Swarm, The (1978)

African killer bees are moving west and threatening to engulf Houston, Texas.

Quick, call on entomologist Brad Crane (Michael Caine) and a hive of Hollywood has-beens to out-ham each other while reciting terrible dialogue and getting stung by coloured Styrofoam pellets!

Crane has long been predicting a human vs insect war, but he “never dreamed it would turn out to be the bees. They were always our friends.”

Richard Widmark is General Slater, the quick-tempered Air Force man piqued when a civilian is put in charge of the rescue and containment operation (and quite rightly, as Caine’s character doesn’t really make a single right decision until the very end).

Henry Fonda is Dr Krim, a spectacularly useless wheelchair-bound immunologist who dies testing his anti-venom on himself.

Richard Chamberlain turns up for about five minutes as Dr Hubbard and says – truthfully, one feels – that he “came reluctantly,” and Katharine Ross is Dr Helena Anderson, a comely doctor cast presumably because she’s exactly the right height and colouring to be able to nestle appealingly against Michael Caine’s tan-clad chest.

Producer/director Irwin Allen added new meaning to his “master of disaster” title with this bumbled B(ee)-movie, widely considered one of the worst ever made.

For such a daft film with such a terminally silly premise, it’s surprisingly bloodthirsty, killing quite a few people on screen, a lot of them children, and then a few hundred more casually when the bees derail a train.

However, there’s much to enjoy precisely because it is so awful, with Queen Bee Olivia de Havilland’s laughable love triangle with Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray being the only strange mating ritual Caine should be studying.

Apparently, during the making of The Swarm – which was based on a novel by best-selling author Arthur Herzog – some real public fears were expressed that the film may traumatise impressionable minds, causing widespread panic in the US.

For this reason, the credits included a paragraph reading, “The African Killer Bee portrayed in this film bears absolutely no relationship to the industrious, hardworking American Honey Bee to which we are indebted for pollinating vital crops that feed our nation”.

Brad Crane
Michael Caine
Dr Helena Anderson
Katharine Ross
General Thaddeus Slater
Richard Widmark
Dr Hubbard
Richard Chamberlain
Maureen Schuster
Olivia de Havilland
Felix
Ben Johnson
Anne MacGregor
Lee Grant
Dr Andrews
José Ferrer
Rita Bard
Patty Duke
Jud Hawkins
Slim Pickens
Major Baker
Bradford Dillman
Clarence
Fred MacMurray
Dr Krim
Henry Fonda
General Thompson
Cameron Mitchell

Director
Irwin Allen

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