No, this is not an advanced beauty treatment!
In an odd mixture of British quality movie making and American schlock horror, The Deadly Bees (1966) never quite achieves net mediocrity. Vicki is a popular pop-singer who has suffered a nervous breakdown and is sent to isolated Seagull Island for a couple of weeks of quiet. There she finds two bee keepers, neither much caring for the other – and then the bodies start piling up, first her host’s dog, then her host’s detested wife.
But Vicki isn’t another passive female figure. She’s looking, if in proper British form, for a solution to the tragedy, and works with the other bee keeper to discover if her host is to blame. When she’s the target, she figures out a way to survive.
And there’s a twist or two occurs before we find out whodunit.
But, honestly, we don’t really care.
The bees are pleasantly schlocky, while the characters have that quaint British feature of not really caring if they’re sympathetic or not, and that’s a pity – if we’d cared for, or detested more, the host’s wife, then her appalling death may have stirred up the audience more.
Add in a couple of loose ends, such as an agent who seems to be on the verge of intruding on her rest, and then never reappears, or the junior inspector who might have added to the complexity if he’d gone to Seagull Island in response to the anonymous threat of using bees to kill someone.
Perhaps it’s a jab at British bureaucracy.
All in all, a wasted effort.
