“A beautiful woman by day – a lusting queen wasp by night.” Synopsis: A scientist develops a youth formula for a cosmetics queen from jelly taken from queen wasps, failing to anticipate the typical horrible side effects.

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Calamity Brains:

Roger Corman‘s The Wasp Woman is fairly generic drive-in creature feature schlock. It has a more robust plot than a lot of its peers, but at a 63 minute run-time, there’s not a lot of time for character development or plot twists.

Refreshingly, this is a story without true villains. Everyone in this brief flick has somewhat honorable intentions, if not a lot of sense. Our mad scientist (Michael Mark) tries to take things slowly and methodically. Our heroine/anti-heroine, the titular Wasp Woman (Susan Cabot), is eager to make herself a guinea pig if it might save her sinking company. Her employees go behind her back to steal company secrets, but are motivated at least in part by a concern for their CEO’s welfare.

Of course, all of those niceties fall by the wayside when it comes to the actual production of the flick. Like most Roger Corman movies, this low-budget movie has boring sets, bad lighting, and worse audio. When we finally see the Wasp Woman of the title, she’s laughably bad – clearly a woman in a rubber mask and gloves, and hardly something even the timidest of viewers could find scary.

But it’s mostly good fun. If you enjoy older creature features, this isn’t a terrible choice. There won’t be much here for the modern horror-focused viewer, but that’s not to say it has no charm. I might stop if I saw it on while flipping through channels… but I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it again.

Calamity Brains’ Rating: C-
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