THE WASP WOMAN was my first excursion into the work of Roger Corman. Aside from assorted clips of his buried FANTASTIC FOUR I've found on YouTube, I'm never actually seen one of his movies. I was curious. He's considered a legend in the industry and he's had a hand in the early careers of modern masters such as Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron. Great! And it's science fiction. What more could I want? The film was released in 1959, a great time for corny drive-in sci-fi, and the poster features an enormous wasp with the face of a woman ready to feed on a man trapped in its clutches. Wicked poster image; I wouldn't mind having it hanging in my office. The movie opens with the title card and a first-minute error. Well, possibly an error. The titles are played over swarming bees. Bees, not wasps. Whatever, moving on. We start on a honey farm where a visiting suit becomes annoyed because the scientist they hired to study the royal jelly from queen bees has turned out to be a mad scientist studying the royal jelly of wasps. He's fired for obvious reasons (being a mad scientist, wasting research funds, etc.) despite his promising experimentation with dogs where he's successfully halted the aging process using the wasp jelly. The mad scientist, Dr. Zinthrop (Michael Mark), turns to the cosmetic industry for further funding, where he finds cosmetic mogul Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) moping over the fact that her advanced age makes her unsuitable as a cover model. She used to be the face of her company (literally) but, shucks, she's aging like a human and she hates it. When Dr. Zinthrop arrives with his wasp jelly serum, he's progressed to the point where he can actually reverse aging and Starlin insists on being his human test subject. It's cheesy 50's science fiction, so you can probably guess what happens from here.
If you guess long stretches of nothing, you are correct. Oh man, I was beyond bored through most of THE WASP WOMAN. From the point where Zinthrop meets with Starlin until the transformation (which doesn't occur until more than 50 minutes into a meager 73 minute movie), there isn't much that happens. We're treated to gossip in the company's secretary pool (oh, that Irving) and the crawling pace of Starlin's descent into obsession with regaining her youth through the serum. Dull. Extraordinarily dull. There's some classic 50's era misogyny and groan-worthy dialogue. I don't know. It's hard to post a meaningful comment for a movie where I spaced out for the majority of the runtime. It starts off promisingly enough with the mad scientist and his inexplicable obsession with wasps but once he settles in with the cosmetic company, I stopped caring until he was hit by a car or a bus or something. Nothing serious, we just needed a convenient plot device to keep him from telling Starlin of his terrifying discovery: that the animals he had de-aged with the wasp serum had turned into hideous, violent monsters. When the transformation finally occurs and we're introduced to the wasp woman, I laughed. Oh man, did I laugh. That cool poster? You can forget about that. I mean, it was 1959 so I didn't expect much but what we got was anything but terrifying.
I mean, I guess I can see how this qualifies as a wasp woman. She's got bulging insectoid eyes and furry little antennae. Instead of mandibles, they gave her fangs that appear to jut from her lower jaw. The rest of her body is pretty normal for a woman except her hair has turned into a terrifying mullet and her hands appear to be her wasp stingers. At first I thought she was just strangling her victims but I soon realized she was apparently stinging them to death. It's momentarily hilarious before returning to tedious. She claims a couple victims and, when in human form, continues to obsess over the serum, demanding the near comatose Zinthrop (still recovering from that fight he lost against New York traffic) whip her up another batch. It's all a bust. I'm sure Corman has got some great work in his career but THE WASP WOMAN is not one to brag about. A little research into the film led me to the understand that this was one of the early films with his production/distribution company Filmgroup where he would make films on the cheap and create throwaway drive-in movies for double features. Frankly, I don't know that I could sit through two movies of this quality back-to-back without sticking my own head in a wasps' nest.
If you guess long stretches of nothing, you are correct. Oh man, I was beyond bored through most of THE WASP WOMAN. From the point where Zinthrop meets with Starlin until the transformation (which doesn't occur until more than 50 minutes into a meager 73 minute movie), there isn't much that happens. We're treated to gossip in the company's secretary pool (oh, that Irving) and the crawling pace of Starlin's descent into obsession with regaining her youth through the serum. Dull. Extraordinarily dull. There's some classic 50's era misogyny and groan-worthy dialogue. I don't know. It's hard to post a meaningful comment for a movie where I spaced out for the majority of the runtime. It starts off promisingly enough with the mad scientist and his inexplicable obsession with wasps but once he settles in with the cosmetic company, I stopped caring until he was hit by a car or a bus or something. Nothing serious, we just needed a convenient plot device to keep him from telling Starlin of his terrifying discovery: that the animals he had de-aged with the wasp serum had turned into hideous, violent monsters. When the transformation finally occurs and we're introduced to the wasp woman, I laughed. Oh man, did I laugh. That cool poster? You can forget about that. I mean, it was 1959 so I didn't expect much but what we got was anything but terrifying.
I mean, I guess I can see how this qualifies as a wasp woman. She's got bulging insectoid eyes and furry little antennae. Instead of mandibles, they gave her fangs that appear to jut from her lower jaw. The rest of her body is pretty normal for a woman except her hair has turned into a terrifying mullet and her hands appear to be her wasp stingers. At first I thought she was just strangling her victims but I soon realized she was apparently stinging them to death. It's momentarily hilarious before returning to tedious. She claims a couple victims and, when in human form, continues to obsess over the serum, demanding the near comatose Zinthrop (still recovering from that fight he lost against New York traffic) whip her up another batch. It's all a bust. I'm sure Corman has got some great work in his career but THE WASP WOMAN is not one to brag about. A little research into the film led me to the understand that this was one of the early films with his production/distribution company Filmgroup where he would make films on the cheap and create throwaway drive-in movies for double features. Frankly, I don't know that I could sit through two movies of this quality back-to-back without sticking my own head in a wasps' nest.