TITLE: Invasion of the Bee Girls
STARRING: William Smith, Anitra Ford, Victoria Vetri
DIRECTOR: Dennis Sanders
STUDIO: Sequoia Pictures
RATING: R
RUN TIME: 85 min
RELEASED: June 1, 1973

A typical quiet town. Birds chirping, that happy-go-lucky classical song that always plays during foresty scenes…

Murder! There’s a fatality afoot, and the victim is found naked, apparently murdered by…sex? The police don’t take much notice in it, and brush it off as a guy who was having too good a time. They continue to brush it off when more male victims start popping up.

Photo from dvddrive-in.com

Then, State Department Agent Neil Agar (William Smith) discovers that the twisted Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford) has been altering the hormones of his female subjects, taking their estrogen and replacing it with a queen bee’s. This makes them want to mate until they are pregnant, but since they are sterile from the gamma rays used in the procedure, they simply screw their mates until they die. Wow, what a way to go.

In the end, Neil Agar locates Dr. Susan’s lair and blows it up, leaving the Bee Girls to die a fiery death.

Invasion of the Bee Girls has everything you could possibly hope for: beautiful women screwing you to death. Does a movie even need anything else?

The movie straddles the soft-core porn genre, so if you want to see it, please make sure you have parental permission or at least are alone. By the way, before we dive into the depths of this film, let me assure you that unless you have sex 24 hours a day, you won’t die from over-exhaustion.

The problems in this film are that of every B-movie. The characters are all bland, stupid and don’t think. Every time a new victim appears, the following occurs: Shock music, character looks at the corpse, character moves to next scene. The townspeople are about as intelligent as a piece of celery.

The thing is, I can’t say for certain if this is a comedy or a serious soft-core porn or both. The horrid acting, weird 70′s soundtrack, a cast full of sex-crazed idiots identify this film as your typical B-Movie. It really isn’t that special, cept for the amazing boobs of Dr. Susan.

Anitra Ford as Dr. Susan Harris. Photo from listal.com

Keep in mind that this film came before the internet, when guys couldn’t get their porn fix anytime they wanted. They had to pay for it all. This film provided a service that many men take for granted, which is why the internet has killed the NC-17/X rated movie theaters, You can still find them, but they’re scummy as hell. In 1973, anything that could provide visual stimulation for guys was all the rage. hell Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” music video provided the most boob a lot of growing boys could see.  I saw this film not expecting a soft-core porn. I thought it’d just be another comedy or horror film. So I was caught completely off guard.

There were other films using female villains as insects. Wasp Woman (1959) was the first. These kind of films followed the weird porn trend of using femme fatales mixed with an creature that seduces and kills men. Guys like watching naked chicks, and there’s a weird fetish about women killing men either after or during sex that has survived for decades. I don’t understand the psychology behind this, but  a lot of guys find this kinky. Is it like a whole slave and master or BDSM thing? Or just something locked inside the human consciousness?

One thing this film does do right is exploit the hell out of that strange fetish  So in a way, though every part of this film makes your average critic cringe, it does do its intended purpose. So coming in full circle, this actually isn’t that bad a film. My god, a movie called Invasion of the Bee Girls isn’t that bad a movie? Blasphemy!

Believe it or not, there was actually a Seattle-based stage production that served as a semi-sequel to Bee Girls in 1998. It was called Beyond the Invasion of the Bee Girls, and it featured the return of both Dr. Susan and Neil Agar. The script can actually be found on Amazon.com, though it’s listed as “Out of Print – Limted Availability.”

The Bee Girls. They were hot, nasty lovers till the end. Find it if you can, it’s pretty hard to look up a movie that is both a borderline porno and a B -Movie. I would give it a 7/10 as a B movie comedy/horror film, and recommend it to anyone who wants to see what early exploitation films looked like.

Front page image from filmfanatic.org.