Matthew Turner | On 10, Apr 2023

Director: Roger Corman
Cast:Susan Cabot, Fred Eisley, Barboura Morris, William Roerick, Michael Mark, Lynn Cartwright, Roger Corman
Certificate: 13+

In the mood for a creature feature? Amazon Prime has a veritable menagerie of monster movies, so we’re working our way through them, one killer beastie at a time. Welcome to Monster Movie Mondays.

Directed by Roger Corman, The Wasp Woman is a blatant cash-in on The Fly (1958), which was released the year before – it even has a character saying “help meeee” in a high voice. It’s by no means as good as that horror classic, but it’s an engagingly cheap-and-cheerful creature feature all the same.

Susan Cabot stars as Janice Starlin, the head of a large, formerly successful cosmetics company whose profits are falling now that Janice herself is visibly ageing. In desperation, she turns to scientist Dr Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark), who believes he has harnessed the secret of rejuvenation by concocting a formula made from wasp enzymes.

After witnessing the formula’s success on various animals – hilariously, rats play “younger” guinea pigs – Janice decides that she’ll be the first human test subject. Miraculously, it works, and soon Janice is looking 20 years younger. There’s just one small problem – the formula also turns her into a bloodthirsty wasp woman who murders various people in the building.

The fabulous posters for The Wasp Woman depict a giant wasp with the head of a beautiful woman, but the actual Wasp Woman is the complete opposite. It’s basically just Cabot wearing an insect head mask and some insect-looking arms, although she does put the effort in, darting about at wasp-like speed and doing a one-woman swarm on her victims.

The effect is heightened by some loud buzzing on the soundtrack whenever she attacks, plus a superb score by Fred Katz. There’s also a delicious note of black comedy, in that somebody eventually defeats the Wasp Woman by opening a window. In a manner of speaking, anyway.

Cabot is excellent as Janice, completely selling the already excellent make-up work by becoming more exuberant in successive scenes. The rest of the supporting cast are fairly bland (Fred Eisley and Barboura Morris play investigative co-workers who suspect something is amiss), although Mark is good value as Zinthrop, most notably in a rather horrible scene where he’s attacked by a cat full of wasp enzymes. Consider that a trigger warning, as things don’t end well for the cat.

The biggest problem with the film is that it takes forever to get to the good bits – the film is only 73 minutes long in total and a full 52 of them have passed before we get the first glimpse of our featured creature. That said, once she appears, the film makes up for lost time, with a surprisingly high body count and an exciting climax.

The film is also interesting for its implicit criticism of the cosmetics industry, and the underlying obsession with youth that drives the plot. There are some amusing diversions along those same lines, with various side characters teasing each other about looking old and needing the serum, reinforcing the idea that it’s not just Janice who thinks that way.

Finally, it should be noted that the version of the film on Amazon Prime Video is the colourised version, although the original black-and-white version (including the prologue footage that was shot specifically for the colourised version) is available on YouTube. Oh, and watch out for Roger Corman’s cameo as the hospital doctor, if you like that sort of thing.

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