The second of five features which producer/director Roger Corman would release in 1960, The Wasp Woman is acutely aware of the time in which it was made as the production reflects the filmmaker’s concern with such topics as gender, stampeding big business, and advancing science. However, in lieu of the film’s insights, The Wasp Woman is nonetheless a trademark Corman production as its exploitive simplicity proceeds to tell a largely escapist tale of urban terror.
Due to a marked decrease in sales on account of being the noticeably aging face of her cosmetics company, Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) hires Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark) after he demonstrates an age reversal serum that he has derived from wasp enzymes. However, in hopes that the experimental agent will save not only her appearance but her corporation as well, the CEO increases her intravenous dosages in lieu of the fact that the miracle formula has not had time to reveal its side-effects.
Though made on a virtually non-existent budget and in the time it takes most directors to get out of bed, The Wasp Woman startlingly offers many interpretative possibilities. The film’s premise aligns a successful female CEO with an aggressive and deadly insect, a wasp (itself succinctly compared during the feature to a black widow), two entities which many men fled in fear of during the time period (and continue to do so even today). Corman parallels such apprehension with a fear of advancing science and big business as he prophetically presents a synthetically-derived cosmetic which is rushed onto the market due to a fragile, vainglorious ego atop the tyrannical demand for an instantaneous fiscal turn-over. Masterfully, Zinthrop’s formula is administered via a needle, as Starlin becomes literally and metaphorically addicted: The CEO is seen yearning for the serum despite the fact she is suffering its ill-effects as she nonetheless is enslaved by the idea that she is regaining her beauty and making money.
Easily, one could read the ramifications of the above as the result of males demanding female beauty as the cosmetic Fountain of Youth is not only devised by a lecherous male scientist, but the male in question, Zinthrop, is seen injecting his serum into his beautiful boss (Corman’s unapologetic Freudian symbolism is almost satirically campy in this respect) after optically molesting a secretary played by Lani Mars (which says nothing of the scientist as the voice behind the suggestion that the drug be offered in lotion form).
Yet, for all of The Wasp Woman’s perhaps largely unintentional insights, Corman’s impenitent cash-in upon the success of Kurt Neumann’s film of two years prior, The Fly, is not the most substantial of narratives in that is merely skirts ideas rather than explores them to any significant degree as his sometimes clichéd storylines nonetheless consistently retain their viewers’ attention throughout. It is perhaps due to Corman’s frugality–an incidental advantage within the genre for, by tightening his budgetary belt, he only permits for a minimal number of locales, which are primarily composed of small, claustrophobia-inducing rooms–and haste that his sparse narratives convey a vestal beauty. If nothing else, how often do big screen scientists actually use the proverbial guinea pig in their experiments (just ignore the fact that the guinea pig which is injected with wasp enzyme regresses into a mouse)?
Rarely does one come to a Roger Corman production in hopes of gaining insight into the human predicament. Instead, the filmmaker offers entertaining, largely escapist, tales of horror. Yet, with The Wasp Woman, the director arguably stumbles upon a multitude of attitudes and ideas which would be stunningly reflective of the concerns of society during the period in which it was made. As such, The Wasp Woman stands of one of Corman’s most admirable efforts amid an already dauntingly large canon of consummate features.
Conversation piece: The role of Janice Starlin would be the last big screen appearance by Susan Cabot. Strangely, she would be bludgeoned to death over two decades later by her son, Timothy Roman, a dwarf who suffered from psychological ailments.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
