deadly invasion: a look back

The film opens with an expository voice-over relating the origin story of the Africanized honeybee:  In the 1950s, a group of the world's foremost bee scientists crossbred various species of docile, low-producing European honey bees with their industrious-but-more-aggressive cousins from eastern Africa.  The scientists' intent was to breed out European laziness and African aggression in order to produce a race of utopian pacifist bees that would just kind of chill and produce a butt-ton of honey.  That the resulting hybrid came to be known colloquially as the “killer bee” should tell you how that all panned out.

The voice-over describes the bees' escape from a Brazilian laboratory (which, by the way, is not artistic license- in real life, killer bees broke out of a laboratory in South America like fucking Mewtwo) and their subsequent northward propagation.  At present day (1995), this deadly hybrid is already on America's doorstep.  The prologue concludes with a dire warning: “the following could be a true story.”

Cut to a lonely desert road “30 miles north of the Mexican border.”  A single insect buzzes ominously in the grill of a highway patrolman's vehicle.  Lamar, the officer driving the car, pulls over next to a dilapidated farmhouse to clear out some squatters.  He clambers onto a nearby box, leans in through the window of the old shack, and issues a friendly warning to the sleeping vagrants:  “you're not exactly in the safest place here.”

Oh, Lamar.  You have no idea.

When the squatters don't reply, Lamar leans in further and looks them over with a swing of his flashlight.  They're dead.  The scene's pastoral soundscape gives way to a cacophony of angry buzzing and screeching violins.  Lamar spots something off-camera and screams.  The camera zooms directly into his mouth.  His face is covered in bees.  He struggles, inadvertently kicking over the box he had been standing on.  His belt gets snagged on two nails protruding from the window frame. Despite his previous concerns regarding the structural integrity of the farmhouse, the nails manage to suspend Lamar's rubenesque figure in place.  He cannot escape.  He struggles and coughs.  We see his legs kicking, like a robber being hanged in a western.  They slow.  And then they stop.

The camera zooms out to an overhead shot of the infested farmhouse and the title splashes across the screen:

Hello, friends!  Rob here.

The nineties were an innocent age.  The economy was booming, the suffocating cloud of nuclear paranoia hanging over post-war America had finally dissipated, and all the rad dudes had bad attitudes.  It was a veritable renaissance of in-line skates and day-glo wayfarers.  Kids my age, born in the waning years of the Cold War, knew nothing of fear on a global scale.  And why should we have?  There was nothing to fear.

A terrified populace was, apparently, as much Fox's business model back then as it is today, so midway through the decade their executive braintrust ripped a few lines of coke and picked out of a hat what they hoped would be America's Next Great Scare.  The end result of this creative firestorm was Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare.

I'm not gonna lie: this movie wrecked me when I was a kid.  People a generation older than me (or fans of FX's cold-war spy drama The Americans) might see a parallel between my experience with Deadly Invasion and the widespread emotional trauma caused in 1983 when ABC aired its sobering apocalyptic drama The Day After.  At ten years old, I basically took this movie for a documentary.  I thought it was scary as hell.  I thought we were going to have to move to Canada to get away from the bees.  Today, I will revisit that childhood terror.  I will cast it aside.  And I will find something much darker in its place.  Read on.

After the title card, we are treated to the first of many aerial shots meant to imply the perspective of bees flying over land.  This bee's-eye view glides over sleepy American pastures as the opening credits roll. (Whoa, Ryan Phillippe was in this movie?)  We eventually land in a small California town called Blossom Meadow.

The shot pans down to a typical household in which five family members try to cram as much background as they can into a single breakfast:

-the parents, Karen and Chad, have high-stress jobs and are far too preoccupied with work to worry about bees, their children, or whether or not both of their given names will come to take on undesirable connotations in the future.
-the amount of time the family has lived in Blossom Meadow is ill-defined.  Business contacts keep sending things to the parents' old Boston address by mistake, and their youngest daughter, Lucy, has yet to make any friends, but beyond that the family has had enough time to integrate fully into this small town despite living on a remote farmstead in the outlying countryside.  Even the two older children, Tracy and Kevin, seem to be thriving at their new high school.
-the family's new(?) property is some kind of orchard, which the parents are hoping will eventually become profitable enough to allow them to step back from their day jobs.
-OH GOD I FORGOT THE FAMILY'S LAST NAME IS INGRAM.  Which, A, is misspelled, and B, certainly made it that much more traumatic to watch this as a kid.

