{"id":73104,"date":"2023-05-19T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-19T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=73104"},"modified":"2023-05-18T14:19:15","modified_gmt":"2023-05-18T19:19:15","slug":"have-you-seen-the-swarm-1978","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=73104","title":{"rendered":"Have you seen… The Swarm (1978)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BY JOHN BILLINGER<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People nowadays seem to do nothing but complain about the number of superhero films that get made, including griping about how they almost overshadow the other films that come out. These people are all like, \u201cOh, I liked things better back in the good old days.\u201d However, in my opinion, the abundance of superhero films is nothing new. It is just another example of a popular genre taking over the film industry in the long history of Hollywood. It seems like every decade, there\u2019s been some franchise that has overshadowed everything. Take the 1970s, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Allen<\/strong><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

In the 70s, there were a whole bunch of disaster films. I\u2019m talking about films like \u201cAirport\u201d and \u201cEarthquake.\u201d These films featured a large ensemble of professional actors in a pretty hokey film. These are the kinds of films that were parodied in the 1980s, such as \u201cAirplane\u201d and \u201cThe Poseidon Adventure (two of my favorite movies). The biggest name in the disaster movie field was producer Irwin Allen. He produced two of the most well-known disaster films of this era, \u201cThe Poseidon Adventure\u201d and The Towering Inferno (a movie which is a bit overcooked in my opinion, it\u2019s just a human barbeque at the end of the day). These films were big, loud, explosive, somewhat corny, and hugely successful. Sadly, the genre slowly lost steam, mainly due to films like the one I\u2019m talking about today: Irwin Allen’s epic b(ee) movie \u201cThe Swarm.\u201d He even did double duty of directing the thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film was made to capitalize on the killer bee scare of the 70s. Apparently, people thought that killer bees from Africa were going to come down here and kill us all. Don\u2019t ask me how; I\u2019m just telling you how it was. Of course, this all turned out to be a complete waste of time, but that didn\u2019t stop Allen from making a movie exploiting it. Made on a $21 million dollar budget (which was $11 million more than what Star Wars was made for), they got an all-star cast including the likes of Michael Caine and Henry Fonda, an all-star insect cast of 800,000 bees with removed stingers, and when released into theaters in 1978, it made $7 million. Ouch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot is as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Bradford Crane (played by Caine) and General Slater (played by Richard Widmark) are investigating the mysterious deaths of soldiers who were killed by an unknown force in a Texas army base. Fortunately, the culprit is found out very quickly to have been African Killer Bees, who have made their way to the United States through Hurricanes, I guess. The Bees soon wreak havoc on the country, and it\u2019s up to Crane, Slater, scientist Helena Anderson (played by Katharine Ross), and Dr. Walter Krim (played by Fonda) to find a way to stop the bees. Meanwhile, there are also a bunch of other subplots that have nothing to do with the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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