transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] Welcome to Stuff To Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeartRadio.

Speaker 2:
[00:12] Hey, welcome to Weirdhouse Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weirdhouse Cinema, we're going to be talking about the 1959 drive-in sci-fi horror movie, The Wasp Woman, starring Susan Cabot, directed by Roger Corman. It is a tale of beauty, vanity, mortal anxiety and science gone wrong, shot in two weeks for under $50,000. And this one is classic late 50s Corman. It is lean, mean, funny, weird, stupid and smart at the same time. It's barely over 70 minutes runtime in the longest cut. I think there are shorter cuts that are sub 70. I don't know which one you watch.

Speaker 2:
[00:57] I watch the theatrical cut, which is the shorter. I believe we'll get into this later, but I think you watch the TV cut.

Speaker 1:
[01:05] Okay, so I got some stuff you didn't see, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[01:08] Right, right. Namely the intro. So we'll get into some of those differences as we proceed.

Speaker 1:
[01:14] Yeah. I think it's funny that like some of these late 50s Corman movies, it is extremely short and quite brisk in the storytelling and yet still feels like it has significant padding. Like all of the beekeeping footage at the beginning, that feels like they're padding that thing out.

Speaker 2:
[01:33] Yeah. I mean, literally was. Because it's not present in the theatrical.

Speaker 1:
[01:37] Then there are also several subplots in the middle to late stretch of the movie. There's one part where they hire a private detective to determine the fate of a character whose fate we already know. There's not really any suspense there. We've just got like a montage of a PI running around town asking people questions.

Speaker 2:
[01:57] I don't know. I like that one. I like how it helped build up the setting. Yeah. To understand some folks find this movie a bit of a bore, just looking around at reviews online. But I think I really liked it overall. Obviously, the budget is stretched thin. The monster is not well realized, as we'll discuss. But I found its synthetic golden age, Mad Men era New York City rather convincing and attractive. I thought the plot while built on the bones of classic mad science tropes felt a lot more nuanced, and all of the actors do a solid job. More to the point, I liked how this is not a villain picture. We definitely descend into a world of monstrosity and horror, but it's a tragic trajectory taken by characters who were just trying to advance in their careers, and in the case of our main character, hold on to their youth, both extremely relatable motivations that are encouraged by nearly every aspect of American culture back then and today as well.

Speaker 1:
[03:01] You're correct that the movie really doesn't have a villain. Even the mad scientist character in it is not especially mad. I mean, he's doing things that are dangerous, but part of the danger comes from collaborating with someone who is not heeding the levels of caution that he himself advises.

Speaker 2:
[03:20] That's right. Yeah, two, it's the matchmaking here. It's a toxic duo. Yeah, toxic duo for sure. That's a great way of putting it.

Speaker 1:
[03:27] Yeah, but I like this movie also. I think in order to appreciate it, yeah, you have to understand what you're getting with a movie like this. Like these late 50s Corman films, we've talked about several on the show before, they are not highly polished works of art. To compare them to other sci-fi and horror films of the time, they are certainly not deeply thoughtful tales, like The Incredible Shrinking Man, which we've done on the show, or like Godzilla, the original Godzilla. They are also not finely tuned thrill machines, like The Thing from Another World. That is maybe not as thoughtful as a movie like The Incredible Shrinking Man, but it is just a machine, it works. The Corman movies of this era are also not even like the later Corman movies we've done, like his Edgar Allan Poe films, which had more time and money to invest, and Corman could focus on making a more refined and finished product. These late 50s Corman movies to me feel more like a kind of exciting and curious exercise. It's like you're getting to watch the result of teams of clever creative people with a good collective sense of humor about what they're doing, racing through weird little timed puzzles with imperfect but interesting results. It's all like how fast can you write a script about psychic crabs? How fast can you come together with an idea about bees and fear of aging? How fast can you shoot it? What kinds of off-label solutions for special effects are you going to come up with? And then even just in terms of the characters, a lot of times these movies feel like they have significantly improvised character moments. Can we think up something funny for the secretaries to be talking about before the next wasp kill scene?

Speaker 2:
[05:21] Yeah. Everybody's really working to deliver this thing on time and under already limited budget. But they're still doing their best. Nobody's just trying to create slop here. And you get that energy watching the picture.

Speaker 1:
[05:37] It's not slop. In a way, I would say it is... We've talked before on the show about the sensibility of Stanley Kubrick, that perfectionist approach to making films where you have a very locked in creative vision and you might even go to excessive lengths to achieve exactly your vision, to make it perfect. Corman, I think, has the exact opposite sensibility about filmmaking in these early movies. He's going to make a movie and it's not going to be incompetent. It will be a smart, competently executed project, but he's just going to cut a lot of corners to make it come together fast. And it will be in the end, interesting and amusing to see how they get there. And so as a result, you get these movies that at least when I watch them, one of the things I like the most about them is how you can just feel them bristling with this sense of improvisation and craftiness. Like there's a strong first draft feeling to everything. You can notice lots of little mistakes, like sometimes the windows are made out of paper. And so there's just this, how are they going to pull this off kind of feeling that makes movies like The Wasp Woman and movies like Not Of This Earth, which we've also done on the show, interesting and appealing to me.

Speaker 2:
[06:59] Yeah, the first draft of observation is definitely apt. For a film like this too, one of the main things that we're going to complain about with it or point out that is less well-formed, is the way the monster looks. And this is just not the sort of picture where they were ever going to come back and say, everything's working really well except the monster, we're going to reshoot those scenes. No, that's not going to happen. They had like one shot at making the effect look as good as possible and then shooting it as well as possible. And given the limitations, it's fine. We watch it now and we realize, oh man, it could have been better.

Speaker 1:
[07:38] It's funny, it just came up recently on the show. Even Albert Pune was sometimes subject to reshoots, demand for reshoots. But I just don't think there's a lot of that going on with The Wasp Woman. So the basic structure of the plot will not hold any surprises because it is a very familiar type of story. There are tons of movies that have basically this premise and we'll get into more examples and other parallels as we go on. But the general plot outline goes like this. The actress Susan Cabot plays a character named Janice Starlin, who is the founder and chief executive of a successful multimillion-dollar cosmetics company. She is not only in charge of the business, she is I think like a former beauty queen herself, or she's some kind of glamorous looking. So she is also the face of the company appearing in all of their advertisements.

Speaker 2:
[08:33] Yeah. I don't know if there's really a parallel for this, except for maybe the MyPillow guy, right? That's the only thing that comes to mind.

Speaker 1:
[08:39] No, I was trying to think of companies today where CEO is like the celebrity who represents the brand also. There are examples, but they're more kind of disgusting cultural celebrities, not like beauty. I don't know. Actually, I don't know that much about beauty products. Maybe there are companies like this.

Speaker 2:
[09:00] Yeah. I mean, certainly, I guess they're example. Well, I don't even know how those were. I was going to say there are examples where you'll have a celebrity that is pushing a product that is maybe somehow tied up in ownership. But I don't know if you can really compare them to a CEO.

Speaker 1:
[09:12] Yeah. So anyway, so she runs the company. She founded the company and she is the face on all of the billboards. But after many years of success, sales have begun to decline and Starlin has become self-conscious about her appearance. There are actually some interesting wrinkles to how this is presented in the plot that we'll talk about later. But she is now feeling self-conscious about the fact that she is around 40 years old and she is afraid she has lost her youth and her beauty. She desperately wishes she could be young again. Enter another character, our mad scientist, or actually not all that mad, our half mad scientist. He does talk to wasps, I guess. Dr. Zinthrop. He is an eccentric scientist, if not mad, who has spent decades studying bees and wasps. And he tells Starlin that he has an enzyme extracted from wasp queens that can not only stop the aging process, it can actually reverse it, restoring lost youth. And then unable to wait for all of the safety tests to finish, Starlin jumps the line and uses the serum on herself. And at first, the effects are wildly successful as she appears 20 years younger, but whoops, the treatment has some negative side effects and it occasionally turns you into a blood sucking were wasp.

Speaker 2:
[10:30] Yeah. So it's kind of your standard tragedy, horror monster trajectory here.

Speaker 1:
[10:37] Yeah. One thing I wanted to note, there's a line from the trailer that says, a queen of beauty by the day, a lusting queen wasp by night. That's totally wrong. I don't permit a lusting queen wasp. I don't think there are any elements at all of lust in the behavior of Starlin and even when she's in wasp mode, like she's not going after men who she desires in any way. And she doesn't even lure or seduce her victims in a sexually explicit way at all to kill them. She just runs at them with wasp face and then bites their necks.

Speaker 2:
[11:15] Right. And the monster is not even sexy in appearance. So there's no way to even project that on the monster here.

Speaker 1:
[11:22] No, it's a strictly haphazard, violent form of attack that has no elements of sexual attraction or enjoyment on either party's behalf.

Speaker 2:
[11:32] And she's not even a really, she's not a queen of beauty, I guess she's not a beauty queen by day. I guess she is a queen of beauty and she's the CEO of a cosmetics company. But still, they're pushing it here.

Speaker 1:
[11:42] That part's right. She is the executive of a cosmetics company and she uses her own face in the advertising. I think that makes sense.

Speaker 2:
[11:50] But would she call herself a queen of beauty? I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[11:52] I don't know. But yeah, so I thought that's kind of interesting that there is an anxiety there in the marketing. It almost makes it feel like somebody thought after the fact, I wonder if this movie should have had something about sex in it. Like it should have been sexy in some way or been about sexual attraction. And it's really not, though beauty is a major theme.

Speaker 2:
[12:14] Well, it wasn't the first time and wouldn't be the last time that promoters decided to change that on the fly after the fact with the poster and the promotion.

Speaker 1:
[12:22] Let's pretend there's some sex in here.

Speaker 2:
[12:26] I had to see what Michael Weldon had to say about this movie and the Psychotronic film guides. And one of the main things he points out is that this comes out a year after the success of The Fly. So there's a certain amount of, okay, quick, pick another insect and let's put a feminine twist on it. There you go. We're off to the races.

Speaker 1:
[12:43] Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. So this would be The Fly with Vincent Price. I didn't realize that was just the year before. So yeah, and a different insect movie. Kind of like, Halloween was just a big hit. Let's do Friday the 13th.