Kevin catches a ride to school on the back of his best friend Ryan Phillippe's motorcycle (90s shorthand for “this kid is hardcore”).  Ryan Phillippe, playing the same kind of acerbic jerkbag that would make him a household name a few years later, mocks Kevin for, um, eating breakfast that his mom made?

John, the family's contractor or groundskeeper or half-wit stableboy or whatever, discovers that the Ingrams' home has a vestigial crawlspace tunnel connecting the basement of their main home to the barn some fifty yards away.  He offers to convert the alcove into wine storage, with the downside being that he'll have to board up the tunnel.  “Gopher it,” Chad quips, looking very pleased with himself.  I'm not sure why this scene was included.  It's definitely not the setup to some later payoff.

Chad begins his workaday by driving some lawyerly documents out to Ken, a ruggedly-handsome local beekeeper who runs a booming apiary business alongside his father.  Ken's father, your classic “vaguely mystical person of color who says something ominous at the beginning of a horror movie,” appears concerned as he looks out over his bee farm.

“They are upset,” he growls.  “Something has them very upset.”
“Has who upset?”
“The bees.”

It doesn't take long for the movie to make good on that promise.  A pair of rambunctious teens take a joyride to the outskirts of town to do sex, but they repeatedly bump into the horn of the boy's classic hot rod during their automotive canoodling, and the noise provokes a bee attack.  In their frantic attempt to speed away from the bees, the teens are killed in a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler.

The town gathers at the scene of the accident to watch the local fire department wreck the offending hive.  Two government agents in aviators show up and hand the town's mayor an “africanized honeybee draft action plan,” essentially shrugging off a national crisis with a frustrating mess of jargon, platitudes, and hideous inaction.  The agents recommend that local schools perform “bee drills.”  Later, Karen will watch in horror as Lucy and her elementary school classmates run one such drill.  Nothing about any of this feels relatable in 2019.

Pruitt Taylor Beauchamp, an eccentric bee expert and academic outsider, turns up at the scene for reasons that are never fully explained.  He expounds upon the environmental and economic necessity of bees (emphasis on economic- this is the nineties after all) and warns that Blossom Meadow's bee problem is far from over.  Apparently, we have to find the “primary colony” in order to stem the invasion.   (Side note:  although it generally seems like the movie tries to get the facts right on killer bees,  I'm not sure there's a scientific basis for this one.  I think it's just one of those “you have to kill the head vampire” tropes that showed up in a lot of nineties horror.)   At a nearby cafe, Beauchamp ruins everyone's lunch by going all diet Alan Grant and describing in horrific detail the cascading effects of multiple bee stings.  Surprisingly, he is actually NOT foreshadowing his own death- after this scene, we see him once more talking to a reporter, and then he just kind of fucks off to somewhere else I guess.

And then everything goes to hell.  Bees attack Ken's wedding- either roused by feedback from the wedding band's sound check or in protest of the band's rather moribund take on blues rock- and sting the crap out of Ken's young son.  At a local trading post, we see cans of Raid (solid product placement!) flying off the shelves.  Chad, a moron, buys a single can.  Karen grabs an EpiPen off a stack at a store under a hand-printed sign reading “BEE PREPARED” (which somehow marks the first bee pun in the entire movie) and is mortified to see Lucy grinning as she dons a novelty bee antenna headband.

