Anoraks Assemble

The Swarm is a 1978 U.S. disaster / horror movie, directed by Irwin Allen, AKA The Disaster Master, and starring Michael Caine and a bunch of famous faces who really ought to have known better.

Basically, a swarm of African killer bees are on the loose, taking out military helicopters, random picnicking families, and a whole train load of passengers. Thankfully, Dr. Michael Caine is on hand to offer assistance and help defeat the pesky critters, which he eventually does after nearly two hours of utter tripe. (Or if you are like me and accidentally end up watching the ‘director’s cut’, two hours and 25 minutes).

The Swarm has all the usual cardboard cutout characters – Caine’s doctor who isn’t believed, Katharine Ross as his love interest, Richard Widmark as a shouty no-nonsense army man, and most bizzarely, old-timers Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson and Fred McMurray as a strange love triangle who appear to have wandered in from a completely different film.

To be fair, a couple of the bee attack scenes are quite well done, especially when they attack the school and Olivia de Havilland’s Maureen looks on in horror at the dead bodies scattered across the schoolyard. The problem is, the rest of the film is so tedious, with terribly ripe dialogue (“Get inside, the killer bees are coming!”) that all we want to see is the next bee attack.

The Swarm is a classic B-movie – see what I did there – with an A-list cast, and it stinks. It takes itself far too seriously and has little to no redeeming qualities. If you want to see the perfect example of how to do a B-movie, go watch Piranha, which came out the same year. It is everything The Swarm isn’t – fun, silly, with extremely likeable characters.

And remember people – “The bees have broken inside!!”