Speaker 2:
[12:57] Yeah, and all the other holidays. Some of which worked, some of which didn't. Another interesting thing to point out about this film is that it is, I think at some point in its development, it was going to be about a bee woman. Then they changed it and said, actually wasp sounds more aggressive. We like, it sounds more evil, less nurturing somehow, no connection to honey. But still, there's a whole lot in the plot where you can clearly see that, okay, this was about bees. The bowens. Yeah. Including the whole business with beginning and ending the film with bees. So I urge viewers of this film, try not to be too much of a stickler regarding just basic biology, but the difference between one animal and the next. It's not going to hold up. You're going to have to let that go to enjoy this movie.

Speaker 1:
[13:47] It is totally hopeless. In fact, there are even parts where the character is looking at wasps and then the camera shows you their point of view and it's just bees.

Speaker 2:
[13:56] Yeah. Now, this film certainly became a favorite for a lot of folks and developed quite a following and has also been remade at least twice and possibly a third time. I'm very excited about that. But first, this came out in 59 as we've been discussing. In 1988, there was what is largely considered, if not a remake, then something was heavily based on The Wasp Woman and clearly inspired by it. That's 1988's Rejuvenatrix, a film by Bryan Thompson Jones. It also features Euro-horror actress Jessica Dublin. I've not seen it, but I've been familiar with it for a while. I've seen images from it and some clips. I think the vibe is roughly trauma-adjacent New Jersey body horror, which may be shades of 85's Re-Animator. I think the title alone is a reference to that. Brian Thompson Jones had worked on TV's Tales From The Dark Side and he'd gone to work on another anthology series, Monsters. It has really grotesque makeup effects from Ed French, Dan Fry and Bruce Fault and Fuller, all mainstays of the industry. But basically similar situation, but with really gross monster effects. I would argue maybe they're too gross. Then in 95, you had just a straight up remake, The Wasp Woman, produced by Corman, directed by chopping models Jim Wynarski, starring Jennifer Rubin and with both Garrett Graham and Fred Olin Ray in the cast. So you know this one's classy. Oh, I included. I love both of those guys, but if they're involved, you have some suspicions. I included an image for you here, Joe, of the monster. A lot more work went into this monster, but I think you might note the busty corset look for the creature's exoskeleton here.

Speaker 1:
[15:59] It's a wasp with cleavage, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:01] Yeah. So I also haven't seen this one, but yeah, I doubt that it's going to be as thoughtful as the original.

Speaker 1:
[16:10] I watched part of this because I just found it online. I was like, well, what is this like? I mean, my eyes could not take it. I'm sorry, Jim Wynorski. I mean, I've liked some of your work, but it has that hideous 90s made for TV look. That's just like everything is gleaming in a way that's very unpleasant, and the colors feel desaturated and nasty. It's got a cellophane kind of look. I couldn't deal with it.

Speaker 2:
[16:38] It's a rough era for film, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[16:40] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:41] But hey, I have my hopes up because as you and I were discussing just the other day, the news about this came out in December, but I somehow missed it initially. But there is a new remake in some level of pre-production, and this was reported in Variety. It is set to star, it's a remake of The Wasp Woman, set to star Amy Sedaris and her long-time collaborator, Paul Dinello. He's going to write and direct it. They, of course, both worked on Exit 57, Strangers with Candy and At Home with Amy Sedaris. I'm really excited for this one and hope that it comes to fruition. Because watching the original film, the original Wasp Woman, I just kept noticing all the different ways that it really fits their comedic styling.

Speaker 1:
[17:27] Oh, what do you mean?

Speaker 2:
[17:28] Well, for starters, Amy Sedaris has, of course, obviously a knack for playing. You can really go broad with a portrayal of characters that, I don't know if she's ever played a monster before, but she's played a lot of grotesque, or at least mildly grotesque characters before. I really want to see what she's like in full monster mode. But then also, there are a lot of great moments on At Home with Amy Sedaris where she's playing up this at least mildly toxic or messy boss character, which I think there's a lot to play with in this scenario. Because that's there to a certain extent in the original script here, but I'm presuming that they are going to position this as a comedy, though who knows? They could go in entirely different direction, but I assume it's going to be a comedy, and I think the bones there are there for some tremendous comedic styling.

Speaker 1:
[18:22] I think there is great comedy potential, especially in letting the main character be less tragic and sympathetic and more buffoonish. In this movie, you really feel bad for Janice Starlin, but I can imagine now her being a toxic CEO who's doing the same kinds of things.

Speaker 2:
[18:42] I suspect that might be where they're going to lean into. At any rate, fingers crossed that this one comes together. I should also point out that I'm not the only or the first person to mention this, but 2024's The Substance also strikes a similar note, deals with some similar themes of struggles between, regarding aging, the female body, and so forth. I think there are a lot of films that you can lump into this larger subgenre. You can also throw in films like 1960's The Leech Woman, for example, as being a great example of this.

Speaker 1:
[19:20] Also about a rejuvenation serum or science fiction treatment for regaining lost youth and lost beauty that results in disaster. Tons of stories like this, actually. I was trying to figure out how far back does this go, because I was thinking many other examples. I was even thinking, isn't there a version? I know there are a lot of different stories of this character, but the Batman villain Clayface, I was remembering from when I was a kid, I think there's one version of that character who's like an actor who has lost his looks in some way, and he takes an experimental treatment in order to get his face back, to get his looks back, but it turns out that he causes more problems than it solves.

Speaker 2:
[20:05] Oh, yeah. I never read the comics, the Batman comics, but that story line was done fantastically well in the old Batman animated series.

Speaker 1:
[20:17] That's what I'm thinking of. I was watching the Batman animated series on TV when I was a kid. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] Yeah. So good.

Speaker 1:
[20:22] But an early version of the Wasp Woman type tragic rejuvenation storyline can actually be found in the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1837 short story, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment. Have you ever read this?

Speaker 2:
[20:38] No, I don't know the story.

Speaker 1:
[20:39] So it goes like this. Four aging friends are invited to the home of an old scientist named Dr. Heidegger, and their host informs them that he has secured quantities of miracle water from the Fountain of Youth, which can restore those in old age to the prime of their lives. And he first demonstrates on a withered rose, restoring it to full bloom. And then the guests drink the water and they discover it does work. They are given back their youth and their vigor. But there's a twist. People always think, if I could go back and live my life again with the wisdom that I have now, that people even talk about that in The Wasp Woman. They say the same things. If I could go back and do it over again, now I would know. Now I would know what to do. But Heidegger's friends in the story, as soon as they are once again young in the flesh, they start to behave in the same old foolish ways that they once did. And they act out the same sins and character flaws that they each displayed when they were originally young. So in the story, there are also hints. For example, there's like a glimpse in a mirror where the characters actually still look old. There are hints that somehow the restoration of youth is some kind of illusion. But they eventually end up accidentally smashing the jar of miracle water. And then Dr. Heidegger declares that even if he could drink it, he wouldn't after seeing what had happened to them. And so a little bit different here because there's no transformation into a monster. It's not like the substance or the wasp woman where you take it and it gives you the youth back, but you also have, you know, some kind of monstrous altered form. There is still a grim twist. And I like the suggestion that maybe the wisdom that comes with old age is not actually wisdom that you could take with you back into a young and beautiful body. Maybe some of the things that we think of as wisdom and experience and temperance, the ideas of wisdom and, you know, cognitive qualities we associate with the loss of youth and vigor. Maybe some of those things actually depend on the aging and enfeeblement of the body. So it's not just a cruel irony of, I wish I knew then what I know now. It's like, what if you could be young and strong and beautiful like you were then, you would actually stop knowing what you know now. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I think it's a very interesting idea.

Speaker 2:
[23:21] Interesting. One of the things that I really liked about the substance is this idea about there being this connection between your past self and your current self, like your young self and your old self, and how they have to be in balance with each other, and how all the horror in this particular movie, the substance occurs out of imbalance between the two, and about these two forces being not connected, but in opposition to each other. I really like that. Overall, I like the substance a lot. I keep having conversations with people about whether the movie should have ended before all the really extreme body horror happened. I don't know. I love body horror sometimes, but I've heard some strong arguments on both sides regarding that film.

Speaker 1:
[24:12] Yeah. I also don't know exactly what I think about the climax. I guess I had mixed feelings about it. But overall, I really liked that movie. Speaking of, another movie that has this quality of rejuvenation with a monstrous twist is a movie many people compared the substance to, which is Death Becomes Her.

Speaker 2:
[24:31] That's a good one. I've long times have seen that one, but I need to see it.

Speaker 1:
[24:34] More of a comedy.

Speaker 2:
[24:35] Yeah. Now a musical, I believe. There's some Broadway treatment of it. I'm not sure if it's Broadway or off-Broadway, but it exists.

Speaker 1:
[24:43] So, yeah, very, very common type of story we're dealing with here. And something that was by no means new when The Wasp Woman was written. There have been many versions of this before and many after. It's a type of story we do not get tired of, probably just because it's the sort of thing that is truly on people's minds all the time. I mean, we all, I'm sure probably more than half of people pretty frequently find themselves after a certain age, at least thinking like, man, if only I could be younger again, I would do things differently.

Speaker 2:
[25:16] Yeah. If you're not thinking of it already, don't worry, somebody will advertise a product to you that will make you think that.

Speaker 1:
[25:21] Yeah. At least you can pretend to be young again. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:33] All right. Some quick stats about this movie and past Weirdhouse Cinema selections, just because I always find this fun. This is our 24th film from the 1950s. It is our sixth film directed by Roger Corman, seventh if you count any direction he did on 1980s Battle Beyond The Stars. Overall, it is our 243rd film selection for Weirdhouse Cinema.

Speaker 1:
[25:55] Were we just talking about feeling old?

Speaker 2:
[25:59] I mean, just think of how many movies we haven't watched. So it's just a drop in the pond here.

Speaker 1:
[26:08] Well, no, actually, I'm like Captain Kirk at the end of Wrath of Khan. I feel young.

Speaker 2:
[26:13] All right. Elevator pitch for this one. I did come up with one that I liked. It's, are you ovipositive? You want to be young again?

Speaker 1:
[26:20] Yes, ovipositor. Nice.

