The Wasp Woman (1959)

What does one say about a picture such as The Wasp Woman, which was another in a seemingly endless spate of horror, monster, drive-in monsterpieces by Roger "King of the B Pictures" Corman, who is now an amazing 96? (Hopefully, one says enough to meet the six-hundred-word minimum count.)

A pitifully bad film about a woman who runs a cosmetics outfit that doesn't want to appear as if she's aging. To that end, she hires some weird old geezer who extracts the royal jelly" from honey bees, but who loses his job in a prologue added to the film for television syndication by director Jack Hill. The ACTUAL director and producer of this monster movie epic is one Roger Corman, the king of el cheapo drive-in monster movie pics and pseudo-comedies of this variety.

Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) runs Starlin Enterprises (the mind boggles) a cosmetics firm whose sales are slumping because Janice is losing her young, hot body looks. She has a small, wiry, sort of intense loveliness, but the old gal ain't what she used to be, as they say, and so she's hunting around for a solution. Her board of directors or whatever, a bunch of tweedy 1950s guys with Andy Griffith Show dos that smoke pipes, assure her that everything is going to be okie-dokie, but one of them, Bill I think (played by Fred Eisley), seems to have some idea about extracting the "royal jelly" (I'm too tired right now to research what that actually is) from bees to make "fountain of youth"-type cosmetics, and then Janice gets a letter from ZINTHROP the MAD SCIENTIST wasp-breeding jelly-extracting MANIAC (who sort of reminds me of Mr. Petrovich, who was an elementary school teacher I had whom they called "Johnny Appleseed" for unspecified reasons and who immigrated from Russia back in the Eighties, and who ended up a door-greeter at Walmart. He's dead now, but there's a plaque for him on the Marion Riverwalk, and I still can't use commas properly. So there.)

So he shows her his rats and guinea pigs that he can make younger JUST BY GIVING THEM ROYAL JELLY EXTRACTED FROM...wasps. Not a great move, but Janice sure as heck is impressed. (Forgive me for shouting. I have to do something to relieve the boredom of a picture that NOTHING happens in until about the last twelve minutes.) She and he both decide she's gonna do the smart thing with this anti-aging miracle wonder solution and start injections of it in herself. Which, predictable, turns her into the SHE-WASP! THE INSECT WOMAN. The titular monster of this monster movie monstrosity.

Bad move. Janice begins to do a Jekyll and Hyde thing wherein she grows waspy horns, a weird, buggy, rotting face, and huge hairy wasp hands. Someone's throat gets bitten out and it's kind of bloody. Zinthrop gets hospitalized. Bill and Mary (Barboura Morris run about worrying over things. There's a fat night watchman with a gun who gets it. Someone throws carbolic acid in Janice's face. The movie ends. As an audience, we feel we needed more.

The costume (the horns, the eyes, the claw, are ridiculous) and only Susan Cabot is really interesting here. Not enough happens in one hour and twelve minutes, and not enough in time, to save this from being something that they should prescribe to insomniacs looking to wean off of benzos. I will say it has some pretty slick cinematography for a piece of crap drive-in picture from 1959. But, I don't watch these sorts of films for that reason. I mean, it's the Wasp Woman, dig? It's not a piece of fucking modern art. I mean, for that, watch Bucket of Blood instead.

The Wasp Woman Full Length Public Domain Movie