Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

The Swarm Blu-ray Movie Review

To Bee or Not to Bee

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 27, 2018

The next time someone tells you that a recent film is the worst movie ever made, ask them if they've seen The Swarm. The 1978 disaster flick was a flop when it was released and is widely credited as one of the bombs that killed off the previously lucrative genre. According to legend, producer and director Irwin Allen lost so much money on the film that he forbade his employees ever to mention its name.

But like the killer bees of its title, The Swarm refuses to die, gradually acquiring a loyal following of the "so bad it's good" variety. The Warner Archive Collection is counting on those fans to buy this new Blu-ray presentation, which, like all U.S. home video versions to date, contains forty minutes of additional footage not seen in theaters. That brings the total running time of The Swarm to over two and a half hours, giving the viewer plenty of opportunities to linger over the slumming of its starry cast (which includes six past or future Oscar winners), the perpetually ludicrous dialogue and the unfailingly leaden direction by Allen, who was much better at producing than at creating a convincing reality on screen. WAC has done their usual creditable job, and the disc is a gift to connoisseurs of junk cinema.

The Swarm follows the well-established recipe of Seventies disaster films. It assembles a large cast of familiar faces with as many bona fide stars as possible, gives their characters just enough back story to make them superficially credible, then kills off nearly everyone in a series of cataclysmic events. (Anyone who thinks it's a spoiler to reveal that most of the characters die doesn't know the genre; the spoiler would be to reveal who survives.) In The Swarm, the catastrophe is an invasion of aggressive African bees—or their Brazilian variant, as Michael Caine's entomologist keeps insisting—which have somehow arrived in the U.S. far ahead of the predicted timetable. Their venom is so powerful that just a few stings will cause instant death. (In reality, the sting of the African/Brazilian bee is no more powerful than that of an American honey bee, although they are more aggressive.)

The first casualty of the invading insects is an ICBM site, where an Air Force rescue team arrives to find all personnel dead. Richard Widmark plays the general in command, who is appalled to discover that Caine's bug expert was first on the scene. He's even more dismayed when the President's chief science advisor puts Caine in charge of the U.S. response to the threat. As far as the general is concerned, the remedy is to spray pesticides far and wide, and nothing better exemplifies The Swarm's absurdity than the scene in which Caine bellows at the top of his lungs about the environmental havoc such poisons would create. You can't even call it overacting, because there's no acting involved. Caine yells his lines like he's reading from a cue card. (As the actor would later admit in an award acceptance speech, he made "a lot of crap" for money. The Swarm ranks high on the list.)

The bees' next target is the town of Marysville, where Fred MacMurray's mayor and Olivia de Havilland's school principal are both leaders. They're also two thirds of a love triangle with Ben Johnson's retired cowpoke, who is one of the few town inhabitants with an authentic regional accent. (De Havilland's character, despite being described as a life-long citizen of a Texas town, sounds like she's channeling Gone with the Wind.) Other town citizens include Patty Duke's pregnant diner waitress, whose husband was one of the casualties at the missile base, and Slim Pickens' grieving father, who shows up at the base's gates and demands to see his son's body. The threat to the town is particularly hard on Katharine Ross's Air Force doctor, because she's originally from Marysville and remains close to many of its citizens. Ross also serves as Caine's love interest in the film. They have multiple scenes exchanging meaningful looks and an occasional embrace, and it's a good thing the script gives Ross that much to do, because she's hopelessly inept as a doctor. Repeatedly confronted with medical emergencies, she invariably runs for help instead of rendering any kind of aid.

Lee Grant appears on the scene as a TV reporter covering the story, and Caine convenes a conclave of scientists that includes Richard Chamberlain and Henry Fonda, the film's biggest catch. Fonda plays an immunologist, on whom Caine is depending to synthesize an antitoxin to the bee sting venom, and there's a thinly developed surrogate father-son relationship between them. But even Fonda eventually succumbs to the absurdity of the situations into which his character is thrust. The scene in which he tests his experimental potion on himself takes second prize after Caine's environmental tirade among The Swarm's biggest eyerollers. Third prize goes to José Ferrer's sole scene playing the chief of a nuclear power plant menaced by the bees, who responds to dire warnings with sanctimonious pronouncements about the invincibility of the plant's safety features. (Guess what happens next.)

After Houston is attacked by the bees, and then largely burned down by Richard Widmark's ill-considered strategy of combating them with flamethrowers, Caine's entomologist finally comes up with a solution to destroy them—but only at the cost of an ecological disaster at least as ruinous as the pesticide option he's repeatedly rejected. Obviously, his concern for the planet's wildlife doesn't extend to fish.