Chad discovers that the primary colony is on his newly(ish?)-purchased property.  Ryan Phillippe gets it in his head to avenge the death of “the coolest kid in town” (the teenage boy from earlier) by taking a shotgun to the hives dotting the Ingram family's orchard.  Kevin looks on in horror for a moment before dragging his idiot friend away.  With a deadly swarm in furious pursuit, the boys leap onto Ryan Phillippe's motorcycle and narrowly escape to the Ingram house.  The home is immediately besieged by bees. (Beesieged?)  Karen tries the phone, but it's dead, because there are bees all up in the switchboard.  Lucy sinks into anaphylaxis after taking a few stings and spends the next twenty minutes wheezing.  The sound of her labored breath is as relentless as it is grating.  The family (and Ryan Phillippe) resort to a series of desperate, comical measures to fend off the encroaching swarm and stabilize Lucy before finally escaping through the old tunnel in the basement (payoff!) and riding out the rest of the night in the relative safety of the barn.

As a new day dawns, the Ingrams clean up.  Lucy tosses her bee headband in the trash, because I guess she doesn't like bees anymore?  The camera shifts to the same bee's-eye-view from the beginning of the film and wafts away.  As it sweeps over the idyllic California countryside, the score turns from bright to ominous and a final warning is delivered by text:  “The killer bee invasion has begun.  The first swarms could reach downtown Los Angeles this year, unless we stop them.  But as of now, no one knows how.”

Conflicts in literature can be boiled down to a handful of archetypes: man vs. man, man vs. God/fate, man vs. society, and so on.  On its face, Deadly Invasion is a simple tale of man vs. nature.  The bees are wild animals.  They sweep across the landscape like a tsunami and leave devastation in their wake.  They cannot be controlled or reasoned with.  There is no motive or morality to their actions.  They simply are.

But there's more to it than that.  Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare is not a tale of man vs. nature, or fate, or society, or even man.  It is a tale of man versus self.  In a sense, killer bees are the offspring of humanity's darkest urges.  Bees (regular ones, anyway), honey, agricultural pollination- these are all gifts of the earth.  But mankind, in our reckless avarice, seized this gift and tried to squeeze it for more.  The bees are our self-inflicted punishment.

Midway through the film, Chad learns some disquieting information about how killer bees propagate: “killer bees come into an area, they mate with the local bees, and pretty soon all of 'em are killer bees.”  I know that by pointing this out I'm playing into the stereotype of the braying liberal who sees racism at every turn, but I can't help finding Chad's language evocative of suburban racism in post-segregational America- it's all very “there goes the neighborhood.”

The bees are just trying to exist the only way they know how.  As Ken, the harmonious beekeeper, explains, “you've gotta give 'em a reason to sting you.  If you're comfortable around bees, they'll be comfortable around you.”  But “live and let live” has never been a part of human nature.  Not including the prologue, there are three killer bee attacks in the movie, and in each case, the bees are provoked by humans.  The horny teens aggravated a nearby hive with their incidental horn honks.  The noisome wedding  band drew the swarm that threatened the life of Ken's son and ultimately drove his family out of town.  The climactic siege on the Ingram house wouldn't have even happened if Ryan Phillippe hadn't attacked the bees in their own homes.  (With a shotgun, no less.  Any idiot could tell you that firearms are useless against bees.)  That Ryan Phillippe chooses to carry out his vengeance not on the bees that actually killed his friend, but on any bees- and, perhaps, the very concept of beedom- is telling.  This attack is not an act of self-defense, nor is it an exactment of justice.  It is an expression of bigotry, and in the end it only perpetuates the cycle of anguish.

Killer bees are not an external threat.  They are our hubris, our greed, our prejudice, and our inability to coexist harmoniously with the world around us- the worst aspects of humanity made manifest that we may swallow ourselves whole.  They are a reminder that we fear that which we do not understand, and that it is all too easy for that fear give way to explosive violence.  But most of all, they are a reminder that when we do battle with one another, we do battle with ourselves.

To paraphrase Billy Corgan, the killer in bee is the killer in you.

If, for some reason, you'd like to check out Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare, it's right here on YouTube.  (The movie is actually only about 80 minutes long- the second half of this video, inexplicably, is just a bunch of scenes from the movie in seemingly random order.)   All in all, it's a campy bit of misadventure that isn't going to win any awards, but does a decent job of scratching that so-bad-it's-good itch some of us have.  I give it two stars (out of five).