Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

Thanks to the talents of the filmmakers involved (especially screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to make both Time After Time and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) Invasion of the Bee Girls is a far better movie than any movie called Invasion of the Bee Girls has any right to be.

So much so that there’s a tendency among critics to describe it as a satire in order to justify the fact that they’re recommending a movie called Invasion of the Bee Girls, when the reality is the film mostly plays its exploitative concept completely straight, with few overt attempts at social commentary.

While I admit it is easy to interpret a film in which a group of sexually alluring women are compelled to engage in a mating ritual that causes their male partners to suffer fatal heart attacks as a sly commentary on the then-growing women’s liberation movement, it actually takes quite a bit of mental trickery to justify that interpretation based solely on the movie’s content. Tonally, Bee Girls never feels tongue-in-cheek, and if it were supposed to, then the attempted rape scene in its middle is more than simply gratuitous, but completely inappropriate as well.

The reality is that Invasion of the Bee Girls is simply a very well-executed version of a kind of film that traditionally sucks, which makes it less a commentary on its own subgenre than the standard by which that subgenre should be judged. Plus, it has tons of nudity. —Allan Mott

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Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011)

Quarantine 2: Terminal is among that rarest breed of direct-to-video sequels: those not only actually good, but better than the original. Whereas 2008’s Quarantine was a faithful remake of 2007’s Spanish horror hit [REC], Quarantine 2 takes off on its own course, while [REC] 2 revisits the exact same territory by staying in the apartment building whose residents have been zombified.

A good chunk of Quarantine 2, however, takes place on a commercial airliner, where one of the passengers has brought infected lab rats from said apartment building as his carry-on. Another passenger gets his finger nipped trying to help fit the damn thing in the overhead compartment, and before long, he’s puking violently and going berserk, headed straight for the cockpit.

One emergency landing later, the remaining passengers and crew disembark into a terminal that’s sealed off from the airport. They’re flat-out stuck, which wouldn’t necessarily be bad if the infected weren’t hiding in the shadows, either. The behind-the-scenes luggage area gives newbie director (and Rollerball remake screenwriter, but we won’t hold that against him now) John Pogue lots of opportunity to turn his set labyrinthian, at which he excels.

As the lead flight attendant, Mercedes Masöhn (Red Sands) is your sub for Jennifer Carpenter, and thank God for that. You won’t miss Carpenter, nor the camcorder concept. Pogue still keeps things claustrophobic without having to resort to that no-longer-novel technique. Quarantine 2 isn’t perfect — some performances could be better — but it’s effective, and more so than its big brother. —Rod Lott

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Evil Bong (2006)

I find pot humor to be the anthesis of funny when it pops up in comedies, so imagine 83 minutes of it. And I do mean imagine, because you shouldn’t waste your time on Charles Band’s Evil Bong, unless you’re 13 years old and just looking for some quick nudity for masturbation purposes. What was Band smoking when he came up with this bargain-basement Full Moon production?

That was rhetorical. Alistair (David Weidoff, looking like Matt Damon with a butt cut) is a college chem major and resident square among a bunch of frat stoner dudes who always say “bro.” According to one of them, the pad they share lacks “a killer bong,” so they order one advertised in High Times that’s “shaped like a woman, bro: tits and a vag.”

When each guy smokes it — only Alistair doesn’t partake — he’s transported to the Club Bong strip club, where the fake-breasted dancers sport carnivorous chests that kill the dudes in real life. (All the movie is set either here — with animated ganja smoke around the edges of the frame — or at their home, which looks like the set of a sitcom threatening to burst into a porno.) Tommy Chong saves the day and runs toy cars up and down said man-made mammaries.

Highlights includes a cheerleader insulting the jive-talking bong (“It looks like an old molden dick. I ain’t suckin’ that shit”), a grandmother type being referred to as a “dusty old vaginal scab,” the phrase “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about” uttered thrice within three minutes. Hey, I didn’t say they were good highlights. You also get cameos from fellow Full Moon characters The Gingerdead Man, Jack-in-the-Box from Demonic Toys, Trancers cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) and more, not to mention an end-credit embedded trailer for Evil Bong II: King Bong. I’ll pass. —Rod Lott

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After the Thin Man (1936)

The sequel to 1934’s The Thin Man features the return of William Powell’s hard-quipping and even harder-drinking detective Nick Charles and his hot, extremely understanding wife, Nora (Myrna Loy). Like in the first movie, Nick spends the entirety of After the Thin Man smashed while still running investigative circles around the police. To be fair, the story does take place at New Year.

This time, the murder is a family affair when one of Nora’s cousins is accused of murdering her no-good, philandering bum of a husband. The death doesn’t occur until about halfway through the movie, however. The first half is all about re-establishing Nick and Nora’s relationship as they move back to San Francisco after their New York adventure in the first movie. Not that that’s at all dull.

No matter how good your own relationship is, Powell and Loy will still make you jealous of theirs. That’s even more remarkable once the movie reveals just how far their individual sides of the tracks are from each other. The Thin Man hinted at it by showing Nick’s getting reacquainted with old crooks he’d put away, but it really comes into focus in the sequel. As Nick and Nora ride home from the train station, she greets people with big hats and monocles; Nick says “hello” to a pickpocket and the guy who delivers his booze.

That makes it all the more fun when their two worlds collide, and Nora’s stuffy aunt has to ask “Nicholas” (as she insists on calling him) to quietly help the family out. Hilarity ensues (especially in a scene where Nick carries a conversation all by himself in a smoking room full of snoring, old codgers), but like The Thin Man, there’s also a great mystery with plenty of diverse suspects, one of whom is a very young Jimmy Stewart as the Nice Guy in love with Nora’s newly widowed cousin. —Michael May

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