Speaker 2:
[26:24] So yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts here.

Speaker 1:
[26:26] I can't compete. I'm an uncle, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:30] All right. Well, if you would like to watch The Wasp Woman before proceeding, this is an easy one to find. I ran across multiple streams of it. Shout Factory put out a blu-ray of the film. I streamed it through the Shout Factory channel on one of the apps. But I did see multiple versions. The original was shot in black and white. There is a colorized version out there. Also, as we'll be discussing, there's the shorter theatrical cut, and then there's the slightly longer cut that was made for television, that has some additional scenes that were directed by Jack Hill, who we haven't really talked about in the show before. He's the guy who directed Spider Baby. That's probably his most well-known film. But the director of this film is, of course, Roger Corman, director and producer, lived 1926 through 2024. We've covered The King of Cult plenty of times before, so let's just situate this particular film within his filmography. This one came out in 59. Depending on how you're counting his pictures, this would be, I think, roughly Corman's 22nd directorial credit.

Speaker 1:
[27:35] Was it the year 1957 that we had previously called his Anis Mirabilis? That's the one where he did like eight movies in one year.

Speaker 2:
[27:42] I think so, yeah. Again, this is the young years. This is early Corman. The year prior to this film coming out, 58, he directed four pictures. War of the Satellites, Machine Gun Kelly, Teenage Caveman and She Gods of Shark Reef. In 59, the Wasp Woman was one of three that he did, sandwiched between the crime drama I Mobster and the horror comedy Bucket of Blood previously covered on Weirdhouse Cinema. The following year, 1960, would see the release of Corman's Ski Troop Attack, Little Shop of Hars, House of Usher, previously covered on Weirdhouse Cinema and Last Woman on Earth.

Speaker 1:
[28:27] Wow, only one year between Wasp Woman and House of Usher. That's hard to believe because House of Usher really does feel like a different era of Corman.

Speaker 2:
[28:37] Yeah. I guess that's the thing, is we're about to transition into a new decade of film and into a new era of Roger Corman's filmography.

Speaker 1:
[28:46] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[28:46] Roger and his brother, Gene, founded the production and distribution company, the Film Group in 59 and Wasp Woman was Corman's first directorial effort for that. This company ran until I think around 1968, but generally ran out of steam when Gene left for 20th Century Fox in 63.

Speaker 1:
[29:03] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[29:04] Let's see. We should mention there is a director's cameo that I missed when I actually watched the film, but apparently-

Speaker 1:
[29:09] I missed it too. Didn't see it.

Speaker 2:
[29:11] Yeah. Corman shows up as a doctor at the hospital. But if I watch it again, I'll look out for it.

Speaker 1:
[29:18] So I wanted to add some notes from a book entry I was reading on Wasp Woman, from a book by Bryan Sen called Twice the Thrills, Twice the Chills, Horror and Science Fiction Double Features, 1955 to 1974. This book was published by McFarland, 2019. Like a lot of the Corman movies from this era, The Wasp Woman played as part of a double feature. In this case, with a movie called Beast from Haunted Cave, a film that was produced by belonged to Roger Corman's brother, Gene. This one was about a bunch of bank robbers who are attacked by a giant spider-like thing, a she-lob in a cave in South Dakota. Sounds interesting. I haven't seen this one. But this one actually, I should note, was written by Charles B. Griffith, who wrote a lot of the great Corman scripts from this era, wrote Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of this Earth and stuff. Some people say that this is a better written film than some of the other Corman movies from this era.

Speaker 2:
[30:21] I love the poster for this one. The poster is almost scandalous with this big squid, spider monster, and a lady. This is not a photo, it's art, of a lady with her shirt almost off. Then it says, screaming young girl sucked into a labyrinth of horror by a blood-starved ghoul from hell. Could this film possibly deliver on all of that?

Speaker 1:
[30:47] No. In fact, it conspicuously does not. It is not what is advertised. The monster in the movie does not really look like the monster on the poster. Instead, it's just a mask covered in cobwebs.

Speaker 2:
[31:02] Looks pretty creepy in the image you provided here, but it's not the monster from that scandalous poster.

Speaker 1:
[31:07] So context on what was happening in the Corman business world at this time, I mentioned the founding of this new distribution group. So in 1959, Roger Corman and his brother Gene, they founded their own distribution company called Film Group. I think they were unhappy with some of their financial relationships with other distributors like American International Pictures. And that book by Brian Sen that I mentioned quotes an interview with Gene Corman where he talks about the logic behind this move. Gene says, Roger and I made so many films and the distributors were legion. If they stayed in business, there was always a question of creative bookkeeping. If they didn't stay in business, there was the problem of trying to find out where the bank accounts were. Necessity was the mother of invention. We decided if we were unhappy with the distributors that it was a logical thing. If we had the product, why not have the distribution? Then we would know where the money was, because we would be the bookkeepers. So we did this. At that time, I knew a lot of the heads of theater chains, so I could pick up a telephone book. So the Corman machine is becoming ever more powerful. It's like they've been making the movies and now they're like, okay, we know who these theater owners are. We can contact them directly. We can form the distribution network. So early films distributed by their new company were a double feature of movies in a juvenile delinquent genre called High School Big Shot and T-Bird Gang.

Speaker 2:
[32:42] I think I've seen High School Big Shot.

Speaker 1:
[32:43] Okay. I haven't seen either one. Is it delinquent? Is it positively delinquent? Yeah. Then there were some horror double features. We had Last Woman on Earth and Little Shop of Horrors. Those are Corman directed movies, Roger directed movies. The Devil's Partner and Creature from the Haunted Sea, and then also The Wasp Woman and Beast from Haunted Cave. We get this venomous double bill distributed by the filmmakers themselves, one directed by Roger and the other directed by a guy named Monty Hellman, but produced by Gene.

Speaker 2:
[33:17] All right. Double feature here. Did The Wasp Woman air first? That was the first one?

Speaker 1:
[33:23] Oh, I don't actually know. I don't recall.

Speaker 2:
[33:25] Yeah. Sometimes we've discussed these double hitters, we'll switch them around for one reason or the other.

Speaker 1:
[33:29] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[33:30] All right. The screenplay for this film for The Wasp Woman was written by Leo Gordon who lived 1922 through 2000, American character actor and screenwriter who in front of the camera often played burly tough guys and appeared in such films as 63's The Haunted Palace. His writing credits include the Corman film's Attack of the Giant Leaches from 59, Tower of London from 62, and The Terror from 63.

Speaker 1:
[33:58] My understanding is Leo Gordon was in a lot of cowboy movies.

Speaker 2:
[34:01] Yeah, definitely. I was looking through his filmography and there's a lot of cowboy stuff in there. A lot of stuff that is, until we get a big cowboy resurgence, is maybe a little bit lost. Now, he wrote the screenplay, but it's from a story by Kinta Zertucci, born 1931, and she worked in various capacities on Corman pictures, including location supervisor, background actor, producer's assistant, production secretary, and script supervisor. She also served as EP on the non-Corman 1960 film The Wild Ride, which starred Jack Nicholson. At the time of The Wasp Woman, she was married to Daniel Holler, who also worked as an art director on this film, for example, and production designer for Corman. He would go on to direct the notable early Lovecraft film adaptations Die Monster Die in 1965 and The Dunwich Horror in 1970, which we've previously discussed on the show.

Speaker 1:
[35:04] Oh, yeah. With Dean Stockwell.

Speaker 2:
[35:07] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I really love that one. Groovy, groovy Lovecraftian horror, good stuff. All right. Now, getting into the cast, we've mentioned already the character Janice Starlin, and we've mentioned that she's played by Susan Cabot, who lived 1927 through 1986. American actress, musician, and at one point, children's book illustrator with film credits going back to 47. So her career saw a long stretch of Westerns and Arabian night movies for Universal, and then she ends up leaving Universal, and Corman is able to hire her for the rock and roll nightclub film Carnival Rock in 57. At this point, she appears in, let's see, Corman's Sorority Girl, The Saga of the Viking Women, and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, movie with the longest title I think of any of the Corman films, that from the same year.

Speaker 1:
[36:01] Feels like a marketing experiment.

Speaker 2:
[36:03] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[36:03] Like they were trying, will people go to a movie because it has a longer title?

Speaker 2:
[36:07] Yeah, kind of like the outrageous, what does the incredibly strange creatures have stopped living and became mixed up zombies?

Speaker 1:
[36:12] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[36:12] Yeah. I remember it.

Speaker 1:
[36:14] Ray Dennis.

Speaker 2:
[36:14] Because it's long.

Speaker 1:
[36:17] Oh, that movie's got some of the best mystery science theater riffs.

Speaker 2:
[36:20] It does. It was a good riff of it.

Speaker 1:
[36:22] Knife delivery.

Speaker 2:
[36:23] Yeah. Did you say Reagan's in it?

Speaker 1:
[36:27] No, Ray Dennis Steckler.

Speaker 2:
[36:29] Oh, Ray. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1:
[36:31] I said Ray Dennis.

Speaker 2:
[36:32] Ray Dennis. I was going to say Reagan is in it. And I was like, well, I don't know. Maybe he is in it.

Speaker 1:
[36:37] That would be funny. Yeah. Shortly before his presidency.

Speaker 2:
[36:43] Let's see. Anyway, back to Susan Cabot. She was in Machine Gun Kelly in 58 alongside Charles Bronson. And she did some westerns during her Corman years, Wasp was her last film for Corman. And it's sometimes cited as her final film role. After 59, she only ever acted, I think one more time for screener TV in the 1970 TV series Bracken's World. She also apparently continued to do a little off-Broadway theater during the 1960s.

Speaker 1:
[37:12] I had read clearly that it was her last film role. Is there another movie you were thinking of or?

Speaker 2:
[37:17] Well, it just depends on how you're ranking them and listing them. For instance, on IMDb, the 1959 movie Surrender Hell is listed after Wasp Woman. Sometimes it depends on how you're exactly stacking them.

Speaker 1:
[37:31] Okay. But it is commonly like in her biographies, people often cite Wasp Woman as her last film appearance.

Speaker 2:
[37:38] Yeah. Certainly the last film she was in that had any kind of sticking power.

