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Elvira: Wasp Women
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by Rhino / Wea
Sales Rank: 66634
Price: $9.98
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Doctor Eric Zinthrop is a run of the mill mad scientist of vague and indefinable European descent who loves wasps. He gets fired from one job during the rising action (if you can call it that) and appeals to the aging head of a cosmetics company to fund his research. The vain Janice Starlin (played to the hilt by Susan Cabot) agrees to hire him after watching a (very Cormanesque) demonstration in which Zinthrop turns guinea pigs into rats. Later (offscreen) we are supposed to believe that he turns a huge wild cat into a cute gray kitten. (What kind of cat did it start as with that coloration? A puma?) Miss Starlin is sold, hires him, and begins taking the age-reducing injections herself. <br /> <br />After a plotpoint of extremely dubious credibility, Zinthrop gets hit by a car (apparently) and lapses into a coma. Starlin speeds up her own treatments (she has reduced her age from 40 to around 23 we are told via some talky exposition) but there are side effects. We are not a bit surprised, as it's almost an hour into the film before we finally get to gaze upon the wasp woman, who, of course, is Starlin. <br /> <br />I have seen most of Roger Corman's films, and count myself a fan of his brand of camp, but this is one of the mangiest monster costumes in film history. The wasp does not fly (obviously that was not in the budget) and appears more like a psychopathic black ruffed lemur or a marmoset of some sort with fangs and horns. In other words, it looks absolutely nothing at all like a wasp. This is the sole reason I am giving the film three stars. The rest of the movie rates on the two star level, but the appearance of the wasp woman is delightful to bad movie fans of all types. <br /> <br />The movie is fairly slow, and mainly takes place in one office building, so it really isn't visually stunning, but Susan Cabot does a good job in her role, and truthfully most of the other actors are a bit better than this genre normally sees in roles of this ilk. Please do not miss a cameo role by Bruno VeSota as a drunken security guard with his own comic relief theme song. Bruno is looking pretty rough here, actually, but six years later cleaned up nicely in his tour-de-force performance in Jerry Warren's truly stunning "Wild Wild World of Batwoman." <br /> <br />This is a good, though not terribly exciting, example of the giant mutated monster genre so popular in the middle of the last century. As a bonus, please enjoy the hilarious box art (from the original poster) and compare it to the actual wasp woman. I suspect that you will notice an uncanny and total lack of resemblance. <br /> <br />
Viewer Reviews
I was expecting a typical Roger Corman movie when I caught this on an obscure DirecTV channel.
Imagine, in 1960, a movie about a female CEO who clearly wears all the pants at her successful company, plus she is bright as heck. Now there's a fantasy premise for the year 1960!
As the other reviewers have commented, the special effects are weak, and the monster doesn't even become visible until 80% of the way through the movie.
However, the premise is so unique for the time, I was more than willing to stick with it. And I found the protagonist to be an interesting character. You won't see another sci-fi movie with a strong female CEO as the protagonist.
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Elvira: Wasp Women
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