THE WASP WOMAN (1959)

Besides having Roger Corman's name on it, I assumed the movie would stink when the title sequence featured stock footage of honeybees, not wasps. But it surprised me by being better than I expected.

Susan Cabot stars as Janice Starlin, a former model and now president of the cosmetics company that bears her name. With sales in a slump, Janice fears that her age (all of 40) might be turning potential customers away. Rather than hire a young woman as the new public face of her company, Janice turns to a quack scientist, Dr. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark), who claims to have developed a fountain-of-youth elixir from the enzymes of queen wasps. Janice agrees to be Zinthrop's guinea pig, and at first she does indeed look younger. But ultimately, Janice morphs into a half-human, half-wasp who commits multiple murders. You can see how that might affect sales.

In many ways, THE WASP WOMAN is typical '50s grindhouse fare: a silly story, implausible pseudo-science, very few sets, an unlistenable music score, actors we've never heard of, and a ridiculous-looking monster suit. Not to mention gobs of the sexism and misogyny typical of this era. One character, a furniture mover, turns up just long enough to unctuously hit on a secretary before shuffling off to his weekly douche-bag lesson. (The same actor had also turned up in an earlier scene, as an executive at a board meeting.)

What I really liked was that Janice's employees—and Dr. Zinthrop in particular—show genuine concern for her well-being, particularly when Zinthrop realizes that his formula can produce deadly side effects. Alas, the good doctor is hit by a car and suffers brain damage, rendering him unable to tell anyone the news.

This is one of Roger Corman's better films, though that's not setting the bar very high. The acting was OK and the story, dumb as it was, held my interest for the 73 minutes it ran. Unlike other Corman films (such as “Night of the Blood Beast”), I can't really hate THE WASP WOMAN. For what they were doing, and the modest $50,000 budget, it worked reasonably well.

Item: When Zinthrop disappears, Janice hires a detective agency to find him. Though the detectives are searching New York, their car has California plates. And anyone who has ever set foot in Manhattan will immediately recognize the exteriors as not Manhattan. For one thing, there isn't a skyscraper in sight.

Item: When the detectives locate Zinthrop, he is conveniently at the first hospital they check—a building with a hand-painted sign that reads “HOSPITAL.”