FFWD Weekly
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Video Vulture by John Tebbutt · Invasion of the Bee Girls (a.k.a. Graveyard Tramps, 1974) The men of Peckham, California are being fatally diddled. Cases of death by sexual exhaustion are being reported in record numbers. The culprits? A hive of horny, insatiable women with the genetic material and instincts of insects... the deadly BEE GIRLS!! (Cue dramatic music; Dum dum DUMMMMMMM!!) Yup, it’s a monster movie, but it’s one in which the monsters wear push-up bras, and leave a string of dead-but-happy victims in their wake. People aren’t exactly fleeing the town in a panic. (Some of the characters even point out that everybody has to die sometime... and some deaths are better than others.) The local authorities try to stop the carnage by suggesting that the townsfolk practice sexual abstinence – a reasonable precaution under the circumstances, but one that is answered with anger and ridicule by the unco-operative populace. (You’d think that they had asked everybody to stop breathing.) The leader of the Bee Girls is Dr. Susan Harris, a brilliant entomologist whose bug experiments have turned her and several female townsfolk into genetic hybrids that kill by mating. When the local sex therapist cottons on to the Bee Girls’ sinister plot, they rub him out. They can’t do their usual thing and shag him to death though, since he’s gay – they have to settle for running over him with a car. When the macho cop hero pokes around in the dead doc’s bachelor pad, he finds a secret rotating panel in a bookcase that leads to some kind of surreal, homosexual Batcave full of unicorn statues. I kid you not. Apparently, in the ’70’s, gay men had to construct elaborate secret rooms to hide all their gay stuff. Of course, the guy’s boyfriend is lurking back there too, making the discovery of his old love letters and bondage gear kind of redundant. The most bizarre scene in the film, amongst some mighty competition, is the transformation scene in which the Bee Girls kidnap a housewife and make her into one of them. The drugged woman is first coated with gloppy white cake frosting, and then put into a hexagonal chamber that looks like a set from Logan’s Run. Then, hundreds of bumblebees crawl all over her while the Bee Girls watch, licking their lips in anticipation. The solidified white stuff gets peeled off, some coloured lights blink furiously, and presto! One brand new Bee Girl, fresh from the oven. This film seems to proceed as though logic followed the dictates of the male libido. Gods of Movie Logic: Well, here we are in a field by the countryside. What should happen next? Male Libido: I think a naked woman should drive up on a motorcycle. Gods of Movie Logic: Good, good. We never would have thought of that. How about the transformation scene? Any ideas on how to end it? Male Libido: All the Bee Girls should pull open their lab coats and play with their breasts. Gods of Movie Logic: Brilliant! So – is Invasion of the Bee Girls a good movie? No. Of course not. Don’t be silly. Do I recommend it? Good God, yes. Do like I did, and fish it out of a $2.99 bargain bin. Then show it to everybody you know.

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