12 Badass Exploitation Films You Need To See Before You Die
2. Invasion Of The Bee Girls (1973)
Why do top-level scientists keep turning up dead due to sexual exhaustion? Its something to do with a mysterious woman in wraparound sunglasses whose research project has created human/insect hybrids that, stuck in their reproductive cycle, continue mating until their partner expires. Wait, it gets better: when the morgue fills up with middle-aged men who all claimed to be working late, the grieving widows are abducted and transformed into Bee Girls by being stripped naked, smothered in beeswax and left in a transformation chamber from which they emerge wearing black contact lenses. So the local Sheriff advises sexual abstinence, unaware hes appearing in a movie where all the supporting female players are strippers, Playmates and porn queens, which renders his authority.impotent. You wouldnt know it from the nudity-heavy trailer, but the script is by Nicholas Meyer (The Seven Per Cent Solution, Star Trek II), who isnt considered a grindhouse aficionado. Tellingly, theres a credit for a Script Consultant (Rewrite Man), so whenever characters discuss psychosomatic death, its Meyer, and whenever a breast pops out.you get the idea.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
