Swarmed

Swarmed is a long way from the worst movie I've ever seen, but it was to me still rather lame. The photography and scenery are quite good though, as is the decently spooky music and the acting, Richard Chevolleau especially is a lot of fun. While the characters are very clichéd with not much development to them, they thankfully didn't annoy me as much as I feared they would. Apart from it, Swarmed just doesn't cut it. The special effects are very cheesy and cheap, while the wasps are nowhere near menacing enough for my tastes. The dialogue is constantly awkward and the comical moments(mainly at the banter and the stereotyping of Tiny) feel forced and annoying. On top of that, complete with a predictable ending and a lack of suspenseful atmosphere or a sense of genuine horror the story plods like mad, it does take ages to get going and when it does it's too late and I didn't care anymore. All in all, not terrible but just didn't buzz for me. 4/10 Bethany Cox

This movie handles about a wasp-invasion in a little town called Dundas, Indiana. I'm not sure if the town has a high-school football team, but if they do, they should rename themselves the Dundas Yellow-jackets and adopt a guy in giant wasp suit as their mascot! Just an idea...

"Swarmed!" is a typically made-for-TV killer-insect horror flick from the early 2000s. That doesn't automatically make it terrible, it simply means you must take into account a few standard shortcomings, like clumsy and cheap-looking CGI effects, derivative storylines, barely any (intentional) humor, and pretty poor performances.

A local research institute experiments with a new type of pesticide against yellow-jacket wasps, but it doesn't really work as planned, since the liquid makes the critters even more aggressive and their first sting deadly already. As a matter of course, bottles accidentally get mixed up, and a killer swarm of yellow-jackets heads towards town to partake in the annual BBQ-contest.

There we have the inevitable "Jaws"-copy! The mayor, sponsor and chief of police obviously refuse to cancel the town's big publicity event, and they'll live to regret it! "Swarmed" is a silly and insignificant creature-feature, but fun enough to watch once thanks to a couple of hopelessly idiotic moments. There's a notable sequence in which the mayor's secretary goes after a single wasp with a shotgun, and for some reason the wasps seem to specifically target the "bad people". While hundreds of people are running around and form easy targets, the yellow jackets prefer to kill the sponsor who ingeniously hid himself in a barrel of water. Smart wasps!

Okay, so this is not a great movie, but I have to admit I was engaged through the whole 90 minutes. It was also one of those rare creatures in that it was made for TV and never made it to TV, it went straight to the Movie Channel. You have to be tipped off by the size of the budget when the 'big' confrontation scene should have thousands of extras milling around but you can actually count them- less than 30 by my count. I'm a fan of any mutated creature film: fish, insects, rodents, whatever, so I HAD to watch this one. The special effects were pretty good for the most part but not great. The acting is also not great but less wooden that in all those '50's movies I love like Them and Kronos. There are holes in the plot you could drive a wasp through but without them there wouldn't be a movie. And by 'them' I mean both plot-holes and wasps. I think if you are a fan of mutated creature movies it won't supplant your favorites but because there aren't that many made you have to see it. If you aren't a fan, give it a pass because it doesn't have any interesting sub-plots (it doesn't actually have any sub-plots) to keep you interested.

TV movie about a swarm of genetically enhanced wasps. This was made very much tongue in cheek, with some good dark humour. The acting is pretty bad, but some of the scenes are great in a bad way. It makes 'The Swarm' starring Michael Caine look like an oscar winner. Fun to pass the time but nothing more

Enjoyable easy going watching, saving the community from killer wasps hooray. Nothing very complex or deep, basic plot well executed Good rainy afternoon viewing.