The Savage Bees is just one of the many "nature gone amuck" flicks littering the TV listings in the wake of Jaws' box-office success and while it's pretty low-scale and silly in its execution it's actually a lot more watchable than most of the "killer (fill in the blank)" movies that glutted the late 70's - although it's still a pretty forgettable time in which not a heck of a lot exciting goes on, characters endlessly ramble on, and attack scenes that don't really amount to much.

Twenty miles off the coast of New Orleans a large freight ship runs into a seemingly abandoned banana boat headed to the States from Brazil. It seems the boat's crew has gone missing and nobody is quite sure what has happened. At around the same time nearby small town sheriff Ben Johnson has found his faithful dog dead at the side of the room the victim of what looks like a poisoning. These two events don't seem to be connected, but just after Johnson arrives at the morgue in the big city the body of a sailor found along the shore arrives. After examining both bodies, medical examiner Michael Parks finds that they were both killed by the same thing: bees (in fact he finds dead ones in the stomachs of both).

Calling in the help of Entomologist Gretchen Corbett, Parks goes to visit a local expert on bees and they discover that the banana boat was carrying a malicious strain of African bees who are easy to anger and ruthlessly attack until their victim is dead. Meanwhile, sheriff Johnson has to try to warn the residents of his town to look out for this new strain of "savage bees".

In between scenes of Parks, Corbett, and bee expert Paul Hecht trying to figure out ways they can stop the bees from attacking the city (which just so happens to be celebrating Mardi Gras, something that's newer used to the film's advantage) and Johnson trying to keep the calm there's a few tame attacks to try and keep us interested as a farmer is killed by the bees even after jumping into the water to try and avoid them (it's poorly staged and tries to give us the farmer's view from underwater, only managing to fuzz out the screen and annoy us) and a few others fall victims to the bees.

This leads to a final third that has a Brazilian expert flying in to try and stop the bees only to fail miserably (and give us a hilarious moment where some people dressed as pirates wildly swing around their swords while being swarmed), our heroes clearing the streets of people, and an entire sequence where Corbett has to drive her Volkswagen Bug into the Superdome stadium covered in bees in hopes of dropping the temperature in the building enough to kill the bees.

While the finale is pretty silly, it's a pleasing finish to the proceedings and actually manages some mild suspense - it's too bad the rest of The Savage Bees can't hold your attention as well. The movie is just too talky with not nearly enough "buzzing" to be all that good, but it must've been an alright ratings getter as a few years later they'd follow it up with a sequel, Terror Out Of The Sky.

Writer Guerdon Trueblood kept busy in the sub-genre penning such "nature runs amuck" films as Ants!, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, and the aforementioned follow-up. Director Bruce Geller (who created TV's Mission: Impossible and was writer on numerous other television shows) would pass away two years after directing this. (Chris Hartley, 11/15/05)

Directed By: Bruce Geller.
Written By: Guerdon Trueblood.

Starring: Ben Johnson, Michael Parks, Paul Hecht, Gretchen Corbett.