The Swarm on DVD

by Jim Bray

To call Irwin Allen's The Swarm hokey is to be unnecessarily unfair to the word "hokey."

Allen, whose major claim to fame on the big screen is his disaster movies, beat the concept to death with this outing that sees an all star cast walking embarrassedly through one of the worst, most cliche-ridden screenplays ever.

Okay, maybe that's a slight overstatement, but only a slight one. But these fine actors, including the likes of Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, Fred MacMurray and many more, must have signed on the dotted line before they read the screenplay, because they all had enough stature to have chosen better projects than this.

Or maybe it was the money...

Whatever. While Allen's more famous disaster flicks, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, also displayed their hokey moments (but where still pretty good flicks), The Swarm gets into the cliched hokeyness in the first five minutes and never lets up.

It's a shame, because the concept is not only sound, it could happen, though probably not in the way presented here. There really are "superbees" that are moving north as you read this, but I daresay they don't have the apparent intelligence and malevolence of the buzzy little critters in this movie.

The problem is Stirling Silliphant's sterlingly silly screenplay. Not only are the bees given credit for an intelligence they don't have, the human characters aren't given credit for a shred of human intelligence. Even the supposedly smart characters, like scientists Caine and Fonda, are forced to utter lines so mind numbingly banal you can almost see their careers flashing before their eyes as the cameras rolled.

What were they thinking? Here's just one of the lines (I paraphrase, since there's no way I'm going back through the movie to find the exact quote): CAINE: "I never dreamed it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friends."

Or how such lapses in logic that medical dudette Katherine Ross stands by, freaking out, when a patient right next to her needs immediate care, forcing someone else to enter from another room to do her job for her. Oh, sorry, she's under the influence of the bees, isn't she? Okay, well later (while still presumably "bee'd") she jumps forward to put an oxygen mask on Fonda's character when he's in cardiac arrest.

Of course, what he needed was to have someone pound on his chest...

Or how about scientist Richard Chamberlain volunteering to go to the nuclear power plant to convince the people there to shut it down. His logic is that, since he's fought these Evil Environment-Raping Big Business Villains so often in court they'd believe he has their best interests at heart and pay attention to him.

Oh, well, the special effects aren't bad, except for the explosion of a nuclear power plant that gave no evidence of a mushroom cloud at all.

Maybe it's me. Maybe they were really trying to parody 50's monster flicks. But if so, one would think there would be laughs due to the wittiness of the script, not laughs of embarrassment that you're actually watching this stuff.

No, if you want a good Man Versus Insects movie, you can do a lot better than this one. Them! comes immediately to mind.

The DVD's pretty good though, as an example of the digital video medium. The anamorphic widescreen picture (16x9 TV compatible) is for the most part very good indeed, with little grain, bright colors and sharp image quality. The audio, which is Dolby Digital 2.0 channel, is pretty good. There's even some good, deep bass in places, though "Earthquake" it ain't.

Extras are limited. You get a cast/crew list that only includes one link (a filmography of Irwin Allen) and a 22 minute documentary hyping the film and its supposed realism. There's also the theatrical trailer.

The Swarm, from Warner Home Video
155 excruciating minutes, anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 TV compatible, Dolby Digital 2.0
Starring Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Patty Duke Astin, Jose Ferrer, Slim Pickens, Bradford Dillman, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda
Written by Stirling Silliphant
Produced and Directed by Irwin Allen

Tell us at TechnoFile what YOU think