Ed’s Note: This review was previously posted in a different version at The Other Films. 

In the 1970s (and into the 1980s), men were having a hard time dealing with feminism. Because men overwhelmingly acted as the gatekeepers to financing media production, most entertainment reflected this struggle in dealing with the new wave of feminism and the classic traditionally gendered roles of men as breadwinner and women as homemaker or sex object. In cinematic representations, feminists were frequently portrayed as purposeless women hellbent on destroying families, unafraid of killing men in order to achieve their goals. Sometimes these feminists killed out of revenge, sometimes they killed as a form of misandry, and sometimes, if they were lucky, the movie would at least reference gendered inequality.

Invasion of the Bee Girls is one of these movies made by men about the evils of feminism, the wiles of womanhood, and the corrupt nature of the sexual revolution. The plot is exploitatively simplistic. Male scientists are dying from congestive heart failure due to sexual exhaustion. Through investigation, a federal investigator discovers that the scientists at the nearby research facility are sexual freaks, engaging in kinky sexuality with a variety of partners. Under normal circumstances, this would be average scientist behavior, but one woman has decided to merge women with bees through radiation for…whatever reason.

One one side of the film, as a movie from 1973, Invasion of the Bee Girls actually may be espousing some radical tenements. One of the scientists has a secret sex room behind his office that has doves or lovebirds (who has birds in their sex room?!), leather accouterments, a fish tank and a bed. That scientist is also a closeted homosexual with a secret lover. But, he’s the exception. All of the other scientists are having after-hours affairs with anything that moves while lying to their spouses about where they are. This rampant sexuality on the men’s side of the movie isn’t necessarily condemned

Of course, it takes two to tango. What director Denis Sanders and writer Nicholas Meyer are hinting at, on the surface, is that women are the seducers, and that they’re out to destroy men. The Bee Girls, always wearing trendy Jackie O glasses to hide their compound eyes, are the new sexually-free women perfectly OK with fucking married unavailable men. These Bee Girls aren’t the helpless recipients of men’s sexual advances of years past, but are the sexual aggressors leading men to their doom. These girls are no ordinary heterosexual women; a normal woman is converted to a Bee Girl through a lesbionic ritual of rampant nudity, breast rubbing, a white frosting covering and bees. The Bee Girl is not just a sexually free woman who wants to fuck men; a Bee Girl is a lesbian who desires to kill men through their sexuality. After the movie ends with the misandrist movement destroyed, the lead federal investigator takes his girlfriend, ignores everything she says, and flings her on the bed as a sex object.

The rub comes from the women killing the men through sexual exhaustion. A lot of these women are scorned lovers or women who have otherwise been hurt by the various chauvinist actions of the men. The men do a lot of hurting by constantly lying to women, treating them like objects, loudly pronouncing the women who refuse sex as “iceburgs” and crowing about the sexual conquests of the others. Smack in the middle of the movie, after the men discover the secret plot, they get their “vengeance” by sexually assaulting an innocent woman; that is, this woman is not a Bee Girl. This brutal sexual assault would lead to gang rape if not for an intervention. Maybe the women actually have just cause for eradicating the world of these corrupt men.

Is Invasion of the Bee Girls truly an anti-feminist screed if it uses all of these terrible male behaviors as reasons for women to become feminists? Is it actually saying that being sexually assaulted is a reason to become a feminist, or is it suggesting that sexual assault is a legitimate form of keeping women in line (ed’s note: sexual assault is NEVER acceptable behavior)? Is Invasion of the Bee Girls presenting the the freaky-deaky misogynist male scientists against the sexually-aggressive feminist bee girls as a way of exposing the double standard of promiscuity in the hope that somebody will read the subtext? Or, is it completely condemning the feminist woman, especially given its celebration of the eradication of sexually-forward women?

At the time, Nicholas Meyer was not happy with the finished product and wanted his name taken off the film for currently unknown reasons (Meyer, write me!). Sci-fi fans know Meyer from the films Time After Time, Star Trek II, IV, and VI, and The Day After. Was Meyer originally sending up the male-dominated society of double standards and almost making the men the villains? It’s still in the movie a bit. Or, was Meyer actually damning the women, but the filmmakers decided to also damn the men as well?

While Invasion of the Bee Girls is even harder to read from 41 years later, it’s a blast of a political document. With a mere 85 minutes, Sanders keeps Bee Girls crackling, with new bizarre events happening with regularity. It’s a zippy, hilarious almost-send-up of the sexploitation genre that had been bubbling at the time. Hell, even the theme is cracked and seems to be the launching pad for the theme of The Sinful Dwarf. If you want something that almost makes you wonder about the politics behind the camera because the politics in front are so cracked, and also want a bit of sexy girls on top of it, Invasion of the Bee Girls may be straight up your alley. But, it was the 1970s, and that sexual assault is still hanging out right in the middle of the movie…

Invasion of the Bee Girls swarms Blu-Ray today thanks to Shout Factory with a new High Definition film transfer.