The Wasp Woman (1959)

I'm writing this in 2018. I'm a Roger Corman fan but somehow I missed this one. Turner Classics showed it today and I started watching it but missed the opening credits. Partway into the movie I recognized some of the music, it reminded me of the jazz score in Corman's Little Shop of Horrors, and as various things happened in Wasp Woman I started to think that this just had to be a Roger Corman movie. I was too hooked to check then, but after the movie ended I looked it up and, sure enough, Roger Corman directed. I really liked this movie. The acting was very good and convincing, the story was interesting, the suspense mounted, and there just the right amount of humor (another Roger Corman specialty). Sure, the wasp monster was a little hokey, but even that was well done. I felt sorry for the woman trying to save her youth, and her company, the eccentric scientist was perfect, and I enjoyed the two romantic leads, especially Barboura Morris. A very entertaining movie.

Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) is the owner of a cosmetics company whose prices are falling. Executive Bill Lane (Fred Eisley) tells her this is because of her aging looks...because that's how you get a bonus at Christmas, right? Anyhow, at the same time this is going on a scientist named Dr. Eric Zinthrop has been working on a serum which reverses the aging process. Might this be the ideal solution? Janice helps fund Zinthrop's efforts to perfect his work, then uses herself as a human test subject. It works, and she easily sheds 20 years. Unfortunately it has a side effect. It turns her into a woman with a wasp's head...exactly twice. Then she dies after falling out a window. Ironically The Wasp Woman has little or no wasp woman it. This might be excused if the characters or story were interesting, but most of the movie is just executives talking about things that we don't really care about. I don't really recommend it because it's pretty boring and doesn't even get the benefit of enjoyably bad.

Long before Olivia de Havilland warned us that a swarm of killer bees were coming our way, and a few years after the public at large fled from "The Deadly Mantis", the staff of a beauty supply company must deal with "The Wasp Woman", unknowingly their big boss, who has been surprising them recently with her sudden youth-creating beauty. Actress Susan Cabot is made to look "old" (sans make-up and with large framed glasses) as the creator of a line of beauty products which no longer work for her. She decides to be the human experiment of a scientist obsessed with wasp jelly which makes an old lab mouse young and turns an old cat back into a kitten. Unfortuanately, thanks to the sudden attack of the no longer friendly kitty, the scientist learns that his wasp jelly has serious side effects, turning the creature who takes it into a wasp-like creature, attacking the nearest victim and literally eating them from inside out. But before he can warn Cabot, he is hit by a car, and pretty soon, she is having flashes of the demon inside her, all the while desperate to take more youth-creating jelly in order to remain youthful.A combination of genuine horror and camp, this is also a very moralistic tale of how the obsession with youth can literally destroy one's soul. Cabot's loveliness in real life isn't hidden by the dowdy way she is clothed and made up in the open scenes (it's funny how lack of make-up and ugly glasses are always used in movies and on T.V. to indicate plainness), and she is publicly humiliated in a meeting with fellow executives and her secretary of how by remaining cover girl for her own product, she has caused the sales of the product to go down. It doesn't help that she's surrounded by younger secretaries and clerks who are quite voluptuous and often comment behind her back (which she somehow manages to overhear) on her looks.While it is insinuated by the bee keepers in the very first scene that scientist Michael Mark is quite mad, he never really shows serious signs of that, although his obsession with angry wasps over the usually man friendly bees is quite odd. His performance is basically very subtle, especially in the scenes following his accident. Other good performances come from William Roerick as one of Cabot's executives, Anthony Eisley as another employee and Barboura Morris as Cabot's devoted secretary. The film really doesn't explode into horror until the final quarter, but it is still interesting to see how it develops.

This movie is really long on plot development and relationships. The acting wasn't really that bad but the whole film was lame. You have the board member, the one with some science background, running around with a pipe in his mouth most of the time. I guess that was to make him seem smarter. You have the female company owner in search of youth. Some side show secretaries that really are not germane to the movie at all. It takes a long time for this film to get to the so called horror part. When it gets there it is bad, bad, bad. The owner has been taking royal jelly injections from queen wasps. So guess what she turns in to a hybrid human/wasp. Kills a few people and gets killed in the end. Not a good movie.