Speaker 1:
[37:44] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[37:45] I have to say, I think she's great in this. I think she really delivers on the key central performance that the whole picture depends on. If the actor playing this role doesn't bring it, nothing else really counts. Again, she's not a clear-cut villain. This film doesn't really have a typical villain character. She's not depicted early on certainly as any kind of ruthless CEO or anything. She just unwittingly crosses a line that takes her on this increasingly dark and destructive path, and I think Cabot plays that really well.

Speaker 1:
[38:19] Yeah. Her behavior becomes unhinged later in the film, but that is shown as being out of desperation, not because there's something wrong with her personality or character.

Speaker 2:
[38:30] Yeah. Now, it is interesting. You have some great notes in our outline about this. Certainly, her transformation into monster is not great, but she also has to do some other sorts of transformations because she's initially depicted as being a woman in her late 30s or around 40, early 40s, somewhere in there. But then she is going to transform into a woman in her 20s. And she was, I believe, 32 years old at the time of this movie's filming.

Speaker 1:
[38:58] That's right. So yeah. So she's playing a character who's supposed to look at various times 10 years older or 10 years younger than the actress actually was. So Cabot used a number of tactics. I think some of what she came up with herself to try to accomplish this. Like in the earlier scenes in the movie where she's supposed to look older. One thing that I appreciate about it is they did use some makeup, but not a lot. So it's not like they're doing obvious, overwhelming, make me look older makeup, like fake wrinkles or anything. We don't have any of that. There are some kind of dark circles under her eyes, making her look weary.

Speaker 2:
[39:38] There's also the classic, I take my glasses off and now I'm hot.

Speaker 1:
[39:43] In the early film, she wears these odd rectangular glasses that just, I don't know if they make her look older, they just make her look very strange.

Speaker 2:
[39:51] Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just a way to differentiate. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[39:56] But she also was mentioned in one of the books that I was reading, that she styled her hair in a way that she thought would read as older, like in the early scenes, she's got a very tight, a very tight, almost puritan looking haircut, or not haircut, a hairstyle where it's very pinned up tightly. She wore high collars thinking that would make her look older. It does at least make her look more old fashioned. But then once she takes the wasp juice, she lets her hair down a little bit, it's still up, but not as tight as it was, and she dresses very differently, takes the glasses off, takes off the tired-looking makeup. But it's also very much there in the performance. Cabot says that in the scenes where she's supposed to look older, she would move more slowly and deliberately, and then after she takes the wasp juice, she starts to move more quickly and appears full of joy.

Speaker 2:
[40:52] Yeah. So I really love this. Again, I wish they'd taken this approach to the monster transformation as well, done something that was maybe a little bit more minimal, and leaned more heavily on her performance and her facial expression, maybe with some sort of minimal ghoul makeup or something.

Speaker 1:
[41:12] I feel like the dynamic between us is more often the other way. I feel kind of soft on this monster design. It's not like it's very elaborate. It is basically just some weird eyes and some weird teeth, but at least in the black and white, I can see it not working very well in color, and I didn't try to watch the colorized version of this movie. But in the original black and white, I kind of appreciated the wasp design. It's one of those that works kind of well in the dark.

Speaker 2:
[41:42] They knew what they had here or what they didn't have. So they do a pretty good job for most of the film when the monster is on screen, just showing very little of it and making sure the lighting is giving it as much assistance as possible.

Speaker 1:
[41:58] But there is some of the performance aspect in the wasp transformation scenes also, like in that book by Bryan Sen that I was reading. It quotes an interview with Cabot where she's explaining her performance in the monster scenes. And she talks about how she had to think through this because she's like, I'm five foot two and I have to be attacking people who are like more than a foot taller than me in a convincing way. And so she says, quote, The only way I felt I could convincingly down a bigger person was through swiftness by coming at them fast, like a bolt of lightning and staying right on target. It worked. And I think she's sort of right. I've read some contemporary reviews of the film that say it looks comical when she is attacking the people who are bigger than her. But I don't know that it always looks comical.

Speaker 2:
[42:51] I didn't really get that at all. Yeah, I think maybe the speed worked. Essentially, the Peter Lorry approach. If you think back to the face behind the mask, where he has to rough up a dude that feels like three feet taller than him. And I was like, how's he going to pull this off? How's he going to make this look believable? And he basically like speed and viciousness and you buy it.

Speaker 1:
[43:11] Yeah. And she, of course, in these scenes, that's her, that's Susan Cabot in the wasp makeup doing the attacks. And to quote the Brian Sin book, quote, doing all of her stunts, quote, including spitting out chocolate syrup upon the necks of her victims as she pretended to bite them.

Speaker 2:
[43:28] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[43:29] I love that. So they like, I guess, squirt the chocolate syrup in the mouth before the take. She runs in nibble, nibble.

Speaker 2:
[43:37] Classic.

Speaker 1:
[43:39] The book also, that Bryan's in book, quotes a publicity article about Wasp Woman at the time of its release, which begins with the words, beautiful and noted Susan Cabot. What does that mean, noted?

Speaker 2:
[43:54] Seems like a word's missing there.

Speaker 1:
[43:56] Noted, you know, like you've heard of her. Maybe that's what it means. Beautiful and noted Susan Cabot, frequently seen in the company of King Hussein in Hollywood and New York, is one of the most popular and lovely of the young leading women. Formerly under contract to Universal International, where she played opposite such stars as Rock Hudson, Jeff Chandler, Tony Curtis and Joel McCray, Susan is making her debut in the independent production as star of The Wasp Woman. So, at least a good bit of the film's marketing was very Susan Cabot forward. It's not just this is a killer insect movie, it's this is a Susan Cabot movie. I think there's some Wasp stuff in there somewhere. As you said earlier, this is usually credited as her final film. When asked later about her retirement from acting, after having done a bunch of movies with Roger Corman at this point, I mean, again, she was in War of the Satellites, in the Viking Women and the Sea Serpent movie, and all that. She replied, I mean, how many Wasp Woman can you do?

Speaker 2:
[45:02] I mean, clearly, at least two in counting. That's what the answer seems to be. So yeah, I absolutely agree. This is very much her picture, but we have some other interesting actors in the show as well, playing some necessary side characters that are a lot of fun. So starting with Billy Lane, the character Billy Lane here. This is a member of her team. Most of the major characters are people who work for her corporation.

Speaker 1:
[45:32] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[45:33] So Billy is played by Anthony Isley, who lived 1925 through 2003, actor of stage screen in TV, who was a regular on the TV series Hawaiian Eye from 59 through 62, and appeared in Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss in 64. But he also has just a lot of low budget genre cinema titles in his filmography, like The Mighty Gorga, The Witchmaker, The Money, and The Curse of the Jackals. All these were like 69. Then Al Adamsons, Dracula vs. Frankenstein in 71, and Monstroid in 1980. Outside of monster movies and low budget sci-fi fare, he was also in the 1966 Elvis picture, Frankie and Johnny.

Speaker 1:
[46:20] You didn't even mention the Navy vs. the Night Monster is the one where the Navy has to fight killer trees.

Speaker 2:
[46:26] Oh, yeah. Sign me up.

Speaker 1:
[46:29] So I was reading about Isley's performance in The Wasp Woman in a different book than the one I was just talking about. A book by the horror historian Tom Weaver, who has come up on Weirdhouse a lot. He does a lot of great interviews with actors from old B-movies and stuff. This book is called Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, a mutant melding of two volumes of classic interviews. This book came out in 2000. This book has an extensive interview with Anthony Isley about being in a lot of these movies. But one thing that's talked about in this book is Isley says he ended up taking drama courses in college not because he really loved the stage or had aspirations to be a great actor, but because he thought they would be easy A's. He's like, that's how I can get through college. But he stuck with it and then sometime later, he was the star of Hawaiian Eye, TV's Hawaiian Eye. Some reviews at the start, I actually had different reactions to this character on my two viewings. I found myself really disliking this character on first viewing and then being a little softer on him second viewing. But some reviews at the time singled out Anthony Isley and his character in The Wasp Woman for praise, saying like, now this is a really likable leading man. And I did not exactly understand this because he's not exactly a leading man. He's kind of a secondary character, though he fills the role. He's like the main man in the movie that does anything good. And this is no offense to Isley as an actor, but I found the character to be a little bit skeezy and grating, but I thought maybe he was sort of supposed to be like, I don't think you're supposed to hate him. And he's certainly not positioned as a villain, but he just reads as a kind of undependable ally to who I thought was actually the most sympathetic character, the Secretary Mary, played by Barbara Morris. Billy Lane comes off as like he's basically a good guy, but he's a libidinous and sort of insincere business creature.

Speaker 2:
[48:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[48:35] And when he is needed most, he comes through, but his attempts to help are sometimes kind of half-hearted.

Speaker 2:
[48:42] Yeah. And when we're first introduced to him, as we'll discuss, I didn't know how he was exactly being positioned. I was like, is this guy being a creep? Is he like trying, doing a power play here in the meeting? Like what's going on?

Speaker 1:
[48:55] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:56] So yeah, I agree. I didn't feel like he was the likable heart of the movie, even if he is the character that is most like a leading man, an action-oriented leading man character.

Speaker 1:
[49:08] Yeah. So anyway, more from this interview with Tom Weaver about working with Roger Corman on this movie, Isley says, quote, This reveals some lack of depth in me, I suppose, but I thought it was fun, a hell of a lot of fun, because he worked like a house of fire and I like to work fast. On the stage, I had spent eight years playing four parts. I'd had a great deal of luck in being in hit plays that consumed a lot of time. But after that period was over, I found it much more enjoyable to learn something, do it, forget it and go on. So he says he really enjoyed whipping through this picture with Corman at this incredible rate. He talks about crazy filmmaking tricks that Corman used on set, stuff that Isley had never seen before in his television work or on other movies. One example is that Corman would have a bunch of different scenes in the movie that were not consecutive to each other, but they would be shot in the same location, and Corman would set up a camera angle on that location, and then they do every scene in the movie that used that location all in a row, and have the actors changing costumes in between the takes. It's like, here's this scene, okay, change, okay, now we're shooting the other one and all that. Then set up another camera angle, okay, now we're going to do every scene in the movie that happens in this room, all back to back.

