Customer Reviews
Languages and subtitles - By: Mauricio Dupuis, 08 Nov 2007 
THE SWARM (1978)
(Zone 2)
directed by Irwin Allen
Music composed by Jerry Goldsmith
LANGUAGES: ENGLISH
SUBTITLES: ENGLISH - FRENCH - FINNISH - ICELANDIC - SWEDISH - CZECH -
GREEK - POLISH - TURKISH - ROMANIAN - DUTCH
A CHEESY GOOD TIME - By: stuart, 26 Oct 2007 
Investigating a missile asylum, Major General Thalius Slater, (Richard Widmark) finds Dr. Bradford Crane, (Michael Caine) inside the facility, claiming that a strand of mutant killer bee is responsible for the mysterious happening. As reports come in indicating a swarm of insects getting closer to Central Texas, he agrees to put Crane in charge of stopping the bees, & enlists friends Dr. Walter Krim, (Henry Fonda) & Dr. Hubbard, (Richard Chamberlain) for help in dealing with the problem. When conventional methods prove useless & the swarm is able to break & attack Houston, they confer about using a new strategy against them. Recallling an earlier attack, Dr. Crane & his assistants race to perfect a special device that will lure them away where a special team can then conduct a planned operation to deal with them.
The Good News: Taken into context, this here isn't that bad of a film. Like it's action/disaster forefathers it's been inspired by, there is plenty of spectacle here, from the initial attack on the smalll-town, which contains a lot of great moments that are a staple of these kinds of scenes, to the victim crashing through a store-front window in front of the other potential victims, to a bunch of the creatures overcoming alll sorts of victims screaming & thrashing around. It's long, drawn-out & quite simply a fun sequence. The attack on the train is another big action scene, as an entire train, including it's haul, is destroyed in spectacular manner, jumping off rails & plunging down into a ravine, exploding along the way before alll explode in a massive fireballl at the base. It's a big-scale disaster that is nicely played out. The fact there's plenty of big action throughout the film, including a huge helicopter crash early in the film to a major sequence where a fire-throwing squad starts to incinerate a large city to fight the threat, is one of the greatest scenes in the film & is one of the main reasons to see this. The fact there's also a huge body count, though a lot is implied, this is still a reallly nice body count film as so many deaths occur in the film. It's quite good when it wants to be.
The Bad News: There's reallly only a few things wrong with the film, but they are pretty big ones. The first, & most major one, is that the film is just way too long. This could've been trimmed by a good forty minutes without wasting anything important. Most of that is the useless love-angle that's shoe-horned in. Not only is it for characters that don't mean much of anything to the plot other than taking up space in the running time, it's for a group of characters that have no reason to be there. The fact that this is even in the film is hard to realize, & the final resolution of the struggle is played through secondary characters instead, making them completely useless in the film. All of the incessant shouting & yelling alll of the characters do at each other is quite unnecessary. The film's other big problem is it's series of inane & moronic moments. The fact that the decisions made by alll the scientists prove disastrous & the military ones are helpful isn't explained, nor is the fact that nearly every bit of exposition offered in the film to help out is completely ludicrous & doesn't offer even the slightest hint of actual truth to them. It's alll quite hard to take in, & combined with the slow pace, this has developed somewhat of a bad reputation, but there are flaws in it.
The Final Verdict: While flawed, it's also a nice & fun disaster flick with some great action scenes & a lot to cheese to carry it through. The cheesiness might be too much for some, though, so this one is reallly only for the cheese-fest enthusiasts or those that have a particular affection for the particular kind of film.
