Invasion Of The Bee Girls

One look at the title and you'll likely guess that Invasion of the Bee Girls (also called “Graveyard Tramps” which is a much less interesting title) is going to be campy B movie silliness. As it delves into the ideas of merging humans and insects it shows some possibilities of being goofy fun, but ultimately it appears to be too interested in keeping the viewer interested with nudity than sci-fi or horror-oriented imagination which is too bad because they approach the edge of some imaginative sci-fi ideas.

Men in a small town are dropping dead at an alarming rate. The town hosts a government research facility which the townspeople blame for the deaths. A govt. agent is sent to investigate. Neil and the local police soon determine that all of the men are dying during sex. But sex with who? When they try to talk the town into abstinence during the investigation they are laughed out of the town hall meeting.

Neil begins to link the nature of the deaths to the behaviors of insects. Indeed a secret lab in the bowels of the research facility is turning local girls into hive queens with the instinctual directive to mate and kill.

The movie might have been far more interesting if the mystery were laid out better. A large portion of the beginning keeps us in the dark about what is going on. We see clipped scenes of men dying, people finding bodies, and the police in their confused investigation which at first all seems random and disorienting. While the information about what is going on does eventually come out it doesn't work out in a Sixth Sense kind of way where the movie is still enjoyable despite being in the dark until the end.

Instead I found myself often wishing the story would hurry up and reveal the Bee Girls so we could get away from the choppy scenes. Unfortunately, when we finally get past the disjointed mystery all we get for the wait is a lot of Neil watching educational videos about insect behavior and naked girls in a weird machine.

The acting is fair for the most part. Will Smith (not the singer you all know) comes across as likable if not the greatest FBI agent portrayal ever. Anitra Ford just has to be sultry and mysterious which she does well enough. I kind of liked Victoria Vetri as Neil's suspect-turned-girlfriend. Will she be the death of him?

The music is pretty crappy even for a low-budget B bee movie. The sci-fi machines look suitably campy but not very interesting. They could have done a better job with the look of the lab. I did enjoy the funky insect eyes and the use of shades to hide them from the unsuspecting victims. I thought the explanation for why the body count was so high was actually pretty good, though why the girls need to mate as well as create more queens with the use of machines is not addressed.

MORALITY:

The violence in this is very mild with a couple of exceptions. For the most part we just see guys dropping dead (or that have done so) out of sexual exertion – no real violence involved. There is a scene of a guy getting run down by a car and a rape assault with some fist fighting to go along with it.

The strong language is mild with the worst of it being religious slurs.

This is a movie heavy on sexuality and nudity. It's laden with sexual dialogue that ranges from clinical to vulgar. Nude scenes are numerous mostly from the Bee Girls. A lot of it is sexual (including the rape assault), but the longest shots are in the lab. Nudity isn't unexpected in a B movie, but towards the end we lose any pretense at telling a story to watch naked girls in the bee-making machine.

SPIRITUALITY:

It just goes to show, you should be faithful to your wife. Half these guys die because they are fooling around. However, if your wife tells you she'd only have sex with you if she knew it would kill you and then starts wanting in your pants like it's her last night on Earth you might want to check her eyes.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I could see this being a guilty pleasure of some B movie fans, but I couldn't get into it all that much.

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