The Swarm (1978)- coming from WAC (1 Viewer)

[atfree]

Just announced at San Diego Comic-Con

 

[Tino]

I remember the Billboards in ‘78

“The Swarm Is Coming”

Terrible film as I recall. Don’t think I’ve seen it since then.

 

[sleroi]

Ive been waiting for this one. Its admittedly bad, but its a guilty pleasure of mine, for nostalgic reasons.

They filmed a lot of this in the building my Dad worked in in downtown Houston. He took me to work a few times so I could see all the behond the scenes stuff. We just got to walk through some of the production, but couldnt linger. But I got to see a lot of the filming from his office window. And at 6 years old, seeing some of the extras in bee sting makeup up close was really cool.

 

[darkrock17]

It's not The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno. It was Allen's first film he directed and not just produced. This was made along side with many other cash-ins of the Disaster genre from the years 75-79.

 

[Dick]

It's godawful, for the most part. Sad, because it's based on a really good novel of the same name by Arthur Herzog, which I read twice. If Sterling Silliphant (usually a good writer) hadn't ignored the science of the novel and instead replaced it with a lot of military bullshit (with Richard Widmark in especially bad form), this might have been a decent disaster flick. The best performance is turned in by Henry Fonda, who portrays a scientist experimenting on himself with a potential antidote to killer bee venom. This is one of the few passages from the novel that is faithfully reproduced, and it is so well done it makes me angry that Allen and Silliphant so badly fucked up almost everything else. The Goldsmith score is very good, but that can be had on CD without having to suffer through the movie to hear it. What a massive (and expensive) disappointment!

 

[Blimpoy06]

I like The Swarm. I like all the Irwin Allen adventure films, from Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea to When Time Ran Out. It's fun watching great actors deliver bad dialogue covered in mud. Not a fan of the early documentary style films and Circus stuff. And The Swarm was not the first feature film he directed. Just the first in the 70's.

 

[Alan Tully]

An easy pass on The Swarm (but I'd buy the equally bad, When Time Ran Out - we have to be selective with our bad movies). I remember an interview with Michael Caine where The Swarm was bought up & he said (quite rightly): Oh come on, Henry Fonda & Richard Widmark were also in it & they seem to get a free pass.

 

[titch]

For lovers of turkeys, The Swarm is hysterically horrible on the level of Exorcist II: The Heretic. Michael Caine makes it very watchable ("I never dreamt it would be the bees. They were always our friends!").

 

[skylark68]

Looking forward to this. I grew up in the Houston area so I’m obligated to buy this one.

Now if Warner releases Brewster McCloud I’ll have a pretty good circa 1970s era view of Houston...

 

[TonyD]

I love a good disaster movie especially an Irwin but this one is a turkey.
It’s nearly 2 and a half hours long if not longer.

 

[commander richardson]

For lovers of turkeys, The Swarm is hysterically horrible on the level of Exorcist II: The Heretic. Michael Caine makes it very watchable ("I never dreamt it would be the bees. They were always our friends!").

yes ...this is a bad movie and in bluray it will be even worse

I love a good disaster movie especially an Irwin but this one is a turkey.
It’s nearly 2 and a half hours long if not longer.

It is a turkey big time but I like it regardless......

 

[TonyD]

Yeah I get it.

I tend to turn it on when TCM airs it.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I love a good disaster movie especially an Irwin but this one is a turkey.
It’s nearly 2 and a half hours long if not longer.

The US theatrical cut was under 2 hours but the DVD used the "International Cut" and it added about 40 minutes to clock in at 155 minutes!

More is not better in this case. It'd be great if the BD offered the choice of US and International Cuts, but I suspect it won't...

 

[sleroi]

Looking forward to this. I grew up in the Houston area so I’m obligated to buy this one.

Now if Warner releases Brewster McCloud I’ll have a pretty good circa 1970s era view of Houston...

And don't forget the bad news bears in breaking training.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I remember the Billboards in ‘78

“The Swarm Is Coming”

Terrible film as I recall. Don’t think I’ve seen it since then.

I saw it in 1978 and don't think I hated it back then, but I think I was disappointed. I loved disaster movies as a kid - I was 11 in 1978 - and that one was a letdown.

As an adult, I fully recognize it's an awful movie.

Though in theory, it should be "so bad it's good" - after all, this is a movie in which they set up a police roadblock to stop bees!

But in reality, it's so bad it's bad...

 

[Colin Jacobson]

For lovers of turkeys, The Swarm is hysterically horrible on the level of Exorcist II: The Heretic. Michael Caine makes it very watchable ("I never dreamt it would be the bees. They were always our friends!").

Based on my review, I disagreed!

"Caine feels like the worst offender, as he screams and spits most of his lines whether they merit that treatment or not. Perhaps he simply couldn’t believe he agreed to star in this dismal clunker and took out his self-loathing on his lines."

 

[Alan Tully]

Looking forward to this. I grew up in the Houston area so I’m obligated to buy this one.

Now if Warner releases Brewster McCloud I’ll have a pretty good circa 1970s era view of Houston...

General Slater: "Houston on fire. Will history blame me, or the bees?"

 

[Dick]

Michael Caine makes it very watchable ("I never dreamt it would be the bees. They were always our friends!").

He needn't have worried. We're killing them all off anyway.

 

[Thomas T]

Caine feels like the worst offender, as he screams and spits most of his lines whether they merit that treatment or not. Perhaps he simply couldn’t believe he agreed to star in this dismal clunker and took out his self-loathing on his lines.

Obviously it didn't sour Caine on working with Irwin Allen as the following year, he worked with Allen again in the equally dismal Beyond The Poseidon Adventure. Caine liked a good paycheck and often admitted he did movies strictly for the money.

 

[Jack P]

There is an on-line review somewhere that makes the argument that Silliphant was deliberately approaching the script as a 50s sci-fi "b" movie (no pun intended) and basically riffed on that theme to the max in tongue-in-cheek fashion, but that Allen missed the joke and was treating it all with lofty seriousness. The fact that Allen to put it bluntly had no business directing (one of the reasons why "Poseidon Adventure" and "Towering Inferno" work is because it has directors who know how to handle dramatic stuff) only made it worse.