I saw this at a local arthouse cinema that was showing a curated "Dystopia" series. This was a bit of a tongue in cheek selection. I kinda like 70's disaster movies and decided to see this even tho I was aware of it's bad reputation. I went in with open mind and was prepared to be positively surprised as I even own movies like Airport (all four), Towering Inferno, Rolleroaster, Earthquake etc, so I genuinely was prepared to like it.So, there was something good about it. It looks good, I saw an original 35mm copy. There are slow-mo shots that really look pretty good and the fx are really good. All of the bee shots are extremely well made, be it close ups or wides with the whole swarm. I guess they used real bees and a lot of them and the swarm was some kind of super imposed thing, but they really did look good. Music was ok, but nothing remarkable by Jerry Goldsmith.And the bad, almost everything else. The script is amazingly dumb. From dialog to anything that happens really. There were so many face palm moments that it makes no sense listing them. It's also very much politically incorrect with the "africans" as villains and all white cast, that alone would make this a bomb. I can't imagine it being ok even in the late seventies.Acting was bad, but that is mostly due to the dumb script and characters. Michael Caines character must be one of the worst protagonists ever. He's not very likable and he doesn't even make very good decisions in the movie.What bugged me a bit tho while watching this film was that part of the audience was clearly laughing because they thought this is a movie you have to laugh at every scene. To me it wasn't a movie that is bad enough to be laughable for the most part, it was just bad. Sure there were a few scenes which did spark a non intended smile, but some people were laughing their asses off when kids were dying in slow motion.Difficult movie to judge. They clearly knew that killer bees might be a bit hard to accept as a real threat, but there were scenes that had tension. It was mostly everything that happened between those scenes that made the movie bad. I saw the original "short" version and it felt really long. Glad they didn't show the longer cut as I would've surely fell asleep.

I wanted to jam pencils into my ears and rip my eyeballs out. Amazingly bad screenplay. Incredibly bad acting. Two hours of my life, lost forever. How could so many top-drawer actors have agreed to be in this mess? Don't actors read screenplays anymore? Was this even scary in 1978?

This movie begins with a small squad of armed airmen clothed in chemical protective gear cautiously entering a small Air Force substation near the town of Marysville, Texas. Upon their initial investigation they find several dead bodies and an unauthorized civilian named "Brad Crane" (Michael Caine) on the premises. It soon turns out that Brad Crane is a world famous etymologist who believes that billions of mutant African killer bees are responsible for the deaths of these airmen. Not long afterward the search party subsequently finds a medical doctor by the name of "Captain Helena Anderson" (Katherine Ross) who was hiding in a sealed room and she reports that there are a handful of wounded airmen with her in need of serious medical treatment due to bee stings. This report validates what Brad Crane has told them and as more reports come in about deaths related to these swarms of African killer bees. In no time the military turns over all of the resources they have to him but even with the excellent team of scientists that Brad Crane manages to obtain the situation soon becomes even more perilous. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie I will just say that this was much better than a similar film by the name of "The Bees" which was made during the same year. For starters, the director (Irwin Allen) made good use of the CGI technology available at the time which certainly helped to some degree. Likewise, he also managed to assemble an all-star cast as well. Additionally, unlike the previously mentioned film of the same year, the ending wasn't nearly as ridiculous. In short, although this movie has its faults and certainly won't appeal to everyone, I found it somewhat entertaining and I have rated it accordingly. Average.

Lots of stars, major and minor, can't lift this shoddy piece if commercial garbage out of the dismissible category. But it DOES have one thing in common with "Hamlet" in that almost everybody of importance dies.It's not really fun watching watery-eyed Henry Fonda inject himself with a bee venom antidote and see his EKG rise to "really sssspooky rates." And it's positively embarrassing to see Ben Johnson talk about love to a plump Olivia De Havilland, who resurrects her Melanie accent from "Gone With The Wind." We can cover the special effects with the observation that everyone dies in slow motion and that buildings, trains, and automobile blow up.The structure of the tale is awful. Every attempt to kill the monster swarm is ineffective until, at the very end, Michael Caine as the requisite scientist springs a new weapon out of nowhere. And what a weapon. Now, I'm no apiarologist or apiariatrist. I'd be the first to admit it. But I'd bet the house my ex wife got that bees don't have a mating call, not being moose. Some kind of scent, a pheromone, might get my attention but this movie loses its organoleptic thread when it introduces portable hummers.It should be shown in all film appreciation classes as a bad example.