Speaker 2:
[50:32] Yeah, this is like in our episode on The Last Temptation of Christ, where we mentioned Martin Scorsese, like pointing out the Corman way of filming being highly useful when you're dealing with budgetary constraints or other limitations on a production.

Speaker 1:
[50:49] So Isley says that his memory of working with Susan Cabot was that he thought she was not very happy about the movie and that she seemed irritated with Corman during filming. I don't know. I mean, she'd made a bunch of movies with him at this point. Maybe there's only so much Roger you can take. But at the same time, Cabot had positive things to say about working on this movie after the fact, like in the other interview I was talking about. She says she was proud of the movie and enjoyed working on it. So I don't know. But also Isley says he was personally very gung-ho on set, and he's trying to be game for everything. Yes, ending with Roger and offering to do semi-dangerous, semi-stunts, including one story where he's supposed to break through glass to get through a door to get into a room. You might remember this toward the end of the movie.

Speaker 2:
[51:42] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[51:43] Well, they didn't have a budget for candy glass, so there was real glass there and he's like, what the hell, I'll do it. So he kicked through actual glass. But then after they shot that scene, they had to shoot more scenes in that room with the door there, and the glass was broken and they couldn't afford to, or didn't have time or money to get it fixed. So they just put paper over the part of the door where the glass was. He talks about how when people would open and close the door in the scenes, you can see the glass, which is actually just paper ballooning back and forth. Yeah, he compares it to the jib on a sailboat.

Speaker 2:
[52:22] Well, I'm glad nobody was hurt because I've heard horror stories about people punching through or kicking through glass or they hit the wrong glass. Instead of getting the gimmick glass, they hit real glass and they're cut to ribbons or they break something. Lady Terminator is an example of that where their star was sidelined for a while because they did a stunt with real glass.

Speaker 1:
[52:45] I want to say to filmmakers out there who may be listening, this story is fun but I don't say this to glamorize the style of filmmaking where you have actors doing stuff like this. I appreciate the zeal to make a movie but it's not worth it. There's no reason people need to get injured on set just to make a shot work. You can figure out a way to do it without people getting hurt.

Speaker 2:
[53:09] That's what the CGI is for. All right. Let's move on to some of the other cast members. We mentioned Mary already, played by Barbara Morris. She lived in 1932 through 1975. She appeared in several Corman films beginning in 57 with a trio that included Rock All Night. She's also in 58's Teenage Caveman, 59's Bucket of Blood, in which she plays Carla, the only beatnik who's nice to Dick Miller's character, who of course turns out to be a murderer. It's a comedy. It's super fun if anyone out there hasn't seen it. Later on, she'd appear in Corman's 1967 LSD movie, The Trip, and 1970's The Dunwich Horror, one of her final roles.

Speaker 1:
[53:59] I found her character very likable here. I think if this movie were made today, I think most filmmakers would want to make this character more assertive. She really does get just kind of moved around like a game piece by the mostly male bosses, including her boyfriend, Billy Lane. But Barbara Morris brings just a very sympathetic quality to the character. She's hard not to like. In a lot of scenes, she uses this very slowly developing hesitant smile that shows off nervousness and friendliness at the same time. It's just a very endearing trait, and you do not want the Wasp Woman to drink her blood.

Speaker 2:
[54:38] Also great scream. She really gets to belt out a nice monster scream in this film. All right. There's an older silver haired gentleman that's a member of her corporate inner circle named Arthur Cooper, and he's played by William Rorick, who lived 1912 through 1995. Primarily a stage actor appearing on Broadway, but he earned a 1991 Daytime Emmy nomination for his work on Guiding Light. He had a very long TV career, and he pops up in such films as 73s, Day of the Dolphin, and 76s, God Told Me To. But he was also in Corman's Knot of This Earth, 57. He's come up on the show before, just in passing, because he was longtime partners with Thomas Coley, who was in 1940s Doctor Cyclops, a movie that is name dropped in this movie.

Speaker 1:
[55:32] Yes, mentioned in the film. In a way, the soul of this movie is contained in the scenes of the office secretaries, like trash-talking each other or trash-talking their boyfriends, which those scenes can be pretty fun. One of them is this character named Maureen, talking about how she can't stand her boyfriend or husband Irving, who just wants to watch TV all the time. She gets a phone call from Irving and tells him to drop dead. The other secretary is like, what happened? What did he say? She says, he told me that Dr. Cyclops is on TV again tonight, Channel 9. He's seen it three times.

Speaker 2:
[56:15] Nice. Yeah, I love all those scenes with the secretaries. Just in general, like I say, it's the Mad Men era. You have this Mad Men office space here, this Golden Age New York. Yeah, I found it rather charming. This particular actor playing Arthur, I think he charmed up, classed up any scene he's in.

Speaker 1:
[56:34] Very, very much so. I do think it's kind of weird reading reviews that mention the Billy Lane character as likeable, because I feel like Arthur is a lot more likeable.

Speaker 2:
[56:43] Yeah, yeah. And he tries to save the day. He's actively trying to do right by our main character. She's making suspicious choices for the business. Yeah. And of course, he pays a price for that.

Speaker 1:
[56:57] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[56:59] All right, we mentioned Eric Zentrop already. This is our, or Zentorp, Zentrop?

Speaker 1:
[57:04] It's in Zentrop.

Speaker 2:
[57:06] He's played by Michael Mark, lived in 1886 through 1975. Belarussian born actor, often appearing in small roles from, I believe like 1928 through 1969. I mean, he pops up at least in small background roles in the likes of 31's Frankenstein, 35's Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Hand, Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, 58's Attack of the Puppet People, which we've talked about on the show, and 59's Return of the Fly.

Speaker 1:
[57:38] Is he the mad scientist in Attack of the Puppet People?

Speaker 2:
[57:41] Who? You know, that is a good question.

Speaker 1:
[57:44] He might be. That sounds familiar. I was wondering where I'd heard his voice before giving these mad science kind of lectures. Sorry, we just had to look up who Michael Mark was in Attack of the Puppet People, because I thought maybe he had been the villain, like the mad scientist in it. But no, he played that character's mentor or friend who visits the laboratory, and this creates problems of the, I think, the mad scientist having to try to hide his work from the sky.

Speaker 2:
[58:13] Yeah. But yeah, in this picture, though, again, it's not really a villain character. He's not really a mad scientist. He's got this amazing breakthrough. He wants to partner with somebody in order to fully realize it, and make money off of it. And that's what he's trying to do. So in fact, when he realizes things are not going as planned, and taking a darker turn, it severely affects him.

Speaker 1:
[58:41] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[58:42] Let's see, just a couple of other folks to mention in passing. Frank Gerstel shows up in this. He plays Les Hellman. He lived 1915 through 1970. Other credits include 53 is the Neanderthal man, 53 is the Magnetic Monster, and 59 is the Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake. One of our secretary gals is the character Maureen. She's I think the switchboard operator, one with the Brooklyn accent.

Speaker 1:
[59:11] She's the one who's mad at Irving about Dr. Cyclops.

Speaker 2:
[59:15] Yeah. She is played by Lynn Cartwright, who lived 1927-2004. She previously had a supporting role in 58's Queen of Outer Space, which of course starred Jacques Gabor. Late in her career, she played the older version of Gina Davis' character in the 1992 film A League of Their Own. She was also in 87's The Garbage Pail Kids movie. But she was married to screenwriter Leo Gordon.

Speaker 1:
[59:40] That's funny. The screenwriter gave her a lot of the funniest dialogue.

Speaker 2:
[59:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[59:45] I'm told that way.

Speaker 2:
[59:47] Also, I'll mention again, just in passing, first delivery man, I didn't even really clock him, but it's Frank Wolfe who lived in 1928 through 1971. Got his start in Corman Pictures, but then would go on to work a great deal in European films, particularly Spaghetti Westerns and thrillers, including 71's Death Walks on High Heels, and 68's Once Upon a Time in the West.

Speaker 1:
[60:08] This is the guy who hits on Maureen. They're delivering a hospital bed so that the scientist can recover in the office. Everybody's dream, if you're horribly injured, you just want to be at work while you're recovering. So you can recover in the office.

Speaker 2:
[60:26] You're too valuable.

Speaker 1:
[60:28] Yeah. When they're delivering the bed, he makes a pass at Maureen. I think she also tells him to drop dead, if I recall.

Speaker 2:
[60:37] All right. Then finally, the music is by Fred Katz, who lived 1919 through 2013, American cellist and composer who is quite successful outside of film and was responsible for the jazzy score for Bucket of Blood and the score for The Wasp Woman uses the same music as do, I'm going to understand something like five other Corman film from this era.

Speaker 1:
[60:58] Okay. Yeah. Sometimes the music in the movie feels a little random.

Speaker 2:
[61:04] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[61:04] But other things are very on point. Obviously, there's a lot of buzzing sounds.

Speaker 2:
[61:11] Yeah. The music is exactly what you'd expect from a movie from this era. But it's good. It does its job.

Speaker 1:
[61:17] Okay. Ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2:
[61:20] Let's get those bees on the screen. Yes.

Speaker 1:
[61:22] Yes. The opening credits, of course, play over footage of bees buzzing. This is the movie The Wasp Woman, The Words Appear and It's Bees.

Speaker 2:
[61:32] Yeah. Then we get a scene that only you saw. I didn't actually see this one, so tell me what happens in the extended cut.

Speaker 1:
[61:40] I'll summarize pretty quickly. Tell me when we get to the part you have seen. We see an older man, Dr. Zinthrop, going out into the country in a beekeeper suit to harvest a wasp's nest, which he puts inside a locked suitcase and carries back to his lab. This is the lab where he conducts his mysterious experiments. Then later, the boss of the apiary shows up and he's dressed funny. He's wearing a business suit, but a mesh mask and a veil over his head walking around among the bee colonies. There's one guy they show in here who's working on the bee colonies without any gloves and that made me think, oh, I bet that guy is not an actor. This is probably just an apiary worker that they used in the movie. He's got one quick line and he doesn't sound like an actor.

Speaker 2:
[62:27] I bet you're right.

