It doesn’t take much to encourage wasps. Even after a few unseasonably cold weeks in autumn, one warm day will bring them back, poking along the siding looking for a nesting place. My most recent stinging incident occurred in October. It’s fitting, then, I suppose, that to try to keep awake late one October weekend afternoon that I watched The Wasp Woman. These creature features were what I grew up with, and this was a Roger Corman brief film from 1959. In fact, it was so brief that eleven minutes had to be added to make it a stand-alone television release. It was originally part of a theatrical double feature. Finding out about added time explained why Dr. Zinthrop’s accent changed from the first eleven minutes to the rest of the film.
Women have the same right as men to be made into monsters, of course, but there’s a poignancy to this storyline. Janice Starlin is the owner of a cosmetics company but profits have been declining since she’s showing signs of aging. Her customers want a younger looking woman providing their beauty products. As is to be expected for a movie from the fifties, it’s a pretty sexist storyline. Still, through the plodding plot the viewer can’t help but to feel for Ms. Starlin. So when Zinthrop shows up with an extract made from wasp royal jelly (a secretion that actually comes from honey bees) that reverses aging who can blame her for trying it? Of course it turns her into a giant wasp woman.
These kinds of mad scientist movies with their inevitable results perhaps injected a sense of caution into those of us who grew up watching them. They weren’t great works of art, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have something to say. What I heard, watching this one, was that women exploited for beauty products suffer from natural aging processes. And any formula that reverses aging come with its own set of problems. The only other scary part of the film was when employees have to get to the upper floors to prevent Starlin from killing people, they have to wait for the elevator. Their sense of frustration, although funny, is nevertheless a reality of working in a high-rise. These movies from the late fifties seem to me to be a cry for help. The sexist, button-down, white shirt world isn’t all it’s advertised as being. Mad scientists are needed to help us cope. Or at least stay awake on a sleepy October weekend afternoon.
