Cinematic Titanic: The Wasp Woman

Movie: (1959) Ex-model Janice Starling’s company is in trouble as she is no longer young enough to be the face of the business.  A mysterious scientist offers the chance to develop an anti-aging formula based on wasp royal jelly; while the other staffers are suspicious, Janice begins to experiment on herself with horrific results.

Or as Trace puts it, “It’s called The Wasp Woman.   The title is synopsis enough.”

First released: August 7, 2008 (DVD, download); live performance that April.

Opening:  A little more discussion between the Titans and the overseers.  Apparently everyone is living at the underground base they film at.  Also some references to Susan Cabot’s real-life woes.  

Skit: Mary Jo stops to call a board meeting.  Only Trace escapes unscathed.

Skit: Back by popular demand, it’s Frank Conniff’s Hollywood Cavalcade!  This time featuring “legendary jerk” Buddy Rich.

End: Everyone just wanders off as Joel places the nanotated disk into the Time Tube.

Extra: No extras.

Availability: on Hulu, Amazon and Amazon Instant. 

Reminds me of:  Any one of the many Season 3 Corman features, but particlularly the female-centered ones like Gunslinger, Swamp Diamonds and Viking Women versus the Sea Serpent.

Joel’s and Frank’s Take:  here.

Stray observations:

This is hands down my favorite CT film.  The classic Corman qualities make it seem like it would have fit in well on MST.

The film seems very Mad Men-like now, with lots of board meetings and 50’s attitudes.  No riffs about that though.  It does a good job with a limited number of actors and locations, and gives most of them little character beats; the secretaries chatting, for instance. 

The prologue with Zinthrop getting fired was filmed and added about a year later than the rest of the film.  While the riffing is great (“Walking’s great exercise!  Not a good way to open a movie, but it’s great exercise!”)  it really does muddle a plot point—without it the audience is really unsure if Zinthrop is a conman, or a quack. 

Zinthrop experiments on dogs, cats, guinea pigs and rats.  Maybe it really was time to go to human trials.  The injection he shows Janice actually seems to transform a guinea pig into a white rat.  Which is weird.

Incidentally, this film does pass the Bechdel test.  It seems very focused on the female characters, and the men seem particularly bland. 

Credits watch:  Buddy Rich played by comedian Dana Gould. 

Cast and crew roundup:  I notice with most of the films we’ve covered that the actors tend to have long, busy careers and the actresses maybe have a five year run and that’s about it.  This is a good example; Susan Cabot has the lead here, and it’s her last movie!  Lovely Barboura Morris was in a number of Corman films, particularly Bucket of Blood.  Both were in Viking Women versus the Sea Serpent, while Morris was also in Teenage Caveman.  In contrast, excruciatingly bland Fred Eisley was very productive for decades.  There were other Corman regulars like Bruno Ve Sota (Giant Leeches), Roger Corman himself (doctor in hospital) and his brother Gene (Barker).  We saw Frank Gerstle (detective) just a couple of weeks ago in Killers from Space.

Since everyone was focused on aging:  Susan Cabot (Janice) was 32, and is supposed to be 38-40 going on 22.  Barboura Morris (Mary) was 27, while Fred Eisley (Bill) was 34 and Bill Roerhich (Cooper) was 48.  Michael Mark (Zinthrop) was about 73!  He was from Belarus, if you wondered about the accent. 

Callback:  Someone “makes their own gravy.” 
Fave riff:  “What happened to ‘Mates, then kills’?”  Honorable mention: “I hate Mondays!”

Next week:  Film Crew wraps up with Giant of Marathon!