Lampooned first by Mystery Science Theater 3000 on this day back in 1998, the 1967 British horror vehicle directed by Freddie Francis, The Deadly Bees, is sort of a low-budget homage, snowclone of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with similar tropes and devices and is based off the above titled detective novel by H. F. Heard. A pop singer (played by Suzanna Leigh) suffering from physical and mental exhaustion after a series of shows is sent off to an island cottage for rest and recuperation and finds herself in the midst of an apicultural arms race with two competing beekeepers claiming to have developed a colony of killer bees that they control variously by pheromones and taped recordings of a moth. Well, I’m off to become Lulu.