The screenplay for The Swarm is by Sterling Silliphant (adapting a novel by Arthur Herzog), and it's hard to believe that the Oscar-winning writer of In the Heat of the Night could have penned so much bad dialogue and created so many ridiculous character interactions with a straight face. Swarms of bees aren't particularly frightening on screen, especially with repeated exposure; so Silliphant and his director have to fall back on a string of secondary calamities borrowed from previous disaster films. The derailment that sends train cars tumbling over a cliff recalls the swamped ship of The Poseidon Adventure (produced by Allen), and the sea of flame that engulfs a Houston skyscraper recalls perils from The Towering Inferno (produced by Allen and written by Silliphant).

But by far the goofiest (non-)peril are the visions of giant bees experienced by the few sting victims who don't die immediately. Like the giant bunnies in Night of the Lepus, these imaginary bees don't actually do anything, and they aren't particularly scary. The only time the effect comes close to working is when one victim hears a strange scratching at her hospital room door, which she slowly approaches with a terrified compulsion to learn what's out there. The tension breaks as soon as the door opens and the cheesy visual effect is revealed, but for a few moments Silliphant and Allen actually manage to generate some genuine suspense. The rest of The Swarm is an embarrassment to all involved, even if costume designer Paul Zastupnevich did manage to score an Oscar nomination (he lost to Death on the Nile).

The Swarm Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Swarm was shot by Fred J. Koenekamp, who had won an Oscar for his work on a previous Irwin Allen production, The Towering Inferno. Koenekamp knew how to shoot with multiple cameras for sequences with elaborate practical effects, and he gave The Swarm a professional gloss that is far better than the silly plot deserves. (It might have worked better with a thick layer of grindhouse grunge.) For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, the Warner Archive Collection commissioned a new scan of an interpositive of the film's extended edition, which was performed by Warner's MPI facility at 2K. The only available guides for color correction were prior video versions made closer in time to the IP's creation, which helped MPI adjust for fading. The master was subjected to WAC's usual thorough cleaning to remove dust, scratches and other age-related damage.

The resulting Blu-ray image has impressive sharpness, clarity and color rendition. In closeups you can see individual bees among the hundreds of thousands that the cast had to endure (most had their stings removed). The palette ranges from the dull earth tones of the location shots to the bright reds and yellows of the competing bouquets that Fred MacMurray and Ben Johnson present to Olivia de Havilland. Grain is observable but, except for a few opticals (notably during the titles and the "giant bee" hallucinations), it is finely rendered. WAC has mastered The Swarm at its usual high average bitrate of just under 35 Mbps. It's an exceptionally good presentation of a very bad film.

The Swarm Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Swarm was an early Dolby Stereo release, and WAC has taken the soundtrack from the magnetic printmaster, cleaned it of any age-related noise or interference and encoded the track in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. The film's single best element—the only part that's actually good—is the energetic score by the great Jerry Goldsmith, whose credits extend from iconic sci-fi (Alien, five Star Trek films) to intimate drama (e.g., Six Degrees of Separation). Goldsmith seems to be the only participant in the project who was in on the joke, and his orchestrations are routinely jaunty where you would expect them to be suspenseful. The Blu-ray reproduction is beautifully full and faithful, and it has much more impact than any of the big action set pieces, which routinely sound thin and underpowered (though this is the fault of the original mix, not the Blu-ray). None of the various explosions register with any force, nor does the roaring of flame or the firing of missiles. The buzzing of bees is initially an interesting effect, but the novelty quickly wears off. The dialogue is clearly rendered and adequately centered, so that you don't miss a single vapid word.

The Swarm Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2002 DVD of The Swarm. The trailer has been remastered in 1080p.

• Behind-the-Scenes Documentary: Inside the Swarm (480i; 1.33:1; 22:12): This documentary was made for TV (you can tell where the commercial breaks occurred). Listening to various cast members attempt to sound like they're taking this nonsense seriously is more entertaining than the movie itself. The portentous narration is supplied by actor and prolific voiceover artist Tim McIntire, who also narrates the theatrical trailer.



• Trailer (1080p; 2.40:1; 2:10): "It is more than speculation. It is . . . a prediction."

The Swarm Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

By the time The Swarm appeared in theaters, there had been enough sensationalist journalism about the approaching "killer bees" that the topic had become a running joke on early seasons of Saturday Night Live. Bees were a questionable villain for a disaster movie even then, and Allen's plodding execution quickly sank an already floundering premise. Michael Caine would later say that his fee from the Swarm paid for his house in Los Angeles. I hope it was a nice house. Recommended on its technical merits, but if you're not already a fan, beware The Swarm.