Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

Perhaps the most notable thing about Invasion of the Bee Girls is that it represents Nicholas Meyer's first screenwriting credit.  That and the fact that it has long been in the public domain, meaning that it turns up all over the place.  As the trailer indicates, its big selling point is the amount of female bums and boobs on display.  Indeed, the flimsy story about a series of mysterious male deaths in a small US town exists merely to provide an excuse for all this female nudity.  A special investigator (William Smith, unusually playing the good guy), is dispatched from Washington to investigate and eventually uncovers a plot on the part of a female mad scientist at the local research institute to create a race of 'Bee Girls' by mutating the local housewives.  The women kill men by sexually exhausting them, resulting in heart failure. Why?  I Can't say that I'm entirely sure, but their main targets seem to be the male scientists working at the institute.

To be fair, Invasion of the Bee Girls is decently made and a surprisingly good-looking film.  Director Denis Sanders had previously directed films in a number of genres, to some acclaim (he won two Oscars) and had given Robert Redford his film debut.  Invasion, though, was his last and probably least film.  Its main problem is its poor pacing and lack of action - there is far too much talking and too many expository scenes for an exploitation film. Moreover, it ultimately builds to a disappointing climax, in which the protagonist defeats the mad scientist and her acolytes by the simple expedient of firing his gun into some lab equipment, which cause the whole lab to explode.  (To be fair, James Bond did much the same thing to Blofeld's headquarters as recently as Spectre).  Still, it does boast both William Smith and Victoria Vetri as the leads, the latter, of course, having a place in the exploitation pantheon thanks to her trouser-straining performance as a cave girl in Hammer's When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.