Trying to get through school, a teen obsessed with bees grows distraught over living with her step-family and eventually is forced from home by a cruel prank to stay with a mysterious teacher she befriended one day, but the longer she stays there she comes to believe something deadly is happening to her.
This was a highly underwhelming and generally uninteresting effort. When this one works is due pretty much solely to the uneasy setup that had the potential to be somewhat interesting. The work done on the farmhouse that keeps her there, with the bizarre work involving the series of impressive double-entendre referencing what's really going on. As it twists around whether or not the intentions behind the abduction are true or what's really going on, the sense of unease and confusion here is quite enjoyable. While it also tends to rush through the action at the end, it's still somewhat enjoyable to watch play out as it does since there's finally some kinetic activity happening with these campy creatures that give this somewhat goofy enough of an atmosphere to be entertaining. There are a few big issues to be had with this one. The main factor with the film is the utterly dull and drab setup that manages to rely far more on uninteresting family drama than anything resembling a genre effort. Featuring a truly cliched disastrous home-life that borders on the unwatchable with the exploits of the teen step-daughter bullying her mercilessly, the step-mother doing everything in her power to encourage it while the dad is spinless to stand up against it despite his best intentions to protect her, this is mixed together with a barely-evolved bullying setup at school that pegs her as an outcast against her step-sister and her friends. This is all completely expected and not in the slightest interesting or chilling enough to matter. In addition to this setup, the film's second half is a series of weird and illogical decision-making that really dooms this one considerably. Their friendship together is underwritten and barely there, essentially being one meet-up following several failed encounters that border on psychotic, borderline-criminal stalking that never feels genuine or realistic. This in turn makes the retreat to her remote house in the country that seems to slowly evolve into her transforming into some kind of queen bee come off even odder, with the incident looking like a straight-up kidnapping that no one goes to check up on as she disappears in the middle of the night to live with a stranger at a remote house away from everyone else. It's incredibly sketchy and suspect which also ends up furthering the blandness as nothing happens here either. The last flaw here, which is quite bad but isn't nearly as detrimental as the other issues, is the films' wholly cheap and underwhelming effects work featured throughout. While the burn-marks are generally okay, they're the only features that look good here with the transformations being absolutely comical and hysterical funny more than anything, especially with the design as much as the prosthetics utilized. The vampire-like fangs are just absolutely ludicrous a concept since they're a feature not on the actual creature and look just as goofy as the half-human/half-bee hybrid that follows, which when all combined together with the other issues here really hamper the film overall.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.
