Oh good GOD, where do I BEGIN? First of all, I read the book upon which this movie is based back when I was a kid, and I don't remember a whole lot about it, but I remember it was better than this steaming pile of shit that has the nerve to call itself a movie. If the book's authoir isn't dead already, this movie would kill him (and then he'd roll over in his grave and come back as a zombie to seek revenge on the people responsible for making the movie). Right from the opening credits, we see that it's amateur day at the film school. There are soldier-type guys running around a base and running into rooms, finally taking the elevator to the ground floor and finding a bunch of dead people, and all the while we can't help but think "THIS is supposed to be a military base? Really?" I mean, there are blinking lights and things on the walls and a lot of big computers, but everything looks incredibly fake (the original "The Twilight Zone" series had more realistic looking special effects). Right away I was shaking my head in sorrow, but I forced myself to pay attention, and boy did I dig up some comedy gold for you. First, we're supposed to believe that a huge swarm of killer bees infiltrated this base, somehow got into this underground room (they must have taken the elevator), killed all these people, and then flew away without leaving a single dead bee behind as evidence. This despite the fact that even a six year old can tell you that bees DIE AFTER THEY STING PEOPLE. Obviously these are magic bees.

There's a small town nearby, and the magic bees start attacking and killing people in the town (and by "the bees" I of course mean "swarms of fake looking pellet thingies and clouds of small dots superimposed on the screen). The bees kill a family but leave the teenage son alive, so he does the most logical thing, gets two of his gooniest friends and finds a swarm of killer bees and firebombs them. That's exactly what I'd do in his situation. It's the only logical choice of course. Not only is this explanation ridiculously stupid, the special effects aren't very special and they start to grate on me. I mean, do any of you remember that old episode of the show "McGuyver" where he has to kill a bunch of fire ants with a blowtorch? That had better special effects, and it was a TV episode. This was a huge budget Hollywood movie with a lot of stars in it. You'd think they'd at least TRY to make things look slightly realistic.

After this stupid firebombing scene, the swarm of bees gets pissed and heads for the nearby town to kill a bunch of people. We meet the rest of the cast, which features a bunch of former Oscar winners who probably killed their agents after this movie came out, and we watch a bunch of people die over the course of the next few days as the military tries to stop the bees and fails. After most of the cast is dispatched, the hero and his woman are left alone to try and kill the remaining bees, and of course they figure out a way to do so (managing to rip off almost every other sci-fi "giant/killer/animal/insect" movie in the process). And no, I'm not just being an asshole here, the ending "solution" for killing the bees is ripped off directly from the 1957 Sci-fi movie "Beginning of the End." That movie was more realistic than this movie, and it features toy cars superimposed over photographs with grasshoppers crawling all over them to simulate an attack of the giant bugs.

I'm probably making this movie sound funny, but that's the thing... this SHOULD be funny, but it's all insanely boring. I fell asleep twice and had to rewind the damn thing, and then I still didn't know how to review it. There's nothing likable about this movie, it's as if Irwin Allen (the man responsible for this bucket of cinematic swill) was forced at gunpoint to make this movie and he was pissed, so he decided to toss the book out the window and piece together a script composed entirely of scenes stolen from other sci-fi movies.

I love low-budget crap, but this was bigger-budget crap (featuring the talent of a bunch of people who should know better) and that grates on my last working nerve. Some movies are so bad they're good. This movie is so bad it's terrible. You can safely skip this.

• Director Irwin Allen was so disheartened by the amount of money he lost on The Swarm (1978) that he forbade any of his employees to ever mention it again. He even cut short an interview when a question was asked about it.
• Michael Caine stated in an interview that during filming he thought the little yellow spots left by the bees on his clothing was honey so he began to eat it, unaware he was eating bee poop.