Produced and directed by Roger Corman, this movie was originally a double feature with Beast from Haunted Cave. When it aired on TV two years later, director Jack Hill added a new prologue to extend its runtime.
The film’s musical score may seem familiar because it’s the same music from Corman’s A Bucket of Blood. Fred Katz wrote it and sold Corman the same score for seven films, including The Little Shop of Horrors and Creature from the Haunted Sea.
Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) is the founder and owner of a large cosmetics company. She starts losing money when the public notices she is aging, so her scientists reverse the aging process using the royal jelly of the queen wasp. It doesn’t work fast enough, so she breaks into her own company’s lab and injects herself multiple times.
So she gets twenty years younger over the weekend but occasionally transforms into a wasp woman who kills people. At the end, when acid is thrown in her face, that scene was more real than it should have been. Someone had filled the breakaway bottle with water, and it was so heavy that when it hit her, she thought that her teeth had been knocked out. To make matters worse, the fake smoke used to simulate the acid also choked her. So after she fell through the window, she found herself unable to breathe. To save herself, she tore off her makeup, along with a good chunk of skin around her neck.
Life didn’t get much better for Susan Cabot. This was her last film, and at the end of her life, she suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts. The psychologist she was seeing felt that she was so troubled that he could no longer see her, and her home was filled with trash and rotting food.
After her mental health continued to worsen, Cabot’s 25-year-old son, Timothy Scott Roman, beat her to death with a weightlifting bar. While he would initially claim that a man in a ninja mask was the killer — thinking that no one would believe her struggles with mental illness — the truth was that she woke him screaming and attacked him with both a scalpel and the barbell. His defense attorneys claimed his aggressive reaction to his mother’s attack was due to the drugs he took to counteract his dwarfism and pituitary gland problems.
Prosecutors changed the charge to voluntary manslaughter at the end of the trial, as no evidence had been presented to support the premeditation required for a murder conviction. Roman, who had already spent two and a half years in jail, was sentenced to three years’ probation.
Corman remade this with director Jim Wynorski for his Roger Corman Presents series on Showtime.
You can watch this on Tubi.
