Killer bees just aren't scary. Even legendary producer Irwin Allen, the king of disaster epics like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, couldn't do anything with the honey producing insects with his 1978 box office bomb The Swarm. This hasn't stopped numerous low-budget companies to keep producing them and Killer Buzz is an example of this. However, where most just go for cheesy thrills with some bloody deaths, the people behind this have decided to try and mesh "nature gone amuck" flicks with a political message. To say the results are a mess would be an understatement.

It's a chaotic first fifteen minutes with lots of pleasingly cheap looking action as tribesmen from the Brazilian rainforest decide they're going to shut down oil refineries to protest the fact that the United States hasn't signed the Kyoto Protocol agreement. This causes American reporter Ann Bower (Gabrielle Anwar) to be caught in the middle of a crossfire between natives and soldiers loaded with gunfire, explosions, and flaming arrows. A dying native mutters to her that there's going to be "demons from the sky" and she finds out quickly he means genetically altered bees when she gets stung by one.

Soon afterwards, apart from being caught in a love triangle with Dr. North (David Naughton), her separated husband Martin (Craig Sheffer) and government suit Scotty (Jason Brooks), Ann has to hunt down an ancient tribe dubbed the 'Shadow People' so she can get a serum. At the same time, Martin is a passenger on a passenger plane and has to deal with some of the deadly insects after they get free from the container that baddie Ezekial (Rutger Hauer, who pointlessly drifts in and out of the movie) was shipping back to the States so he could unleash them on the general public - and apparently make people's eyes bleed as that's a side effect of being stung.

Writer-director Jeff Hare seems to be trying to cram as much as he can into the film's 96 minute run time with government intrigue, action sequences, and some disaster movie stylings with the subplot on the plane. The problem is, he isn't able to make any of it convincing and it's hindered by numerous moments that are more laughable than anything. Like when Ann and her camera man return back to the site only to see a jaguar being decimated by the bees and their only reaction is a nonchalant "let's get out of here" or the annoying surfer girl character on the plane who is spraying the bees with a fire extinguisher while yelling "you want some of this?". Everything culminates in a lousy finale packed with bad CGI effects and an emergency landing.

They've certainly stacked the cast with a bunch of (now) b-list actors! Anwar first came to my attention in 1993's Body Snatchers and has since see-sawed between Hollywood movies, television and the low-budget realm. She's just not that good here and just when you figure that her character is meant to be the heroine of the film they shift all the macho insect fighting to Sheffer. Another name that should be familiar to b-movie fans, Sheffer (Nightbreed, Fire in the Sky) is probably the best thing here but that's not saying a lot. Naughton (An American Werewolf in London) doesn't have enough screen time to really care about while Hauer continues to prove he'll take a role in just about anything and gives a hammy performance that is miles away from the effective bad guys he was in films like The Hitcher and Ladyhawke.

Originally going under the moniker of Flying Virus, Killer Buzz already had a strike against it simply by being about killer bees. It lacks the unintentional humour of 1978s The Bees (which was basically an Italian rip-off of The Swarm with John Saxon) or the silly TV-movie thrills of The Savage Bees making it completely disposable. (Chris Hartley, 1/16/11)

Directed By: Jeff Hare.
Written By: Jeff Hare.

Starring: Gabrielle Anwar, Rutger Hauer, Craig Sheffer, Jason Brooks.