TERROR OUT OF THE SKY (1978) * ½

Terror Out of the Sky starts off with an odd dream scene in which Tovah Feldshuh is attacked by killer bees while driving a Beetle.  At first, I thought this was supposed to be some half-assed dream symbolism.  Get it, because she was driving a BEE-tle?  

As it turns out, this is a Made for TV sequel to The Savage Bees.  I didn’t realize it till later because I haven’t seen that movie.  Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have recognized the footage because Gretchen Corbett played Feldshuh’s role in the original.

Anyway, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. works at The Center for Bees.  He mistakenly sends out a killer queen bee and must race against time to find all the shipments before the queens can mate and spawn thousands of killer bees.  He wants Tovah to go along with him, but she’s still skittish because of her rampant bee nightmares.  She gets her pilot boyfriend Dan Haggerty (who wears the same bracelet he wore in Elves) to help fly them around to the spots where the bee boxes have been sent.  Predictably, the last queen mates, and hundreds of bees descend on a baseball game in a small town.

The only part that’s worth a damn is when a guy at The Center for Bees gets a mouthful of bees.  This scene is pretty strong stuff for a Made for TV movie from the ‘70s.  Too bad nothing else in the film comes close to matching it.

The scene where our heroes try to save a bunch of boys from a school bus crawling with killer bees is the worst.  In fact, I think Terror from the Sky challenges Jeepers Creepers 2 for the worst horror sequel featuring a bunch of shirtless boys trapped aboard a school bus.  This rescue sequence is laborious and just goes on and on.  By the way, have you ever noticed how all these Made for TV killer insect movies always have that one longwinded scene of people being evacuated?  What’s with that? 

If director Lee H. (World Gone Wild) Katzin ended things after the bus rescue, it would’ve been okay.  Unfortunately, the movie continues on another twenty agonizing minutes.  It’s here where Zimbalist, Jr. wanders endlessly around in a beekeeper’s outfit walking down corridor after corridor while hundreds of bees crawl all over him.  

The most ridiculous part of the movie though is the fact that a woman could be caught in a love triangle with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and Dan Haggerty.  

AKA:  The Revenge of the Savage Bees.