Beauté interdite

The wasp costume design was excellent, but the acting, plot changes and action sequences are pretty cringy.

This was part of a series of Showtime produced remakes of Roger Corman classics. I don't know if the world was clamoring for a remake of WASP WOMAN but we got it. Jennifer Rubin stars as the owner of a cosmetics company who starts to depend on the experimental work of an discredited doctor (Daniel J. Travanti) in order to maintain her youth. Hey, that is the exact same plot as CATWOMAN! Only this cost about $84 million less. Director Jim Wynorski fares well enough with this entry in his extensive filmography. The movie is filled with bad acting (most notably from Rubin), cheesy effects and bad dialogue. But it moves fast enough, contains plenty of nudity (courtesy of Maria Ford) and features some B-acting greats (Gerrit Graham, Jay Richardson). And, at the very least, you get to see Emmy award winner Travanti get attacked by a big wasp that used to be his pet cat.

Being a fan of Coman's original creation from 1959 I had a hard time stomaching this remake. Sure the original film has its flaws like most Coman films with its dragged out dialog and quite boring mid-plot but it sure had charm which is something this film lacks. Everything ain't bad though and even if Wynorski fills out the majority of the plot with boring sex scenes there's one thing that this remake does better than the original and that the actual wasp woman. I'm not talking about Jennifer Rubin who just like a wasp couldn't act her way out of a paper bag; I'm talking about the transformed version of her. In the original film it was basically just Susan Cabot running around in a black spandex suit. This time Cormans studio actually put some dollars into creating a monster which is far far from believable but nevertheless quite creepy (almost at least). Sure it's stale and quite weird in some scenes but thinking of the budget and the year it was shot the only alternative would have been CGI-effects and we all know how that went in Dinosaur Island.

The story follows Cormans classic to the book with some exceptions but even so I can't help but asking myself what went wrong along the way. The whole film feels like a dragged out episode from Tales of the crypt. A show that I love but there was a reason why these episodes never went full-length.

Leaving this film behind in my Wynorskivaganza marathon (which never became a marathon because of work and other stuff to do) I am left with an empty feeling since it didn't really deliver where Wynorski often delivers. The sexy parts of the film are far from sexy, it lacks any humor like some of his other work and that creative cord that was still intact in his earlier films is long gone. In many ways it reminded me about his remake of Not of this earth. An movie that somehow survived a complete trashing thanks to its original story, which it copied from a 50's flick.

I saw this film because I like to watch monsters run around and eat people! And there's plenty of rubbersuit-monster stompin n' chompin n' slicin n' dicin! See her turn into a wasp in bed with a man! See her rip a rival model apart right in the photo room! See her morph in broad daylight! See a weird dream sequence that proves, once and for all, that too much sunlight CAN kill you! :) Frightfully silly, but that just adds to its cheese/fun factor. It's one of my favorite killer-bug movies!

An aging model/cosmetics executive (Jennifer Rubin) finds a way to reverse the aging process through an experimental wasp drug, but it has deadly consequences as she morphes from time to time into a giant man eating wasp.

Much better then you would expect remake of the original Roger Corman camp classic, though this remake is dead serious. It features a very appealing turn by Jennifer Rubin, and actually focuses more on characterization then cheap scares (even though it does have its share of them). However, the film does feature poor monster effects.

Rated R; Nudity, Violence, Sexual Situations, and Profanity.