The Wasp Woman (1959)

Genre: Horror, Mad Scientist, Monster

Source: My Own Collection

Grade: B-

I went into watching this movie with very low expectations, I thought it was going to be another slow moving, cheap monster movie were the monster doesn't even show up till the last 5 mins of the movie. Thankfully though that wasn't the case with The Wasp Women. Instead this movie turned out to be a decent monster movie, and another worthy effort from Roger Corman.
     Of course this is not one of Corman`s top movie`s, but it is very far from being one of his worst. Its story is pretty straight forward, were a once beautiful owner of a cosmetics company is aging and becoming not as beautiful as she once was. So naturally she enlists the help of a washed up old scientist played by Michael Mark, who has found a way to persevere youth through a formula based upon queen bee secretions. Unfortunately though when he try's this on her she transforms into a human wasp that preys upon its victims at night (an unfortunate side effect).
         Though unlike what its poster leads you to believe, the monster isn't a wasp with a human its actual the opposite she has a human body but a wasp head and "hands", to make something like that in the poster would have required a lot of money that they did not have.  When she does kill people its pretty cool and they actually had more blood then I thought they were going to have. But that's not saying a lot cause I didn't think there was going to be any blood. Then there was cast, which was actually very well assembled with the beautiful Susan Cabot as the wasp woman, unfortunately this was to be her last role in a movie. From what I read she went through some abuse in this movie! Of course it was all unintended but still getting hit in the head with a glass bottle, almost suffocating  in her mask when someone put too much liquid smoke on it, and then she even got some skin on her face ripped off when they took the mask off too fast! Oh well despite all that she put in a very good performance. As for everyone else they were pretty good and played all there roles straight.

     Well overall The Wasp Woman is a good little late 50s "mad scientist creates a monster by accident" type movie. One interesting fact I found out after I watched this was one of my favorite directors Jack Hill did a uncredited directing job on this movie, he directed the films prologue were Michael Marks character gets fired from the scientific community and I guess that part was filmed after the movie was released to. Then I guess there's a remake of this that came out in 1995, i`d be curious to check it out except I have my doubts as to how much resemblance it bears to this movie and all the negative things i`ve read on the remake don`t help either. Regardless of all that, this movie is cool movie that I can definitely recommend to Roger Corman fans as well as classic horror movie fans and even if you don`t end up liking it its only 73 mins long so it`s not like you wasted a lot of your time.