Quand les abeilles attaqueront

The other half of a double-bill in UK cinemas with the other film being the far better The Incredible Melting Man. This was actually made for television in America.

Killer bees have flown into America and are claiming their first casualties disturbingly close to New Orleans when their Mardi Gras is due to kick off. A bee expert (of course) and a guy who isn't quite a coroner yet (so he isn't taken seriously) are on the case but come up against obstacles in the form of sniffy officials who don't want to see Mardi Gras cancelled- at any cost (hints of Murray Hamilton's character in Jaws here).

We learn that the bees don't like noise and the colours black and red. The first human victim is a coloured girl in a red dress blowing a toy horn. Not her lucky day.

The finale involves Ms Bee Expert being nudged into a sports stadium in her red Beetle which the bees have covered as she was earlier using the horn near them (doh!). The temperature of the Super Dome is then lowered as the bees die when temperatures reach below 35 Degrees Fahrenheit. This sequence is very unexpected and works well with tension being ramped up as the temperatures come down (we see this on huge displays which show the actual countdown).

This is an above average TV movie which received a video release in some territories. There aren't enough action sequences and some of the more talky bits are quite pedestrian. But when it gets going its quite exciting. Because I saw it on TV when I was a small child and loved it then it will always hold a special place in my little black heart.

Look out for the scene in which someone in fancy dress tries to take on the bees with a sword. Yes, a sword!

**SPOILERS** One of the first "Killer Bee" movies to come out in the late 1970's "The Savage Bees" starts out with this Brazilian banana boat, the Cornila Rios, limping into New Orleans Harbor with everyone on deck being either missing or dead.

later in the movie a local Sheriff Donald McKew, Ben Johnson,finds his dog Zeth dead and despite it being Fat Tuesday and the Mardi Gras parade he takes Zeth's body to the City Coroner's Office to find out what killed him. Assistant Coroner Dr. Jeff DuRand, Michael Parks, sees something in Seth's stomach that truly disturbs him and calls his girlfriend and entomologist Jenny Devereaut, Gretchen Corbett, to check it out. It turns out that his as well as the city of New Orleans, worst fears are borne out. Zeth was killed by a swarm of deadly killer African Bees.

With a number the crew of the Corlina Rios bodies recovered from New Orleans Harbor it becomes more and more evident that the banana boat has a colony of African Bees hidden in it's hull.

Trying to keep the story of the invading African Bees under wraps Sheriff McKew has a number of his men fan out in the countryside to find the African Bees hive and at the same time both Jeff and Jenny get in touch with bee expert Dr. Rufus Carter, Paul Hecth. Dr. Rufus warns them not to disperse the deadly bees, with fire and insecticide, because it would only have them invade friendly European or Italian Bees hives and take them over and start dozens, if not hundreds, of African Bee colonies. Thosesbees would attack and kill thousands of people and livestock all around the state.

Dr. Carter gets in touch with the biggest authority on the killer African Bees Brazilian professor & Dr. Jorge Meuller, Horst Bucholtz,and has him come to the city's rescue but it turns out that the Killer Bees were a lot tougher, and more dangerous, then even Dr. Meuller thought that they were.

Even though a bit lacking in production values "The Savage Bees" is a lot better then the far more expensive and star studded Killer Bee deserter movie "The Swarm" that turned out to be a real disaster and bombed out in the movie houses a few years later. Dr.Meuller is killed when trying to catch the Queen African Bee when a couple of drunken Mardi Gras party goers accidental cut open, with a plastic sword, his anti-bee protective suit thus being, together with the two party drunks, stung to death.

Jenny ends up being stuck in her red Volkswagon,the color red attracts the killer bees. Jeff in a last act of desperation has her drive the car with him in a police car pushing her Volkswagon, the last mile, through the now empty streets of New Orleans into the Superdome.

The temperature inside the enclosed sport facility is lowered to 45 degrees immobilizing the killer bees and having them collected and brought into the custody of Dr. Rufus Carter's lab for further study. It's just too bad that one of the killer bees survived capture and escaped to start the entire horror of attacking African Bees all over again in about a dozens or so movies that followed "The Savage Bees".

This is a tense thriller that shows, in no uncertain terms how real and deadly the Killer Bee threat really is. This film shows, with scientific plausibility, the City of New Orleans coming under the increasing threat of a large killer swarm approaching town on the eve of Mardi Gras. Unlike Irwin Allen's The Swarm, whose main objective was to show one celebrity guest star after another being stung to death, this film is more like a cross between a tense sci fi thriller and a Hitchcock film. Obviously a TV film cannot posses the cinematic genius of a Hitchcock film, yet this little gem comes close. The team of scientists, (aided by the local sherriff) that are trying to thwart the disaster deal with a slow subtle(at first), steadily climbing stream of attacks. The threat grows as the attacks continue, and for awhile it looks like the bees will win out. The death scenes are the most realistic ever shown in a killer bee film, one senses what it might actually be like to meet this horrible fate. Also a first, this film gives the actual history of how the bees came to invade South & Central America, and deals with the scientific realities of how to stop this menace. Now that there have been killer bee deaths in the United States, this film rings even more true than when it first was telecast in 1976.

From the writer who brought you "Jaws 3-D" comes this very boring "thriller" about killer bees. Writer Guerdon Trueblood seems to have a one-track mind, as all his "thrillers" involve either bugs or airplanes. There must be something Freudian to that. Nevertheless, there are no airplanes here but plenty of bees. Oooga-booga! Scary stuff! Half of this movie involves people talking about bees, the other half is people driving around looking for the bees. Watch as they discuss for 15 minutes how to get bees off a Volkswagen. Then marvel as they drive the whole carload of bees downtown to see a Saints game! The only purpose of this movie is to sit around with some friends and make fun of it MST3K-style.

Oh yeah, and look for James Best aka Rosco P. Coltrane... um... he doesn't do his funny voice though.

"The Savage Bees" is a somewhat peculiar entry in the long list of nature-running-amok/animals-going-wild horror movies from the 70s. On the one hand, it's a very prototypic tale, with aggressive animals - African killer bees, to be exact - going on a violent murder spree in a small town near New Orleans just at the same time as the annual Mardi Grass celebrations. But, on the other hand, it's a much more intelligent and scientifically accurate film that often opts for realism and tension instead of sensationalism and gratuitous action. The lead characters, played by veteran Ben Johnson and a young Michael Parks, are plausible and even likeable, the sequences with massive swarms of real bees are more than impressive, and the buzzing killers cause for a couple of atypical victims in town. It's harsh and painful to witness young kids or innocent workmen getting attacked and killed by a swarm, but also admirable. In many comparable movies, the wild animals only seem to wipe the bad, arrogant, and corrupt people. How realistic is that, honestly? The downside of the film's approach, however, is that it's slow and occasionally rather boring, and that the grand finale (albeit imaginative) is very UN-spectacular.