Two word review : utter crap. This Roger Corman helmed tale of a woman who uses a wasp-based serum to rejuvenate herself – no prizes for guessing what the serum’s primary side effect is – is a movie with no redeeming features at all.
From the very start you know you’re in trouble – there it is, up on the screen, the fearsome title “The Wasp Woman!” but what are those insectoid creatures moving around behind the title? Gee, they don’t look like wasps to me, they look like bees!
Yep, poor old Roger Corman isn’t too good at entomology. Not too good with rodents either – at one point in the movie the mad doctor shows the head of a cosmetics company the effectiveness of his youth formula by injecting it into an adult guinea pig which promptly turns into… an adult rat! Precisely what the commercial use would be for a formula that turns your pet guinea peeg into your pet raat is a mystery, until one realizes that we are expected to think that the adult rat is in fact a juvenile guinea pig! Never mind the long tail, nor the fact that the rat stands on its hind feet, something I have never seen our pudgy little friends accomplish, it’s smaller than an adult guinea pig and roughly the same color so it must be a juvenile guinea pig! Of all the stupid things I have seen in low budget movies this is easily one of the most stupid. But maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe our under-resourced director just didn’t have enough money in the budget for yet another one of those fancy, expensive Guinea Pigs so he went to Wal-Mart and bought one of those cheap Chinese Rats!
The acting is atrocious, the dialogue ludicrous, the sets and photography amateurish, the design and execution of the title creature truly pathetic…
… and pretty much nothing happens for the first hour of the movie – and keep in mind this is a 73 minute movie. The only really interesting thing about this disaster is that the titular monstrosity is played by Susan Cabot in her last film performance and that the end to Cabot’s life was even more hideous than the end of her film career – she was bludgeoned to death by a deranged dwarf! Come on, little man! It was a bad movie, but not that bad!
The Verdict? See the poster at the top of this post? Enjoy it – it’s the only halfway decent thing about this celluloid cowpat.