A few days ago when I flicked through
the headline that a remake of
Irwin Allen's late 70's killer bee disaster movie
The Swarm was in the works, I was instantly transported back to my childhood in remembering how ridiculously scared I was of this movie. In fact I say
was... I'm not entirely certain to this day that I've managed to shake-off this irrational fear of bee's and just how absolutely f*cked we would all be against hundreds, thousands, millions of them if they became a collective force. One scene in particular had a lasting effect on me and although my memory of it is a little hazy, I'm fairly certain it involved a young girl who had either been bitten by too many bee's or had swallowed one or several or something... and it had left her in a coma, her life in severe danger. I'll never forgot my squeamish reaction to the whole idea of wasps swirling around her insides, stinging things they shouldn't be. But then I started to really think about it and wait... was
Michael Caine really in the movie I remember? Maybe, but I can't be sure. Then I read that the likes of
Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Slim Pickens, Fred F'N MacMurray and
Henry Fonda were in this thing and I wonder if what I remember was a different movie altogether? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpO4gvW6D3Q The movie I remember was more intimate and I think set in one family's home - which terrified me more because obviously it meant you weren't safe in your own home and it depicted bee's chewing at wooden doors and as a collective force trying to make there way through window cracks, etc. The skyscraper in the poster can't be from that movie? Regardless of whether it's the movie I remember or not, the truth is Allen's film was a notorious box office flop. It was pulled from theatres after just two weeks (yup... amazing considering the cast), cost Warner Bros. half of the $20 million budget they allocated and now-a-days it's generally considered to be one of the lamest of the lame 70's high-concept disaster films. Lead
Michael Caine genuinely believes it is the worst film he has ever been in and I wouldn't want to argue about it with him.
So I guess nobody is going to be crying out about 'raped childhoods' to producers
Roy Lee (The Ring) and
Steven Scheneider (Paranormal Activity) who are making plans to remake the film via their Vertigo Entertainment and Room 101 banners. New Zealand born commercials director
Ash Bolland will helm. You can an example of his work below which
/film have collected together and they are ALL basically CGI-heavy ads... So no script writer has been hired yet but presumably these guys are desperate to get this one made soon to captialise on the
Piranha 3D disaster fad. I would expect this one to have the same kind of B-movie actors, good looking young adults and a whole lot of ridiculous bee-related deaths that buzz right into your eyeballs in 3D. Oh... and if The Swarm wasn't the movie I remember... what on Earth was?