B-Movies with Marg: The Wasp Woman



Nope. She has the head of a wasp, body of a lady. 

 Second in my B-Movies series is Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman from 1959. Going into it, I naturally believed this to be a straight up "creature feature" but was surprised to find that in fact, Wasp Woman spends much more time exploring the pseudo-tragedy of lost youth and beauty, than it does trying to thrill you with a lady-insect hybrid.

Janice Starlin (I thought her name was Starling, my boyfriend heard Darling) is the founder and CEO of her own cosmetics firm, Starlin Enterprises (so yes, her surname was repeated multiple times, yet we both got it wrong til the credits rolled). She has always been the face of the company, but after 18 years, her looks have naturally faded. Losing sales and desperate to regain her beauty, Janice is all too eager to try out clearly mad scientist Eric Zinthrop's new miracle cure - an extract from the Royal Jelly of the Queen Wasp. I don't think I need to tell you that too much of the injections cause poor Janice to turn into a Wasp Woman. 



I can't even remember what wasps look like anymore.



Except the thing is, she barely does!

Most of the film is spent with an excruciatingly slow build to the inevitable transformation. First, Janice needs Zinthrop (who we know is mad, by the way, because he talks to wasps) to prove his formula works. He demonstrates by injecting a guinea pig with his "cure" and turning it into a white mouse, and then injecting a cat and turning it into a kitten. Despite that every sign points to either Janice becoming a baby or becoming an entirely different species (what? Guinea pigs aren't just old mice?), she goes ahead with the treatment and quickly becomes a super-fox. Or well, they washed off the amusing aging make-up that they put on then-32 year old actress Susan Cabot. Anyway, all this only took a few sentences for me to write, but takes up well over half the film to establish. There is even a montage in there made up entirely of footage found earlier in the film, Zinthrop doing sciencey things, the Starlin Enterprises executive board looking at each other and smoking pipes, Janice being injected, mice.

Eventually, Zinthrop (who all of Janice's employees think is a quack) gets hit by a car for some reason. He spends the rest of the film incapacitated, which leads Janice to finally start injecting herself. Which finally turns her into the dreaded Wasp Woman - inconsistently. Unlike a The Fly sort of situation where once Brundle becomes Brundlefly, there is no turning back - Janice only has a wasp's head and hands (?) when she is about to suck a victim's blood (like... a wasp?), but otherwise she is still hot-Janice. And this is only for the last 10ish minutes of the movie. 

As I indicated above, much of the film is really about appearances more than monsters. It is an interesting set up to have an unmarried woman in the 1950s presented as the CEO of a major cosmetics company. All the other women in the film are secretaries and assistants, each one making some direct or indirect mention of a boyfriend or husband, and all of them are younger than Janice is supposed to be. They seem happier too, and don't become wasp women, so the movie certainly doesn't rewrite the book on sexism in the 50s - but, it is a credit to the film that it's never presented that if only Janice had a man to take care of her, she never would have gotten into this mess. If anything, I think that her situation is presented as really being the only option she truly had to save her company, because as the face of the organization, her worth is literally tied to her appearance. It may not be perfectly executed, but I do think The Wasp Woman is a pretty clear social commentary. If a woman's worth is linked to her looks (and still today, as a society that is how we continue to measure women!), her desperation to grasp onto that worthiness will surely lead to her downfall.

Clever stuff, Roger Corman, clever stuff indeed.

All in all, The Wasp Woman offered some interesting social reflection, but it is poorly paced, and aside from a few nice moments of absurdity (why would a guinea pig turn into a mouse? Why?) doesn't offer enough wild kitch for a classic B-movie. Since Roger Corman directed and produced, I really was expecting more. 
 
In keeping with Attack of the Giant Leeches trend of lead actresses meeting with gruesome ends, I shouldn't mention but I just have to tell you that Susan Cabot's son suffered from dwarfism and mental illness, and bludgeoned her to death with a weightlifting bar in her sleep in 1986. What the... You can't make this stuff up! 


-Marg
@acuteinsomnia