Speaker 1:
[62:28] But the boss here asks a worker at the main harvesting area about Dr. Zinthrop. Apparently, the honey company that owns the apiary pays Dr. Zinthrop to do experiments on bees and honey production. But Zinthrop has been hugely overcharging his company account and hasn't filed a progress report in months. So what's he doing up there? Then the worker guy, they got this very folksy guy. He says, oh shucks, that's Zinthrop. He's a nut, him and his bees. These guys, they're all out there with bees. But he says, one of these days, I wouldn't be surprised to see him flap his arms and take off after some queen bee, like the rest of the drones. This guy also tells the boss that he likes to be like the bees, busy, busy, busy. So this guy is sucking up to the boss. So the boss goes to check out Zinthrop's lab, and he finds that Zinthrop has strayed way off mission. Instead of what he's supposed to be doing with the bees, he has been running experiments on Queen Wasp Royal Jelly. Zinthrop claims he has discovered it has incredible powers of rejuvenation. He shows the boss an adult dog and a puppy, and then he says they're actually the same age. The puppy, which he says is named Greta, received an injection of his wasp rejuvenation treatment. The boss is like, look here, Zinthrop, I understand about science and progress and all, but you're fired. Zinthrop, he's a little bit heartbroken, but the boss says, you just don't seem to be one of the team. You understand, you'll fit in somewhere else. Zinthrop sits down and he talks to his wasps. He reassures them that they will find a new home, everything will be all right. Then he says, now, how would you like a nice, juicy caterpillar? He tosses a caterpillar into the suitcase and then slams it shut, like he's running his own caterpillar boo box. So you didn't see any of this so far.

Speaker 2:
[64:28] No, none of that. The cut I watched, the theatrical cut, once the credits are done, we go straight to the board meeting.

Speaker 1:
[64:36] Interesting, because I would say that the version of the movie you got has an even less mad scientist than the version I saw, because the maddest we ever see, is in this opening scene where he's talking to the wasps and feeding them caterpillars and stuff. So yeah, now we go to the board meeting at Janice Starlin Enterprises. Janice Starlin, the founder and CEO of this world-class cosmetics company is headquartered in New York. She is holding a board meeting to discuss a recent decline in sales from the last quarter. And she grills the executives, demanding they give an explanation for the poor performance. Nobody will speak up. One of the bosses, when put on the spot, makes the excuse that he is not feeling well. So they are afraid. They don't want to say what they're thinking. Eventually, only one of them has the guts to speak up, and it is this guy named Billy Lane.

Speaker 2:
[65:34] And he is really, I mean, nobody's eager to speak, but when he decides to speak, there's a certain swagger to him that initially I was like, oh, this guy's trouble. He's about to make a power play or something.

Speaker 1:
[65:45] Yeah. I thought the exact same thing when I first saw it. Yeah. So he says, if you look, sales begin to fall off exactly the month that the company made one change. It was the month that they first took Janice Starlin's face off of the company's advertising. See, she built the company from the ground up using her face in all of the company's imagery, and her face has been the only face associated with Starlin Cosmetics since the beginning until a few months ago when for the first time, she went off the ads and they started using new models. And Lane says, Look, people associate your face with the brand, they trust you. And after so long, taking your face off the brand causes distrust. So his suggestion is, let's just put your face back in the ads. And everybody agrees with him. There is applause from the board, but Starlin is not impressed. She says, I think I've had enough flattery for one morning, gentlemen. And then later she says, you know, that might have been impressive analysis, but one small fact you have overlooked, not even Janice Starlin can remain a glamour girl forever. And then she dismisses them. So I thought it's interesting that they didn't go with the more cruel version of this premise, which would have been that the public stopped buying the product because they thought she didn't look young and beautiful enough anymore. Instead it's framed more as a matter of Starlin's internal anxiety and lack of self-confidence about her appearance as she's aging. It's that she decided to take her face off the product because she feels insecure about looking older. And then the market did not respond well to the change that her face isn't on there anymore. For all we know, the cosmetics consumer in the world of this movie would still be happy with how she looks, but we know that she is not happy. I thought that's kind of interesting. You would think maybe that the easier place to go with the story would be the former.

Speaker 2:
[67:51] Yeah, yeah, that is a good point. And to come back to the Amy Sedaris version that I hope we get to see one day, I wonder how they might tweak it for comedic value. Because the crueler version could be more funny and more humorous if you tweaked it just right.

Speaker 1:
[68:08] Yeah, I wonder about a version of the story where the CEO is not feeling insecure about her looks. Or maybe more realistically, especially if you're going for a comedy skewering of this character, where they are feeling insecure, but they're not willing to admit it in front of others. Yeah. Also, I think an interesting thing could be approaching this from a gender-flipped way. Gender expectations about beauty and aging are a huge thing that affects how the story is perceived. Though, you could imagine a kind of male beauty wellness thing. I mean, there are tons of products out there like that now, with guys who associate themselves with the product they're selling and a certain kind of male appearance of youth and masculinity and virility and all that. I could imagine the story being taken interesting ways with that as well. Anyway, bringing it back to this board meeting. So yeah, Starlin, she does not take kindly to the idea that she's going to go back on the ads, and she just seems generally weary and unhappy at the beginning of the story. But then a phone call comes in. Starlin's secretary, Mary, informs her that a Dr. Zinthrop is waiting in the office to see her. So here we go. I think you can almost guess what's going to happen at this point.

Speaker 2:
[69:28] Well, I could. I mean, I could because I knew what the purpose of the film was. But for me, this is a much more mysterious character. He just comes out of nowhere, almost like a mysterious stranger bringing some sort of a promise.

Speaker 1:
[69:41] This movie is probably better without the intro, With All the Bees, I think. Yeah. Now that I think about it. And that also even keeps it tighter. I mean, go ahead and make these movies short, people. You do not have to pad a film out to even 70 minutes, certainly not to 90 minutes.

Speaker 2:
[69:58] Two-and-a-half hours of wasp.

Speaker 1:
[70:02] A 63-minute movie is okay. Give it seal of approval. If that's what the movie needs to be, that's what you should do. But before the meeting with Zinthrop, she pulls aside Arthur Cooper, the man of chemistry on the board.

Speaker 2:
[70:17] He's a silver-haired guy.

Speaker 1:
[70:18] The science representative, often smoking a pipe. And she asks him, you've done work on Queen B Royal Jelly and its supposed restorative properties. She wants to know, is there really any therapeutic value in it? He's a bit equivocal. He says there's probably some value, but it's not proven yet. We don't really know. And it will, if there is value, it will depend on individual reactions. Quote, one man's meat is another man's poison. She asks, supposing a more powerful version of Royal Jelly could be obtained from the Queen Wasp, for example. And he frowns, almost like, oh, not this claptrap again. And because I was wondering, like, why would you assume a Queen Wasp Royal Jelly would be more powerful? And it's like a wasp is bigger than a bee.

Speaker 2:
[71:09] Yeah, yeah. It looks meaner, less cute.

Speaker 1:
[71:13] Cooper says, I wrote this quote down, I'd stay away from wasps if I were you, Miss Starlin. Socially, the Queen Wasp is on the level with the Black Widow Spider. They're both carnivorous. They paralyze their victims and then take their time devouring them alive. And they kill their mates in the same way, too. Strictly a one-sided romance. But I mean, if that were true, if that is, I don't, I didn't look this up.

Speaker 2:
[71:40] No comment on the science here. I'm not going to tarnish this discussion with any actual wasp signs.

Speaker 1:
[71:47] But, well, yeah, never mind. Just drawing conclusions from insectimating behavior is fun. Okay. Anyway, he advises her-

Speaker 2:
[71:55] We don't want to associate with this as a source, because the good tarnish are a corporate brand, because the insects murder each other.

Speaker 1:
[72:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[72:02] I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[72:02] So he advises her to forget about it. And she says, okay. And then he leaves. She calls in Dr. Zinthrop. And Starlin says, I'm afraid I can't give you much time today, Mr. Zinthrop. And he says, but it is I who will give you time, Ms. Starlin. 10, maybe 15 years I can give you. So that's a good pitch.

Speaker 2:
[72:22] So she's like, go on. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[72:24] Good reversal. She says she demands absolute proof of what he claimed in his letter. And so, okay, off to the laboratory. It's time to see the proof right now. So this is the scene where Zinthrop demonstrates that his enzyme from Queen Wasp oil jelly can reverse the aging process. Though what's actually shown on screen, and I had to rewind it the first time, I was like, did I see this right? What he does is he injects a guinea pig with this stuff, and that turns the guinea pig into a rat. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[72:56] That is absolutely what is depicted here. I don't know if they were originally going to do rats into mice, as if that would be more realistic. What they had was guinea pigs into rats, and so that's what we're going with.

Speaker 1:
[73:07] I think it's supposed to be, it turns the guinea pig into a younger guinea pig, but maybe they didn't think a younger guinea pig would register.

Speaker 2:
[73:15] Were you not aware that guinea pigs are just old rats?

Speaker 1:
[73:18] They do. Once they go through the metamorphosis, a rat goes into its chrysalis and it comes. Pretty much. She says, okay, I'm convinced that rat, I love this rat, you did a great job. She gives Zinthrope a laboratory, she sets him to work, she says, one caveat, no, the caveat is not from her, it's from him. He says, I know my formula works on animals, but it may not be safe for human beings. I haven't tested it yet, so human deployment, that's going to have to wait on results for more safety tests, but she doesn't want to wait. She says, you will test it on me. And he tries to argue with her, no, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. And she insists. So he gets to work creating doses for human consumption.

Speaker 2:
[74:16] All right, so we get some more tests here. I don't know if we want to mention the full progression. I don't know if they planned this out, but they're like, okay, we're going to turn rats into guinea pigs.

Speaker 1:
[74:26] No, the other way around.

Speaker 2:
[74:27] The other way around.

Speaker 1:
[74:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[74:29] Guinea pigs into rats.

Speaker 1:
[74:30] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[74:30] Then we're going to turn cats into kittens.

Speaker 1:
[74:32] Right.

Speaker 2:
[74:33] Makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[74:33] Perfect.

Speaker 2:
[74:34] And then basically time for human testing right after that.

Speaker 1:
[74:37] All you need.

Speaker 2:
[74:37] Just three steps.

