ZZZZZ
The Outer Limits (1963)
ZZZZZ, directed by John Brahm.
How do you pronounce that?
A queen bee somehow transforms into a mysterious, sexually alluring young woman. Object: cross-species breeding to advance her race.
The professor has been developing advanced bees so maybe this is his fault. He has developed a language translator that understands their buzzing and has a microphone to speak back to them. Note the symmetry: he has inserted an artificial bee microphone into the hive, and the hive has sent out an artificial human probe into his world.
His wife doesn't like the strange "Regina" at all. Without accusing her husband of infidelity, she recognizes the young woman as a threat to the household, without knowing exactly why.
It's a goofy premise that works surprisingly well, maybe because we like looking at the exotically beautiful Joanna Frank. With those over-made eyes and fall of hair across her face, she looks like a character from later Japanese anime.
I don't recall seeing the actress before; she's Steven Bochco's big sister. At the time she had a poor self-image and -- quite unnecessarily -- stuffed nylon stockings into her bra for padding. You can see how over-developed she looks in some of the thumbnails. When shooting one scene when she was lying on a table, Conrad Hall found her chest was blocking his view of her face. "Can you do anything about your... tits"? So she pulled out some of the stockings.
Marsha Hunt -- Pride and Prejudice (1940) -- is the wife, a beauty of the Golden Age.
Written by Meyer Dolinsky and directed by the under-appreciated John Brahm, who like so many directors had moved into television by this time. Some of his feature films:
Conrad Hall uses the same strange lens filtering as for The Man Who Was Never Born.
The Blu-ray commentary track is by Tim Lucas, who gives many intriguing reflections:
This is an Eden setup --garden included-- with the prof and his wife as Adam and Eve and Regina as Lilith, who in folklore was a seductress who tempted Adam. (An aside: I recall a quip from years ago. The reason men and women are uneasy with each other is that men still yearn for Lilith while women miss the Serpent).
He proposes thinking of the story as a fable, where Regina is the prof's muse. Unable to have children, he pours his creative energies into his work. His subject: the notoriously fecund bees.
Some dark waters: the couple had a baby girl who died. She would be about Regina's age. Perhaps the prof sees her as the daughter who might have been, but she wants him as a mate. Temporarily: the drones die after mating.
In a nighttime scene Regina is observed in the garden, embracing the flowers and erotically licking from a water lily. Joanna Frank said this was unscripted, she just did it as part of her character. Lucas said the scene would have been perfect if she were naked.
He says the lens Conrad Hall used was a "Sparkle Plenty", which I can't find on the net, apart from a character in the Dick Tracy comics.
He dwells on the unexpected horror moment of the final scene, when Regina appears in a wedding dress, having no idea of the evil she has done. It is shocking: from a distance she looks like zombie bride.
