Director – Paul Ziller, Screenplay – Miguel Tejada-Flores, Producers – Neil Bregman & Stefan Wodoslawsky, Photography – Robert Saad, Music – James Gelfand, Visual Effects Supervisor – Marc-Antoine Rousseau, Visual Effects – Keyframe Digital Effects Production Inc., Special Effects Supervisor – Michel Gagnon, Production Design – Ed Hanna. Production Company – Reel One Entertainment.
Cast
Michael Shanks (Kent Horvath), Carol Alt (Professor Christina Brown), Richard Chevolleau (Q), Jonathan Malen (Rafe), Booth Savage (Officer Doug Heydon), Christopher Bondy (Mayor Darrel Gibson), Ellen Dubin (Ellie Martin), Maria Brooks (Melanie Sheer), Tim Thomerson (William Washburn), Samantha Weinstein (Cindy Orsow), David Eisner (Ken Orsow), Bill Lake (Chief of Police), Balazs Koos (Chuey Ortega)
Plot
In the town of Dundas, Indiana, Kent Horvath leads a research program into insecticides. After he has left for the night, a janitor accidentally knocks open a container releasing a yellowjacket wasp that has survived Kent’s latest experimental batch whereupon he is stung to death. So too is the doctor who conducts the autopsy on the janitor. Kent’s friend, the exterminator Q takes some of the experimental batch to clear a wasp problem on the Orsow farm. However, this instead mutates the wasps in the nest and makes them more potent. They form a deadly swarm and attack the town just as a televised barbeque cook-off is beginning.
Swarmed is fairly typical of a formula Monster Movie made for the Syfy Channel during this period. Due to some error with a scientific experiment, a regular creature is turned into a monstrosity and proceeds to go amok. These types of films bring assorted people on to be attacked at regular intervals. We follow the various everyday mini-dramas around the town – about mayoral corruption, tv coverage of the barbeque cook-off featuring Tim Thomerson as an aging celebrity barbecue sauce manufacturer, exterminator Richard Chevolleau and his horror nerd ward – as various people become affected.
One of the more absurd scenes involves Ellen Dubin blowing a conference room apart with a shotgun as she tries to kill a single wasp. The most absurd death is Tim Thomerson who manages to get stung after a wasp invades his air hose while he is hiding under water at the bottom of a paddling pool. There is a struggle to perfect a last ditch effort to dispose of the menace. The film reaches a lame ending where the wasps are lured into a shed with meat from the barbeque stacked on the back of a quad bike and then the propane tanks inside blown up.
Mutant killer wasps on the attack
To Swarmed’s credit, there are some not-too-bad CGI representing the wasps. The script also gives the impression that it has at least done some reading on the science of wasps. This is by no means a bad means a bad entry in the bug genre, but it is never surmounts being throwaway formula fodder.
Miguel Tejada-Flores is best known for writing Revenge of the Nerds (1984). Tejada-Flores has written a surprising degree of genre material including also Fright Night Part 2 (1989), Write to Kill (1990), Psychic (1991), A House in the Hills (1993), Almost Dead (1994), Screamers (1995), Atomic Dog (1998), Faust: Love of the Damned (2000), Rottweiler (2004), Solar Strike (2006), Decoys 2: Alien Seduction (2007), Screamers: The Hunting (2009) and Frankenstein’s Army (2013).
