There has yet to be a convincing killer bee movie – see the likes of The Deadly Bees (1967), The Killer Bees (1974), The Savage Bees (1976), Terror Out of the Sky (1978), Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare (1995), Killer Bees! (2002) and Swarmed (2005) – with special effects technology having so far failed to find a means of making a swarm of bees look like anything more than clods of dirt thrown past the camera. Nobody has tried making a bee movie during the CGI effects revolution (at least, anything beyond a tv movie release) – which may well say something about how badly bee movies have been received. The Bees tries hard and its swarms look moderately convincing. They are effectively added over scenes of crowds panicking and planes crashing. The filmmakers even manage to score footage of the Pasadena Rose Parade, which contains an uncredited cameo appearance from ex-President Gerald Ford. But it is the absurdity of the rest of the film that sinks The Bees into near-total laughabilty.

The Bees ties itself to the ecological themes that ran through the 1970s cycle of Nature’s Revenge films – The Birds (1963), The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), Willard (1971), Frogs (1972), Jaws (1975), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) et al. This is something that causes it topple over into the completely absurd. Everywhere possible the bee attacks are tied to human exploitation – honey commercials play on tv, honey companies are shown trying to import bees indifferent to the potential danger, the Rose Parade contains giant bee floats, and there is a corrupt senator who stole the money that would have built better security for the Brazilian aviary. Unfortunately, the upshot of this is that the bee attacks end up seeming less a grand force of nature and more as though they are out to enact human justice, with ridiculously personalised attack scenes where they take revenge on the senator or sabotage the van containing the pheromone that could wipe them out. However, this sense of morality often becomes self-contradictory – the bees take revenge on the senator for stealing the money that would have built better security for the aviary, although their mentioned intelligence doesn’t seem to be enough to work out that if the security system had been built this would not have allowed them to have broken out of the compound in the first place. Certainly, the ideas brought up by John Carradine (who plays with an appallingly fake German accent) about bee movements containing communication patterns is an appealingly plausible one, but when it gets to scenes with the bees waking John Saxon and Angel Tompkins up out of bed and opening doors for them, the idea topples over into thorough ludicrousness. There’s a bizarre ending with the bees invading the UN assembly to tell humankind to develop a more eco-conscious attitude.