Entertainment
 

The Deadly Bees

From MST3K

905 - The Deadly Bees
Air Date May 9, 1998
Movie Director Freddie Francis
Year 1967
Cast Suzanna Leigh, Guy Doleman, Frank Finlay
Preceded by 904 - Werewolf
Followed by 906 - The Space Children


Contents

The Movie

Synopsis

Yet another plodding British movie with depressing sets, depressed actors, minimal emotion, and just enough action to keep you from thinking that you've spent an hour staring at a painting. But just.

Pop singer Vicki Robbins (Leigh) collapses from exhaustion while shooting the 1960's equivalent of a music video, and her physician inflicts a visit to Seagull Island on her.

She arrives on Seagull Island and promptly ends up in the classic and most British of scenarios: There's murder most foul. There's a bad guy who's just a little too good, and a good guy who's just a little too bad. And, of course, she's the ingenue caught in the middle of it all. Phones are on the fritz, people are stranded, and well, it just sort of goes on from there in typical "Dark and Stormy Night" fashion.

Suffice to say the ending is hopelessly obvious about five minutes after Vicki lands on the island.

Stylistically, this movie treats color as though it were a shameful, dirty thing, and the sad assortment of studio odds and ends that form the sets reek of Bengay, dry rot, and mothballs. Apparently none of the sets collapsed during filming, but with some of them it's really hard to tell.

The special effects aren't all that special, and production quality finishes a distant third behind The Screaming Skull and The Projected Man.

Information

  • Watch for the guitarist from the group "The Birds", not the American group at the beginning of the movie - it's a pre-Faces, pre-Rolling Stones Ron Wood. He's on the far right of the screen.
  • The male leads were written for Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff.[1]

The Episode

Crow's sonnet

Host Segments

  • Prologue Mike Tom and Crow quickly go through a montage of disjointed melodramatic scenes reminiscent of of various cop dramas, soap operas and hospital dramas. No further explanation is given.
  • Segment 1 Bobo and Brain Guy are watching Daytime television and eating chili dogs. Two observers (Mike Nelson and Paul Chapman) teleport into Castle Forrester and try to retrieve Brain Guy so he can help them rebuild their planet.
  • Segment 2 Crow is enamored by the cigarette-addicted old hag from the movie and writes her a love sonnet.
  • Segment 3 Tom tries raising a hive of wood ticks. Meanwhile Brain Guy is packing for his departure from Earth. In a Rodgers an Hammerstein style musical number he sings about leaving. Bobo and Pearl join in the song and convince him to stay with their lyrics.
  • Segment 4 Crow has misplaced his "Just For Men" hair dye. Mike decides to dress as a bee and communicate using bee's body movements. Using bee wiggles he easily conveys a number of complex ideas to Tom but fails to resolve Crow's Just For Men problem.
  • Closing Segment Mike, Crow and Servo agree that bees should be in every single movie and they're visited by the mysterious silent man in the bowler hat (Jim Mallon). In Castle Forrester the observers are having a psychic battle. Bobo distracts one of them with Chili dogs long enough for Brain Guy to steal his brain dish. The remaining observer challenges Brain Guy to a final battle of mental powers. This battle is cut short when Brain guy kicks him in the knee and snatches his brain dish away too. Stripped of their brains Brain Guy condemns the two observers to live out the rest of their lives in Wisconsin as raging Packers fans. The man in the bowler hat makes a final appearance.
  • Stinger: "The dog's meat, have you seen it?"

Obscure References

  • "It's the guy from the Magritte painting!"

A reference to the René Magritte painting The Son of Man.

  • "They're growing Bill the Cat!"

Bill the Cat is a character from the comic strip Bloom County.

  • "Breathe deep the gathering gloom, watchlights fade from every room."

The poem read during the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin," inspired by the tinkling music played during that scene, similar to that of the song.

Alternate Credits

Beez McKeever is credited as "Deadly Beez McKeever".

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