Speaker 1:
[74:40] We get a montage here where we start seeing mostly repeated footage we've already seen. So laboratory, bees, rats, guinea pigs, rats, executives. And I think it's just stuff is happening.

Speaker 2:
[74:54] Yeah. Rat race too. I don't know. It kind of works.

Speaker 1:
[74:56] Yeah. And then after the montage, there is a scene where Billy Lane and Mary are talking while Mary transcribes a document on the typewriter. We get the idea in the scene that they are romantically involved, they've been dating. And Billy says he does not trust this new guy at the company, Zinthrop, quote, He must be the granddaddy of all confidence men to get Starlin to fall for his tricks. Why doesn't somebody wise her up? Mary says, somebody like you, for instance. But she wants to know, why does he think that Zinthrop is a fraud? And Lane says, oh, you're as bad as she is. Oh, women. Then Mary says, men. So reversal on the, oh, women. Men, every time you're stuck for an answer, you always come up with women. You're not getting out of this one so easily. I'd like I'd like to know why you think Zinthrop really hasn't got something. And then Billy says, well, you can call it male intuition if you like, except there's something about this whole business that doesn't smell right. A private laboratory, a secret experiment. Zinthrop himself. The only thing missing is a genie with a lamp. And then Mary says, you better leave the intuition to me. And they discuss going out to dinner. Apparently, they keep flipping a coin to see who pays for the check when they go out. But Billy always wins. So Mary wants a different arrangement. And he suggests that he will buy her dinner if she starts spying on Zinthrop and Starlin for him. Oh, and then also, this is the part where they get interrupted by Cooper who comes in. And he's also suspicious of Zinthrop. And this is the scene where they discuss the difference between a quack and a con man. I know you liked this one, didn't you?

Speaker 2:
[76:39] I really liked this. I thought this was a nice back and forth where, I'm going to read the dialogue here where Billy Lane says, I've been trying to tell bright eyes here that I think Zinthrop is a phony and a confidence man. And Arthur says, if I were sure of that, I wouldn't be worried. I think he's a lot more dangerous, a quack. And then Billy Lane says, well, I don't follow you, Coop. And then Arthur continues and he says, well, a confidence man would just be interested in your money. The only damage they can do is to your pocketbook. A quack can be fatal. So yeah, I like the way they're positioning that. Like what is the true threat here? Is the threat that he's just trying to make some money off of it? Or is the threat that he's offering something that's not real at all? Of course, we know at this point, as you pointed out, like we the viewer know that he can already turn guinea pigs into rats. Like whatever, he's already doing something. Or if he's, it seems like it's legit. But you know, this is from their point of view and they're trying to figure out exactly what the threat is.

Speaker 1:
[77:44] Well, I think Cooper's correct in a sense in that if he were a con man, I think what he's saying is he would just be taking the money. But as a quack, even though his serum does work in a sense to reverse the aging, he is, he together with Starlin are playing off each other in a way where they were moving to human testing before it is safe.

Speaker 2:
[78:07] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[78:07] So it works, but it's not safe.

Speaker 2:
[78:09] Yeah. And it could be fatal in the business sense or certainly as we'll see in the human sense as well.

Speaker 1:
[78:17] Yeah. Also, this is the part where we get some color in these scenes with the secretaries gossiping and like talking trash about their boyfriends. This is the scene of Maureen with the put on Brooklyn accent saying, so I says to him, I says, listen, Irving, I'm getting sick of this TV every night. And so she wants Irving to take her out to a nightclub. And yeah, oh, this is also the scene with the doctor Cyclops. But yeah, anyway, did you notice how, this was the first scene, I noticed it, that there's supposed to be an elevator that opens directly into the office. So not into a hallway, it's just the elevator doors slide apart and you go straight into the room with all the secretaries.

Speaker 2:
[79:06] Oh yeah. I mean, there's at least one, maybe older office building in the Atlanta area that does that, that I can think of. And I've heard of cases where you have really fancy New York apartments where the elevator goes directly to the floor. So I guess it exists and certainly existed.

Speaker 1:
[79:28] Well, obviously, this is not a real elevator door. This is just boards that people are manually sliding open and closed on either side of the doorway.

Speaker 2:
[79:36] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[79:38] So anyway, time to test on humans. Zinthrop shows Starlin a kitten and says, yesterday, this was a cat. She is overjoyed. She says, you're a kitten. You've got your whole life to live over again. And Zinthrop swabs Starlin's arm with alcohol and then gives her her first injection. So here we go. Then we cut to three weeks later and Starlin is working in her office. She looks in a compact mirror and she's not satisfied. She is not improving fast enough. Zinthrop encourages patients. He says, there's more to you than a little kitten and a difference in metabolism. But we can see that Starlin is not happy. She wants more drastic results faster. And Zinthrop just mentions offhand in the scene. He's like, oh, you know, I've been working on a much more powerful, more concentrated version of the enzyme, possibly for use, highly diluted, of course, in lotions in the future. But of course, it's not safe yet, wink, wink. It is over there in the refrigerator though. And that was my implication I was putting on it. Zinthrop, once again, he's not suggesting that she take it.

Speaker 2:
[80:45] But she sees the opening. She's like, oh, well, I'll just, that's strong enough. I'll just use that. I won't dilute it. I'll just directly into my veins.

Speaker 1:
[80:53] Yeah. So there's a sequence in here where Mary steals the letter from Zinthrop out of Starlin's desk and then takes it to Lane and Cooper at lunch. And they sit around looking at it. And Cooper concludes that Zinthrop is a very capable confidence man. And in fact, quote, he claims he can stimulate the processes of rejuvenation. I look at stimulate the processes of rejuvenation through the use of enzymes extracted from wasps. And so the three of them are trying to figure out a way to get through to Starlin and expose Zinthrop for the fraud that he is. So once again, we know the serum already works. It just might not be safe. And then later that night, alone in her office, Janice Starlin is, she's sad, tired, anxious. Something is getting to her. And she sneaks down into Zinthrop's laboratory, breaks into the refrigerator, takes out the extra powerful wasp juice, and she injects herself. And then, so it seems like, well, maybe she's gonna, maybe it's gonna work out great, but while she's sneaking out of the office, out of the lab, we get a glimpse of the cage where Zinthrop was keeping the kitten, the cat he had transformed back into a kitten. Ain't a kitten anymore. Now it is a cat, a sort of angry, greasy looking cat.

Speaker 2:
[82:14] Yeah. But only like, it just looks like somebody rubbed grease on a cat, and now the cat's a little perturbed. But the scene still kind of hits, and I was, it stirred something in my memory, and I realized this is, and I don't think this is actually patterned after it, but in 2024's Alien Romulus, there is a scene where a character takes samples of an injectable serum in a mad science lab, runs off with it, and then we pan over to the horrifying results of experimentation on rats with that same ingredient. To drive them up, this is not going to work out well for anyone.

Speaker 1:
[82:48] The next scene, there is a revelation. Finally, we get the altered form of Susan Cabot as the much rejuvenated Starlin. She comes into the office, looking 20 years younger, and then the secretary, Maureen, sees her, and she's just stunned, jaw hanging open. She's like, is that really you, Miss Starlin? And Starlin is like, finish your nails, Maureen. They're a little bit mean to each other here. There are tinges of jealousy from Maureen and gloating from Starlin. And now everybody sees she looks 20 years younger, and she makes a pitch to the board. She gathers the board for a meeting, and she says, Our new company slogan will be, Return to youth with Janice Starlin. We're now no longer just a cosmetics company, we are a rejuvenation company.

Speaker 2:
[83:35] Oh yeah. And this is where everyone starts bringing up some very good points. Like, we can't just suddenly become a rejuvenation company. Like, you're talking about, we're no longer a cosmetic company, we're like a medical company.

Speaker 1:
[83:49] Yes. And this is actually not in this scene, it's in the later board scene when she's pressing them to go forward with the rejuvenation slogan. In that later scene, one of the executives, a minor character, says, I think we should be a little more conservative with our messaging. Cosmetics are one thing, medicine is another. Very sound.

Speaker 2:
[84:09] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[84:10] True. But at the same time, Mary here seems genuinely happy for Starlin. She confesses how they had been plotting to rescue her from Dr. Zinthrop, but now it all seems so silly because obviously, he's not a con man. His stuff really works, and Starlin is just overjoyed. She's asking Mary over and over, how old do I look? How old do I look? And she talks about how she now looks exactly like she did when she started the company 18 years ago. So she can start all over. She can do it all over again. It's like a dream. But good dreams come to an end because the next scene is a cat attack. Xanthrope goes into his lab. Remember that greasy cat?

Speaker 2:
[84:53] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[84:54] Was a cat, then it was a kitten, then it was a greasy, angry cat. Now it is a-

Speaker 2:
[84:58] It's essentially a mutant wasp cat. I think that's what they're going for here.

Speaker 1:
[85:02] Yeah, mutant wasp, greasy, angry cat. Now it attacks Xanthrope, it jumps and like grapples his neck, and he has to break the cat in half essentially. Then we see him now quite depressed, cramming the dead cat into an incinerator, and then he wanders outside and steps in front of a bus.

Speaker 2:
[85:22] He's like, did I have time to just walk into traffic? Again, he's not a mad scientist, because realizing what he's done is destructive, he clearly has a lot of regrets.

Speaker 1:
[85:34] Yes, he's deeply, deeply upset. And we see him knocked to the pavement, and one scene that I do think is unintentionally comical is this scene where he gets hit by a car, because there's just kind of a bam, and he just like falls down.

Speaker 2:
[85:48] Yeah, and we don't actually see it, it's just step out, horns, you know.

Speaker 1:
[86:00] Meanwhile, there's a scene out at a restaurant where we have Lane, Mary and Cooper conspiring once again, and Cooper is expressing doubts. It seems that Mary is thinking, wow, so he's not a con man after all, the stuff really works. But Cooper is like, I'm reminded of another doctor who was implanting monkey glands into people a few years ago, seemed to work for a while, then the deterioration set in. And he says, if only I could get a look at his lab, see what he's using. Actually, before we started recording, we were looking up who this, because this is at least one actual case in history of a quack surgeon who was implanting monkey glands in people for as a panacea for all different kinds of things.

Speaker 2:
[86:45] Yeah. And it inspired the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Creeping Man from 1923.

