I thought I’d do something a little bit different this week. Until now, I’ve only been reviewing stuff that I’ve watched with friends. However, this time I was thinking of reviewing a bad movie that I like very much but don’t think is appropriate to watch in a group. So today we’re going to tackle the buzzing bullshit that is THE SWARM.
Quick Recap! When COVID shut down everything in early 2020, I started an online bad movie night get-together with some friends that we eventually dubbed “Bad Movie Monday”. The premise was simple: We’d torture each other every Monday with the worst trash we could find, tell a few jokes, cheer each other up, and in the process maybe discover some weird obscure cinema that we might never have seen any other way. This series of reviews will feature highlights of those night so you can all share in the fun and maybe get some ideas for your own movie night.
Cards on the table, The Swarm is far from a “bad” bad movie. In fact, it’s a GREAT bad movie. One of the first bad movies I ever enjoyed as a bad movie. It stars Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, José Ferrer, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Bradford Dillman, Henry Fonda and Fred MacMurray. It was written by Stirling Silliphant based on a book by Arthur Herzog, and directed by Irwin Allen. All that raw talent under Allen’s less than stellar directing skills? Chef’s kiss! Perfection! However, it’s just way too damn long at two hours and thirty-five minutes. Yes, it has a lot of really great fun moments, but it’s “more long than fun” if you get my drift.
Look, if I can give you any advice for picking a fun bad movie to watch with friends, it’s this: The shorter the better. In my opinion, a bad movie’s ideal length is around ninety minutes. Anything over that and the movie will be a worse experience, anything under that and the movie will be a better experience. Always remember the wise words of the great playwright William Shakespeare when he said “Brevity is the soul of wit” It’s kind of like that, only this time you’re watching something that includes honking noise sound effects when a guy squeezes a woman’s breasts.
What happens when a movie is too long is that once one of your friends starts to get bored that leads to another friend getting bored. Within a very short time, the boredom becomes as contagious as a yawn and nobody’s having fun anymore. That threshold of patience is roughly around thirty continuous minutes of tedium and when a bad movie is over two hours long this is almost certain to occur. You can actually feel it as it happens. People start to laugh less. They make less jokes. Eventually, they just sit and quietly wait for the end credits to roll. That’s not a fun thing to experience.
So what’s THE SWARM about? What’s the story? Well, allow me to explain it badly. The Swarm is about the “inevitable” attack on the United-States by Africanized Killer Bees. If you’ve seen a disaster movie before you’ll feel in familiar territory. You’ve got a main “A” story is about a civilian entomologist called Bradford Crane (Michael Caine) being put in charge of the military by the President of the United-States and given unlimited power and resources to stop the bees after they take out an ICBM command bunker in South Texas, and two “B” stories that are roughly interwoven in the main narrative in order to give us a sense of scope about what’s going on. The first “B” story is the better of the two, about a boy called Paul Durant whose whole family was killed by bees. It’s short and dumb but it feels part of the narrative at least. The second is a weird totally out of place soap opera-esque love triangle between Fred MacMurray, Olivia de Havilland, and Ben Johnson that feels like it’s from another movie.
Let’s ignore the “B” stories though, because they don’t really advance the plot at all. Instead, let’s focus on Michael Caine’s character and how he’s a complete and utter tool. He’s so terrible at his job that I literally thought the film was going to have a twist ending where he reveals that he’s actually a giant bee pretending to be Doctor Bradford Crane. It’s ridiculous the number of times he refuses rational courses of action. For example, the military General under Crane’s charge (Richard Widmark) suggests dropping massive amounts of poison on the bees. Crane is horrified and refuses because it would also kill regular bees. He then goes on a rant about how killing normal bees would kill the crops, and by killing the crops you’d kill the people. Never mind the fact that no one was suggesting to do this nationwide, only in the very small area in Texas where the killer bees are now. An area whose main crop seems to be flowers. Not exactly the greatest loss. Later, after a small town is attacked by bees and over two hundred people are killed, the military chastises Crane for not evacuating the area since the bees have been so close by. “Why evacuate?” Crane says, and if he sounded stupid before now he just sounds completely crazy.
However, regardless of Crane’s objection everyone is eventually evacuated by the military, which is what should have been done in the first place, but since the movie is determined to demonize good ideas the bees manage to crash the train in the most ridiculous way possible and kill everyone on board, including most of the cast from the “B” story about love triangles and whatnot. So at least that’s out of the way now.
FINALLY, Crane decides to drop some environmentally friendly poison pellets on the killer bees. Stuff that is supposed to only affect those specific bees and nothing else. It doesn’t work, because of course it doesn’t. Oh, and that kid Paul from the earlier “B” stories dies of… something. Running out of options, one of Crane’s friends who is helping him fight the bees, Doctor Krim (Henry Fonda) decides to test an experimental antidote to the bee venom on himself. Fonda’s character is a frail old man in a wheelchair, which begs the question “Why test this on yourself???” If two stings killed a healthy young boy in the space of a few days, perhaps not inject yourself with the equivalent of SIX stings. The scene of him testing it on himself, without an assistant of course, is shown in long intricate detail. He explains every step of the process in a long monologue. This is such slow torture that I’d have let him inject ME with that goddamn bee venom at this point if it could have ended the movie sooner. In any case, it was all for nothing since he dies. SPOILERS. Shocking right? Crane’s character then has an emotional scene where it’s obvious that actor Michael Caine is desperately trying not to laugh as he pretends to be devastated.
