When you get right down to tacks made of brass, The Fly isn't a scary movie, because what can a fly do? I'll tell you what a fly can do. Nothing, that's what. No one's reaction to a fly has ever been "Run away before it settles on your forearm!" A bee is more intimidating because of the stinger, but they die after losing their stinger, which makes that whole stinger business a lousy defense mechanism. Once you get into wasp business, though, you're getting straight-up frightening, because a wasp can sting you two dozen times, go back to reading the Wall Street Journal, and fly back home for a delicious dinner with its wasp family.
And if you think that's scary, I doubt the world will ever be ready for a movie about the Japanese Giant Hornet, a species that entomologists refer to as "straight-up assholes."
Wasps are good enough for government work, though, and The Wasp Woman could've been an entertaining film. I would've like that very much. About the time he was working on The Wasp Woman, Roger Corman made some endearing no-budget larks like A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. They kidded themselves and, by doing so, found a way to approach the dreck at an angle. The Wasp Woman treats itself seriously, a big mistake for a movie that chooses to be about a woman who is also sometimes a wasp.
The woman, Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot), mutates into a wasp because she knowingly ingested a batch of untested wasp enzyme from a mad scientist she never properly vetted, so immediately she gains my sympathy. To be fair, though, she's the CEO and public face of a cosmetics company, and her looks are fading with age, which explains why she'd be interested in Dr. Zinthrop's rejuvenating wasp extract. What isn't explained is why Dr. Zinthrop would so readily accept her demand of being the first human test subject, since it's generally bad form to poison your only investor, but I guess we can file that into the overstuffed "mad scientist" folder.
After all, Zinthrop talks to his bugs in a loving voice, and he confides to a worried colleague that "they know who their friend is." Hey, guy, wasps are idiots. They don't even know they're alive, let alone that their owner should go on a date or at least do a Groupon. I may be biased, though, because I resist engaging with any character who, at some point, said, "You know, I think I'll take the job where I risk death by thousands of insect-stings on a daily basis." Later on, somebody warns him, "I'd stay away from wasps if I were you." Sound advice. I'd stay away from wasps if I were anyone at all.
Zinthrop's experiments with the enzyme involve making animals younger, which happens off-camera, by way of switching from a shot of a dog to a shot of a puppy. Later experiments show Zinthrop injecting guinea pigs with his solution, and that made me pray for a climax that involved a swarm of deadly flying guinea pigs. It'd be the most adorable horror climax ever. Instead, the film devotes most of its middle section to Starlin's underlings, who have nothing to do with wasp enzymes, wasp women or the potential devastation wrought by flying, stinging guinea pigs.
Roger Corman finds heroic ways to pad out the scant plot to feature length. The most notable involves Zinthrop getting his wasp-loving butt hit by a car. Starlin's underlings send out a private investigator, which launches the film into a needless montage of the man asking around town, in case we weren't sure how investigators work. He eventually tracks Zinthrop to a hospital where the scientist is found to have a serious case of brain damage. Luckily, that brain damage clears up like a bad headache, as brain damage does, and just in time for him to explain the plot, because it's not like the movie was doing too good of a job.
The movie waits for fifty minutes of its seventy-minute runtime before introducing the Wasp Woman, who looks uncannily like Susan Cabot with a Halloween mask on. I'm running out of energy here, so just a three more notes. (a) Scenes with adult actors wrestling with cat props will never not look silly. (b) Roger Corman supervised a remake in 1995, and it apparently wasn't much better. (c) Susan Cabot plays a woman of forty and a woman of twenty equally well, and it's a shame she never got more work. Were she alive today, I'd beg her to cameo in my upcoming film, The Four Guinea Pigs of the Apocalypse.
RATING: D+
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