The Bees

The Bees proudly follows in the footsteps of Ed Wood and his goofy naiveté, fanatical ambition and charming creativity despite the limits of the budget. Like the master of dreck, his successor, Alfredo Zacarías, cooks up a bombastic vision of a catastrophic spectacle with an engaging idea, in which he vehemently plunders the image archives and has the actors deliver phantasmagorical dialogue. In this respect, trash fixture John Saxon heroically excels, but he is vehemently matched by the manic John Carradine, who seems to have subordinated his speech to a decision to combine the wildest aspects of Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price in his performance. The screenplay is absurdly disjointed and contains twists from a world beyond the seven corners, so that it seems that it has already gone through live dubbing at the Shockproof Film Festival. It could be said that the highlight of the film is the episodic and seemingly random attacks of killer bees, which are fascinating due equally to their DIY execution and their silliness. But we would then be unjustly highlighting only a single aspect of a film packed with WTF elements – from the conspiracy of the confectionery and cosmetics lobbies to the whole storyline involving attempts to decode the language of bees. (11/13/2021)