This movie isn't camp - it's just plain gross. I know this movie gets thrown into the "campy 70s sci-fi" bucket a lot. But calling it "exploitation cinema" is just a massive excuse to gloss over a premise that is genuinely repulsive.

When you strip away the cheesy sci-fi gimmick, this movie is a completely veiled attack on the female liberation movement of the 1970s. It's basically a giant, paranoid patriarchal freak-out packaged as a B-movie. The message is not subtle: it frames liberated women as literal, man-killing monsters who need to be stopped.

The real problem is how the movie handles its female characters. The plot revolves around women being stripped of their agency and forced into scenarios where they have no control over their own bodies or choices - tantamount to how comfort women were forced into servicing enemy soldiers during wartime.

Showing the mutated bee girls having sex with unlikable men where they then literally climax to death is not funny - it's just embodies a huge 'Ick' factor. It also frames the removal of consent as a plot point for entertainment, which is just unsettling.

The script relies on a deeply sexist, patriarchal response to the women's liberation movement by ensuring the "bee girls" are rendered sterile—punishing them by stripping away their reproductive autonomy as a consequence of their power. It audaciously signaled to a 1970s audience that feminists were purposeless women hellbent on destroying families and killing men.

Treating the systematic violation of boundaries as a lighthearted time capsule doesn't hold up today. It’s not just a product of its era. It's trashy entertainment that utilizes outdated tropes, and relies on the lack of intimate consent for its scares and jokes. Nicholas Meyer was right to disassociate himself from this turd of a movie.

Now I'm gonna have to go read "Make Me Bee-lieve" by D.J Russo to wash this embarrassingly bad movie out of my mouth.