Director: Elesia Marie
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
Forced to return to her hometown, a bee specialist is forced to deal with a series of bizarre interactions that soon show that bees are reviving from the dead and killing people, forcing her to team with the man who left her at the altar, who’s now the town coroner, to stop the creatures.
Review:
Overall, this was a pretty solid and enjoyable genre cheesefest. Among the better factors to be had with this one come from the silly content surrounding a straightforward insect invasion storyline. The central setup, focusing on the realization that the dead bodies in the community are the result of strange insect attacks that are soon discovered to be this strange swarm of bees, which have been subjected to a chemical mutation that kills them and brings them back to cause the attacks on the community, which makes everything here feel incredibly fun. The type of investigation work that goes into the work here to realize that, from the discovery of the dead bodies and the chemical reports to the encounters with the bees themselves to uncover their behavior and the series of reveals found in their lab that includes the full realization of the bees’ condition and how to stop it.
That all of this is ably supported by a cheesy one gives this a lot to like. With the secondary subplot involving her trying to get her life back on track, only to get caught up with the coroner being the person who left her several years ago, the combative relationship that emerges comes off incredibly well as they keep talking about their past instead of the issue at hand, making for a solid enough confrontations that have a lighthearted tone alongside the kind of series of interactions with the bees. Their attacks on the community, from the first situation in the playground where the kids are outside, the later scenes at the park getting run over by the swarm that requires the police chief to get involved, and the final battle that brings their plan together to stop the hive by targeting the lead queen, features some rather solid sequences that bring about a cheesy tone. These all bring about quite a lot to like.
There are a few factors keeping this down. The main detrimental point within the film is a decidedly lackluster sense of pacing, where it takes forever to get the plot going. Far too much of this one is spent on the couple back together, getting the town to believe the stories about the bees, or trying to come up with the proper name for them, which stalls significantly in the first half, where it focuses quite rarely on the bees despite the escape taking place in the opening scenes. That causes this to be a bit longer than it should be, especially with all the usual interactions finalizing their relationship status or trying to come up with plans to fix the creatures, especially when it could’ve been a little easier to fix the running time either way. The other issue here is the slightly obvious low-budget work of the film, focusing on the usual series of issues usually found in the genre when it comes to how the bees interact or are depicted on screen, keeping this one down overall.
Overview: ***/5
A really fun cheesy genre effort, there’s a lot to like here while only having just a few slight issues keeping it down, which causes this to be focused rather nicely as a solid middle-tier genre effort. Those with an interest in this kind of genre fare or who are curious about it will have the most to like here whale those turned off by its drawbacks might want to heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment