Entry Forty-Three: Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

Dir: Denis Sanders

"They'll love the very life out of your body!"

 

Get out your bug spray and batten down the hatches; down here in the Basement of Sleaze, I'm doing my damnedest to ward off the Invasion of the Bee Girls!

Cinematic badass William Smith (Angels Die Hard, Boss Nigger, Conan the Barbarian) is Neil motherfucking Agar, a take-no-shit G-Man sent to investigate the sudden death of federally-bankrolled scientist Dr. Grubowsky in a small California town.  After interviewing the dead man's sexy assistant, Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Rosemary's Baby and Playboy's Miss September 1967) , smooth-as-hell Agar discovers that Grubowsky died mid-coitus in an extramarital tryst with said assistant.  While the dead man's colleagues in the scientific community speak enviously on the manner of his demise ("Think of it, boys; coming and going at the same time!"), all sorts of dudes (frat boys, bikers, teachers) around town are dropping dead with their dicks hanging out.  Coronary reports reveal that all of these gentlemen died fucking, and you can be damn sure that Neil Agar is going to get to the bottom of this shit, while also making time to romance the now-available Dr. Harris.  The local authorities recommend total abstinence in order to prevent further death, a suggestion that the men of the town don't take kindly to ("These guys freeze wages...Dammit, they're not gonna FREEZE anything else!").  Meanwhile, the exotic Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford, The Big Bird Cage, The Longest Yard), who has an obsession for sugar, is wandering about town romancing the members of the local scientific community.  Agar and Zorn discover that Harris is the Queen of a race of extraterrestrial bees, who are taking over the women of this small town (they all wear sunglasses to shield their multifaceted eyes) in order to kill off the America's foremost experts on reproduction, thus ensuring a beachhead for a full invasion of this great nation!  When Zorn is captured by Dr. Harris, will Agar be able to save her?  Or will she, and the rest of our nation, be subjected to the will of the Bee Girls?  

This movie is typically written off as a camp classic, but, while that's not totally inaccurate, there's a bit more worth looking at here.  It's plot is informed by the paranoid alien invasion films of the height-of-the-Cold War 50s, it's colorful, often-trippy visuals by the B-movies of the 60s and it's anti-sex/anti-authority narrative is symptomatic of the 'Nam-era, post-Altamont, death-of-the-free-love-generation 70s.  It was made during a transitional period in American cinema, and just might bear re-examining as an important (if confused) historical artifiact.  If you'd rather view this as simply a bit of exploitation, then rest assured there are plenty of boobs, butts and vagina-bulges on display here.  The director was primarily known for documentary and television work, but screenwriter Nicholas Meyer would go on to much more illustrious work: he penned the Sherlock Holmes film The Seven-Percent Solution, the excellent H.G. Welles-meets-Jack the Ripper time travel film Time After Time and the two best Star Trek movies.