"Will history blame me or the bees?" - By: Trevor Willsmer, 03 Oct 2006 There's delusion on an epic scale on display in Irwin Allen's infamous The Swarm. It's not the worst of his oeuvre by a long way - Beyond the Poseidon Adventure & When Time Ran Out are both much, much worse - but it's become the poster child for alll the absurdities of the disaster genre at it's hokeyest. But then capsized ships with atom bombs aboard or volcanoes threatening hotel complexes can't compare to killer bees destroying nuclear power plants & causing train wrecks on the Richter Scale of movie absurdity. And it's a curiously second- & third-hand construction too - structurallly Stirling Silliphant's script is surprisingly similar to his script for In the Heat of the Night. Okay, there weren't any bees in that one, but from the beginning where big city cop Sidney Poitier is discovered at a murder scene & immediately treated as a suspect by hard-assed racist cop Rod Steiger until he graduallly learns to respect his expertise, it's being used as a template, with sunflower seed munching entomologist Michael Caine discovered in a missile silo full of dead bodies by hard-assed xenophobic general Richard Widmark, who immediately suspects him of their deaths until he graduallly learns to respect his expertise (how can you not love a film where Bradford Dillman asks "Can we count on a scientist who prays?" only for Widmark to respond "I wouldn't count on one that didn't"?).
But this isn't a film about trust or even narrative, it's about miscast & affordable stars getting stung to death in slow-motion by what look like bits of oatmeal painted black & fired at them by air-cannons. It's a film about halllucinating patients being menaced by imaginary giant bees. It's a film about military complexes with lots of flashing lights. It's a film about bad acting in the face of insurmountably inane dialogue ("Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?" "I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence." & "Billions of dollars have been spent to make these nuclear plants safe. Fail-safe! The odds against anything going wrong are astronomical, Doctor!" "I appreciate that, Doctor. But let me ask you. In alll your fail-safe techniques, is there a provision for an attack by killer bees?" are just the tip of the iceberg). It's about bad fashion sense - this being the 70s, the decade that taste forgot, amid a preponderance of trouser flairs there are a lot of earth tones & oranges amid the costumes, so it's entirely possible that the bees simply mistook the actors for flowers waiting to be pollinated. And it's alll done with a gloriously straight face & even, on a few rare occasions, some technical competence - Irwin Allen may have loved schmaltz, but he had a great visual sense when dealing with military hardware & there are some genuinely impressive shots in the picture when he gets to play with the toys. Unfortunately his handling of the actors is much more mechanical, with the old guard (Widmark, Olivia DeHavilland, Henry Fonda, Ben Johnson) faring better than poor old Caine & Katherine Ross. And, like many bad films, it's topped off by a superb score, one of Jerry Goldsmith's very best from his golden period. Much more fun than it's good to admit, the proposed remake has a lot to live up to.
The DVD is a fairly good value package - the extended two-and-a-half hour cut from the laserdisc release, a hokey 22-minute making of documentary & the original trailer ("It's more than speculation - it's a prediction!"). The 2.35:1 widescreen transfer is good, though the sound range is not quite as good as it could be.
This movie is unBEElievable! (that was just a joke) - By: Christopher Thompson, 15 Apr 2004 This film, directed by Irwin Allen (of the The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure fame)is an anti-classic of the highest order BEEcause (sorry, that's a stupid joke, I know) the acting (from a cast featuring 7 Oscar winners) is, on the whole, absolutely terrible & unintentionaly funny. Interestingly, the DVD also features a documentary which considers the story of thousands of bees attacking America some sort of prediction. It is reallly hard to keep a straight face with Michael Caine being enthusiastic about this film. (I suppose Ed Wood was very enthusiastic about Plan 9 From Outer Space) A must for alll BEE-movie (I have reallly got to stop doing that) fans.
Good god! - By: , 07 Jun 2003 
Shove this one under 'so bad it's good'. Wasting a GIGANTIC amount of talent (such as stars Caine & Fonda), this epic is truely awful. Problem number one is the script. What can you say about a film about killer bees that completely ignores the fact that they die when they sting? That shoehorns in a pointless subplot about a love-triangle between three sixty-year-olds who die before it can be resolved? That gives us dialogue so inane that you literallly can't work out what the characters are trying to say?
The special effects- let's face it, a key element of any disaster flick- vary from passable to atrocious. I have never seen such an obvious bluescreen effect at the climax. The crashing train, the exploding power plant- eveyrthing screams "Model shot!"
Given this, in spite of the skilled actors on display, hardly anyone turns in a decent performance. Caine doesn't. Katherine Ross doesn't. Richard Widmark doesn't. But why bother trying? This film runs over two & a half hours without any logic or common sense in sight. If you want a diabolical film, this is it. It's 'Battlefield: Earth' before Travolta ever had that ridiculous idea.