Speaker 1:
[86:52] Yes. So that is real medical pseudoscience history, people were, and it was not even the only case in medical fraud history of xenotransplantation. That's what they call it, putting organs from one animal into a human to do something. Also, you can say that in real medicine, there are some cases of xenotransplantation that have been shown to work, but a lot of these early things that it was just quackery.

Speaker 2:
[87:20] I think we've talked about some of these on the show before, like some of the skin transplants, where trying out transplants stuff like frog skin. At times, in the short term, it seemed to work for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with the flesh actually growing and adapting, but just maybe it was helping to cover up the damaged tissue for a little bit, things like that. At times, some of these experiments seemed to work, and that was part of the danger of them.

Speaker 1:
[87:50] Yeah. And we were talking about how I'm sure, we didn't check, but I'm sure there are some wellness influencers out there today who are like, yeah, what you need is monkey glands.

Speaker 2:
[87:59] Yeah. Somebody's got some monkey glands out there trying to sell them, I'm sure.

Speaker 1:
[88:02] So Cooper sneaks into Zinthrop's lab to solve the rejuvenation mystery. Like, is it monkey glands? What's going on? And he finds evidence of wasp-related funny business. There's a plot section where Starlin desperately hires a private investigator to find Zinthrop. She needs him to come back and make more wasp enzyme post-haste. Where could he be? And also in this part of the movie, we see that Starlin is starting to get headaches, some kind of attacks are periodically coming over her. The PI manhunt. I thought this part felt kind of like padding, but Rob, you said you liked it more.

Speaker 2:
[88:42] Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things where, again, the first draft scenario where you could imagine a downriver version of this script where they may be played, because it played up the sort of uncertainty about everything, because it does kind of tease with this idea, like the PI is asking her, like, well, this guy works for you, don't you know anything about him? And she's like, well, he wasn't really a traditional employee, so yeah, I don't know his home address, and I don't have his phone number and all this, where you're really beginning, or at least I was kind of imagining it from her point of view, like she's maybe realizing, oh yeah, I really didn't research this guy, we just really jumped into this very quickly. So I kind of liked it, but again, part of that is in imagining where it could have gone if this had been developed more.

Speaker 1:
[89:30] Yeah, I can see that. So eventually they find he's in the hospital, he's not dead, but he's in a coma at this point, I think, and Starlin says that she will pay anything to fund his recovery, the best doctors, round-the-clock care, everything, but he must be able to get back to work. She needs more Wasp stuff.

Speaker 2:
[89:49] In, as we already discussed, is in, let's get a hospital bed in the office.

Speaker 1:
[89:54] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[89:54] We're going to get him in there.

Speaker 1:
[89:56] Exactly. We also see her secretly sneaking off to give herself more Wasp injections, but I think the serum is running low, so she's got to get him to make more soon. Then one night we see Cooper, the scientist guy sneak in to Zinthrop's lab to get more information about his research. He wants to understand what's going on, and here we get, now we're nearing the end of the movie and we get our first Wasp Woman attack because Starlin has been in there injecting herself, and Cooper hears some buzzing sound and then sees a horrible creature that rushes toward him, bites his neck and spits chocolate syrup on his throat.

Speaker 2:
[90:35] A furry bee woman with fangs. Again, I don't think anybody was happy with how this turned out, but at least, like we said, they tried to keep it in the shadows. It shot pretty well, so it doesn't look completely crappy on the screen.

Speaker 1:
[90:55] You know what I just thought of? She's got, in Wasp mode, she has big hair, but they could have embraced it and given her full beehive hairdo, what do you think?

Speaker 2:
[91:06] Oh, yeah. I mean, why not?

Speaker 1:
[91:08] Like B-52s. Yeah. Notes for Amy Sedaris and co. Think about it.

Speaker 2:
[91:15] Yeah, I am very, very interested to see what they do with the full monster mode in that. But I imagine they'll do something where, again, Amy Sedaris is such a great physical performer, they'll come up with something that plays to her strengths and maybe won't be as much coverage as this particular get up is.

Speaker 1:
[91:35] Now, there are more boardroom scenes in the movie where Starlin insists on using the return to youth line even though her people are against it. Then somewhere in there, there's another caddy secretary scene that's pretty great. Maureen is talking to the other secretary and she's like, if that stuff takes 15 years off Starlin, I'm sure it could take 10 off you. Then she says, oh yeah, well, if I were you, I'd take a double dose and then maybe Ira wouldn't watch television so much. I love how there is barely any discussion of the disappearance of Cooper. Yeah. Just the-

Speaker 2:
[92:08] Yeah, they're just like, he's conscientious. I'm sure he's just sick or something.

Speaker 1:
[92:13] Yeah. But here's the part we were talking about where they move Zinthrop in the hospital bed into the office. While they're moving in, he's trying to remember he had something important to tell Starlin but he can't quite get it out and then he falls unconscious. There's one scene in here that's funny where now Billy Lane is ogling Starlin. He's got the hots for the boss, I guess, and Mary is like, Hey Bill, don't go getting any ideas. Bill's like, Oh, you know me, I'm just trying to be a good employee. Do you think Xanthrope could get you any of those treatments? There are a bunch of scenes throughout here with the Night Watchmen. This is just a guy who loves his radio programs.

Speaker 2:
[92:57] Yeah. Basically, listening to podcasts and he gets his own goofy music while he's walking around.

Speaker 1:
[93:03] But unfortunately, he's going around listening to his programs and he suddenly hears buzzing inside the laboratory. Uh-oh. So he draws his revolver out of his belt and he wanders in. And that's the last we see of the Night Watchmen. Now, eventually, Lane and Mary do start to get worried because why has Cooper been missing so long? And they go looking around and in the office somewhere, they find his pipe. He never goes anywhere without it. And I was just thinking after Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla, this is our second movie two weeks in a row that has a very important pipe discovered late in the film. And while this is happening, Starlin is down at Zinthrop's bedside, begging him for help. She's like, you got to get me more of the enzyme. But he's like, no, no, you can't take any more. And then we get another Wasp Woman attack scene because the nurse comes into the room. Just when Starlin is transformed into the Wasp Woman, yet again, she attacks her and the chocolate syrup on the throat yet again. And then she goes up to the laboratory and looks at bees. They're bees. Okay, well finally, we're at the climax. So, Zinthrop starts to come to his senses while Mary and Lane are in his room trying to figure out what's going on. And he explains, Starlin is in danger. She cannot take any more of the injections. Quote, the enzymes, the enzymes, they're going crazy. For some reason, Mary runs up to talk to Starlin and then Billy Lane is left down there with Zinthrop by himself and Zinthrop says, Ms. Starlin is not a human being any longer. The enzymes have changed her. She will destroy the girl as an evil wasp would destroy her enemies, then devour the remains. Oh, so she's been eating everybody. We didn't realize that she ate Cooper, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[94:53] Yeah. I guess that's where they went. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[94:56] So this builds to a climax where Wasp Woman attacks Mary, Zinthrop and Billy Lane after run up to the rescue. This is the scene where Billy kicks through the glass door, and I guess it's real. So how is the Wasp Woman going to be defeated? It's kind of anticlimactic. Zinthrop grabs a jar that's standing on the table that's clearly labeled acid. It's carbolic acid. He throws it at the Wasp Woman, smoke starts coming off of her, and then she crashes through a window and falls down to the street below, still smoking. Then we fade to bees, and that's the end. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[95:31] I was wondering, when I knew that you'd watch the extended cut, I was like, maybe there's a little extra at the end.

Speaker 1:
[95:37] Yeah. Somebody is going to say something about what happened? Nope.

Speaker 2:
[95:41] But it's often the case with some of these 50s films, where the ending comes and they're done. They're like, go on, go home.

Speaker 1:
[95:49] There are a few different abrupt ways they end at the time. Yeah, often the monster dies, and as soon as the monster is down, we're fading to the credits. That's it. No commentary on what happened. Other times, we get a little bit of commentary, like in Bride of the Monster, with He Tampered in God's Domain.

Speaker 2:
[96:06] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[96:06] I feel like the Wasp Woman-

Speaker 2:
[96:07] Or Bride of Frankenstein, wasn't it? To go back to an earlier decade.

Speaker 1:
[96:10] We belong dead.

Speaker 2:
[96:12] Yeah. But was that the one where we get the joyous, or am I thinking about the original Frankenstein? There's one of the older Frankenstein films that has this really weird upbeat ending, like with laughter and champagne, where they're like, why did we do this? What was wrong with the ending on the scene beforehand?

Speaker 1:
[96:29] I don't remember which one you're talking about. That sounds familiar.

Speaker 2:
[96:33] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[96:34] The main thing I remember at the ending of Bride is We Belong Dead.

Speaker 2:
[96:37] Yeah. That's a great place to end. Sometimes there's this feeling like, well, we need to send everybody home happy or we need to send everybody, just send them home because we got to get the next film going here. It's a double feature after all.

Speaker 1:
[96:52] He tampered in wasp domain. Okay. That's Wasp Woman.

Speaker 2:
[96:58] There you go.

Speaker 1:
[96:58] I think it's a lot of fun. I'm going to say, even though I haven't seen it, I recommend the shorter one, I think.

Speaker 2:
[97:05] Yeah. I'm the opposite in that I haven't seen the longer version, but I'm still going to say, yeah, go with the shorter version. I don't think you really gain anything by tacking on an extra 10 minutes. But you're not going to suffer too much by watching the other versions. Whichever one you can get a hold of. Yeah. The Wasp Woman. I thought it was a lot of fun. Yeah. I'm eager to see what happens with the potential remakes in the future.

Speaker 1:
[97:32] Yes, certainly. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[97:35] We'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have thoughts about The Wasp Woman, or if you've seen any of these other films about rejuvenation that are connected to it, write in. We would love to hear from you. Just a reminder to everyone out there, Stuff To Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weirdhouse Cinema. You can follow the Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast on a number of different social platforms. But if you use Letterboxd, the film website, you can find us there as well as Weirdhouse, and that's just dedicated to Weirdhouse Cinema. We have a nice list there of all the movies we've covered over the years, sometimes a peek ahead at what comes up next.

Speaker 1:
[98:21] Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff To Blow Your Mind is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.