Reviews

...but it's close. For sheer film-making ineptitude, Plan 9 from Outer Space probably takes the prize. But Ed Wood Jr had a budget of about ninety dollars. This Irwin Allen epic looks like it had a medium to hefty budget yet still managed to end up being a real stinker.

The problem is a script full of bad dialog and improbable, idiotic situations. The action supposedly takes place in Houston but it's obvious that the film was shot in California instead. The bees "learn to live with" some pesticide called neutracide which, according to Google, is a cleaner/deodorizer. The Army keeps announcing that, "The Africans are coming" which I found confusing at first since they seemed be referring to some nation on the African content, not a swarm of killer bees who suddenly "decide" to make Huston their permanent home.

I counted seven Oscar winners in the cast as well as several nominees. Unfortunately, all of them compete in delivering the absolute worst performances of their careers. You expect Michael Caine to appear in bad films, and even Richard Widmark was in a few bad ones near the end of his career. But this is probably worst appearance for either of them in any motion picture at any time with any budget. They spend this one yowling at each other as they compete for macho bragging rights. This movie was apparently so bad that Fred McMurray retired from acting right after appearing in this and died soon after.

The film has a nasty habit of killing off sympathetic characters in the first reels in particularly gruesome ways while retaining obnoxious a-holes like Michael Caine and Richard Widmark to the bitter end. Poor Olivia Haviland, one of the goods ones, gets mutilated in a train crash caused by the bees.

I have only one film viewing rule. If Bradford Dillman is in a film, expect the worst. He has a huge part in this one.

Robert Altman said this was the worst movie he'd ever seen. The ship doesn't start to founder until well over an hour filled with some of the most turgid melodrama and dreadful dialog ever committed to film. At the point when Jack overhears that the ship is likely to sink with great loss of life, he says to Rose, "This is bad." The director even stages a gun battle in the middle of the sinking, as if one of the most dramatic events in the 20th century needed another cliffhanger. My favorite line in the film: Jack and Rose are hanging onto the bow of the ship as it begins its slide into the ocean and she says, "Jack, this is where we first met!" I wonder if there is a Hallmark card for that.

The film is gripping once the ship starts falling apart. But I wish the crew had thrown Jack and Rose into the sea early in the voyage as a sacrifice to Neptune.