Thirty-four minutes to go.
So what happens next? One of the characters had mentioned a nuclear power plant earlier. So of course the bees blow it up. SPOILERS! This is even stupider than the train scene. Oh well, if you ever wanted to see Jose Ferrer and Richard Chamberlain covered in bees then you’re in luck.
FINALLY, after over thirty-six thousand people die in the Nuclear Plant meltdown and receiving information that the Killer Bees are now heading for the city of Houston the President of the United-States realizes Doctor Crane’s complete incompetence and strips him of his powers. Which leads to a really weird scene where Richard Widmark, as General Slater, says “From now on the war against the Africans will be under military direction.” Which is a really really really strange way of putting it. I don’t know if this was some sort of subtle commentary on race relations in America or something, but… damn. That line really stuck out in a movie full of weird dialogue.
Alright, let’s pinch off this turd. Houston has been evacuated and taken over by bees, and the Military response is simply to burn the city to the ground. How do they do this you ask? With incendiary devices or bombs? No, no, no. Of course not. They just send in nine guys with flamethrowers to burn everything within sight. Does this make any sense? No, and I don’t care about logic anymore. The movie STILL has twenty-minutes left to go and it feels as long as the Vietnam War by this point.
Speaking of Vietnam, Doctor Crane finally figures out that the bees are attracted to sound waves. So he hatches up a plan to lure the swarm over the ocean where he has the military dump billions of gallons of oil into the water. Once the bees are over the slick, he has it SET ON FIRE. Remember when he was going on about the environment earlier? How everything existed in a delicate balance? Apparently, he decided that fish could go fuck themselves.
The movie then mercifully ends with Michael Caine and Katherine Ross standing in front of the burning ocean waxing poetically about how the world might just survive if we use the time we’ve gained wisely,
Christ on a crutch that was a long one.
THE SWARM was not the end for the Disaster Movie genre, but it was as ominous as an undertaker standing outside a hospital room. Where previous entries in the genre had been a fairly solid bit of soap opera silliness, Swarm almost felt like parody where none of the jokes have punchlines. To be fair, I actually enjoyed this movie more than I’m letting on, but it is a bit exhausting. If you have the stamina, I say go check it out. However, if you don’t feel like spending 155 minutes of your life watching Michael Caine try not to laugh through most of his scenes, I’ll understand.
And now we come to my favorite part of any review where I list ten random thoughts I had watching the movie:
#1 – One early scene that got me laughing particularly hard was when the military, investigating why everyone in the ICBM bunker is dead, are about to open the elevator doors to go down into the control room and two guys who are carrying flamethrowers point them at the doors. You know, just in case there’s something inside. Well, what the hell were they gonna do if there was something? Shoot a blast liquid fire about a foot away from their own faces? Why not just throw grenades in there while you’re at it? I mean, why not? I’d rather be blown to smithereens than roasted alive. Why did they even bring them anyway? I get that they look cool, but they’re not a very useful weapon in close quarters.
#2 – This is trying to be so topical that it’s an inadvertent comedy. Back in the late seventies everybody and their mom were afraid of Killer Bees. Think people today freak out about every little thing? Dear God, you weren’t there for the Satanic Panic, Ancient Astronauts, The looming ice age, Three Mile Island, Watergate, the metric system, the Oil Crisis, and yes… THE FUCKING BEES.
#3 – This isn’t just trying to entertain you. No, it wants to EDUCATE you about the dangers of Killer Bees. It wants to teach you a lesson about respecting nature or… something. I’m not sure. I don’t think the movie knows either. The ending is certainly ambiguous.
#4 – Michael Caine is a treasure. If you made a drinking game where you take a sip when it’s obvious that Caine’s only motivation during a scene is trying not to laugh you’d be as drunk as Michael Caine probably was during the filming of the movie. Doctor Bradford Crane is probably one of the most ridiculous characters he’s ever played, and that is saying a lot.
#5 – One of the things that becomes clear upon repeated viewings of the film is how many times Caine’s character is disastrously wrong. Not just wrong, but catastrophically, apocalyptically wrong. And not just that but the Military, who are consistently portrayed to be bad guys throughout the movie and who Caine constantly butt heads with, are almost always right.
#6 – The movie is so desperate to show that Doctor Crane is always right and always knows what to do that one scene involves him curing a boy of the effects of bee venom by talking to him. That’s right, the man can heal with the simple power of his voice. I’m not kidding either, this is in the movie.
#7 – I know that the scene where a grade school is attacked by bees is supposed to be tragic, but the overuse of slow motion and the fact that I find people running away from bees hysterically funny had me rolling around the floor in a puddle of tears.
#8 – There’s a scene where, after Henry Fonda’s character dies, Caine is supposed to be so broken up that he sits in Fonda’s wheelchair and starts rolling back and forth with it, then the camera pans to Fonda’s glasses and I wondered for a crazy minute if Caine wasn’t just going to put them on and start rolling around the room laughing hysterically.
#9 – This is not Jerry Goldsmith’s best score, but then again there’s only so much you can do when your principal musical theme is Bzz-Bzz-Bzz-Bzz-Bzz-Bzzzzzzz-Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz-Bzzzzzt!!!
#10 – Depending on sources, THE SWARM either cost the same as the original 1977 Star Wars or twice as much. No joke here, just an observation. Money well spent eh? It made all of 7.7 million dollars.
