Director
Roger Corman
Cast
Susan Cabot - Janice Starlin
Fred Eisley - Bill Lane
Michael Mark - Eric Zinthrop
Frank Gerstle - Les Hellman
As far as obscurities go, this flick isn't too obscure. It's a film by the legendary Roger Corman. I've wanted to check it out for a long time. I knew the poster image was deceiving. SPOILER: There is no wasp with the head of a woman in this movie. Quite the disappointing opposite, really. Nevertheless, The Wasp Woman may be well known among horror fans, and not so much among general movie audiences. Film critic Leonard Maltin gave it two and a half out of four stars, so it's half-bad...but not half bad.
The year The Wasp Woman was released, the horror genre was in its silver age. Hollywood was getting passed monsters like Dracula, and Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolfman. It was time for aliens, mutated fluke-of-nature type creatures (like the one from the Black Lagoon), and other science fiction monstrosities. America was on the cusp of the atomic age, and mutations and such were the perfect fear for audiences to overcome of that time.
A whole new line of monsters like Godzilla (from Toho in Japan), and the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and the Blob were next in line to scare audiences.
Movies like Them (A monster movie), Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and The Day the Earth Stood Still (alien movies), and Forbidden Planet (a SciFi flick) were the on-screen attractions at the cinema. No doubt The Wasp Woman just buzzed her precious little self into the hearts of Americans, coughed up a nest, and laid her eggs of nostalgia to sting us...where...she...I don't know where I'm going with this?
She's really more of a female version of the fly. In this movie, Dr. Eric Zinthrop, who has been experimenting with wasps at a honey farm, gets fired from his position. I guess if you can't get wasps to make honey, you serve no purpose at a honey farm. One thing he was able to accomplish was extracting enzymes from the wasp queen's "royal jelly." This royal jelly somehow reverses the aging process.
Meanwhile, over in New York City, Janice Starling, who owns a huge cosmetics company, is seeing her sales decline because her customer base doesn't like the fact she's getting old.
Zinthrop takes his findings to Starling, and she agrees to fund his research so he can carry on with it, and potentially use it to her advantage. So, he has to agree to allow her to be his human subject. What could go wrong?
He agrees, of course. And after a short while, Starling isn't happy how slow the results of the reverse aging process are going. So, she steals his formula, and gives herself a little more than his boring ol' recommended dosage.
The results are amazing...for a while. Little does Starling know that Zinthrop's test subjects are growing violent. When he goes to tell her, he's in a car accident, and winds up at the hospital.
No one at the company knows he's there, and Starling and others at the cosmetics company assume he's missing.
Luckily, they find him and Starling takes over his care. All the while, she's still secretly injecting
Then, as formulas often do, it makes her change into a hideous, angry wasp creature every so often. When this happens, she ends up attacking someone, ultimately killing them.
I have to say, for a movie with tropes that are considered cliche' by today's standers (serums turning people into mutations that kill people) it does have a good story line, and I was intrigued to see where the story was going.
Sure, by today's standards, the effects are laughable, but Roger Corman (often referred to as the "Pope of Pop Cinema") is an American classic. Many, if not all, of his films are the stuff of drive-ins. His movies really focus in on the story, and this is no exception.
I was drawn in from the moment a hive of bees came on the screen while the credits rolled. If there's one thing I'm personally afraid of, it's hornets and wasps, and the idea of getting caught in a wasps nest, and potentially being swarmed. Being squeamish and fearful is the whole point of a movie such as The Wasp Woman.
The actors really seemed to put in great effort in their roles. Susan Cabot for instance has Starling look more and more worried throughout the movie, yet trying to maintain her composure, as she realizes what the formula is doing to her. She's invested in getting sales up, and maintain her youthful appearance despite the horrific knowledge of what the formula is doing to her. The turmoil gradually builds, and you can see it in the character's face and body language. Cabot was fantastic in pulling it off.
This is more of a SciFi movie with guys in lab coats performing experiments, but there is a real element of horror in this, too. It has some blood and such it. And sex appeal! I mean bees, stinging, royal jelly, honey. The euphemisms are there! Oh, 1950s...you weren't really that innocent.
One thing I like is that once she turns into the wasp, there's no hiding it, or any sort of slow reveal. She becomes a wasp, and not only do we see her in all were gross appearance, but we get her coming straight towards the camera.
Slow reveals can certainly help build the suspense and keep an audience scared. Had it been done like that in this movie, it would have really dragged the movie on. The audience already had several minutes of psuedo-scientific terminology. Let's get to the mutated woman!
Despite its being dated, this movie has a solid foundation which I'm willing to bet horror movies that came afterwards had pulled from. If not from this movie, then most definitely from Roger Corman's style of movie making.
Thanks to this movie, I'm quitting royal jelly for good.
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