly, unflinchingly bad that after a while it becomes very, very funny.  If Irwin Allen had realised this at the time and pushed the film over the edge into all-out parody it might have enjoyed a far more positive reaction.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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