WARNING- There are spoilers ahead.

I remember as a young kid going past my local cinema in the family car and seeing the poster for the double bill The Incredible Melting Man and The Savage Bees. Just seeing this poster in passing was enough to give me sleepless nights. In fact, my protestations that The Incredible Melting Man and The Savage Bees were coming to get me became an in-joke for my family with them bringing it up for many years to come, much to my chagrin.

I managed to see The Savage Bees first when it was shown on TV a few years after this. I’d have to wait a little longer to see The Incredible Melting Man and that was when it was released on VHS during the giddy days of home video.

I decided to revisit both films recently. The Incredible Melting Man concerns astronaut Steve West who is part of a space expedition to Saturn. However, a radiation emitted during the journey kills two of the ship’s crew with West surviving and being taken into hospital on his return to Earth. He remains heavily bandaged in bed and on removing his bandages sees that his face and hands appear to be melting away. He starts to go berzerk at what he has just seen. The nurse who has been tending to him whilst he was bandaged now gets to see the full extent of his molten appearance and is so freaked out that we get a sequence in which, in slow motion, she runs out of the building and even runs through and breaks a glass door to the hospital. Although, if this was her reaction, imagine if she had worked on the burns ward…

We then see West’s quest for human flesh to consume which, apparently, decelerates his melting. But his colleague Dr Ted Nelson is on the trail with his Geiger counter as he tries to stop West’s killing and help his friend.

The Incredible Melting Man is a doozy of a film. Quirky characters with left-field dialogue (witness Nelson’s conversation with his wife regarding her forgetting to buy crackers. Or Nelson’s elderly parents-in-law who stop to steal oranges from an orange grove).

The film also possesses a fantastically dark sense of humour. Witness the scene in which we see a fisherman’s severed head make it’s way downstream to eventually fall down a waterfall and smash on the rocks below. I love the scene in which Nelson sees some of the goo left behind on a bush by West but on closer inspection sees that it isn’t just gloop. ‘Oh, God! His ear!’ he exclaims.

But the gallows humour never overshadows the horror aspect of proceedings. The film never lapses into the vile territory of my most hated movie genre of all time- ‘horror-comedy’ (*gag*). This movie reminds me of The Howling in that both films get the horror/comedy ratio just right.

Rick Baker’s effects work is genuinely brilliant and Ol Puss Face is aesthetically pleasing as well as genuinely gross.

The film is also gorgeous to look at with a brighter-than-bright colour palate that makes it look like a very vivid comic book. The scenes of Mr Melt wandering across the wilderness as the sun sets behind him are absolutely beautiful.

On watching the film again I had forgotten that a very young Jonathan Demme was part of the cast as was Janus Blythe. She starred in this film the same year she was in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes as the cannibal Ruby. I love the scene in which she grabs a meat cleaver, chops off one of West’s arms and then has her own meltdown (but in a very different way to West’s) at the horror she’s just been a part of. Her reaction reminds me of the exaggerated response to the victim who has just had her feet stomped on by The Baltimore Footstomper in John Waters’ masterpiece, Polyester. In fact, the whole film feels like John Waters directing a horror film whilst getting John Sayles to write it for him.

The film’s climax is also brilliant. You don’t expect Nelson to be killed and by a policeman to boot. I adored the closing credits that play over footage of a janitor hosing away the remains of West who has literally melted into a pool of ooze, limbs and internal organs. Beautiful.

Imagine seeing The Incredible Melting Man on its original release. It must have been a complete trip.

As it must have been seeing the Savage Bees on the cinema screen. This TV movie concerns a boat sailing in from Brazil with all of the crew dead from what looks like massive amounts of puncture wounds. What could it be (or should that be *bee*)? Scientists carry out tests and find the culprits to be Brazilian killer bees who appear to have sailed in with the vessel. We even get a lesson as to the factors that will aggravate the little critters- the colours red and black, any annoying noises (the first victim we see in the film is a little black girl wearing a red dress and blowing a toy horn. Yes, she was destined to earn the insect’s wrath).

The local sheriff’s dog is killed by the bees which sends the law enforcer on a mission to push for the tests to be done quickly and to try to stop the bees which they surmise must be inland now. Unfortunately, as this is New Orleans and also Mardi Gras season, this sends them on a race against time to stop the celebrations from becoming a killing ground for the little angels of death.

There are kills galore throughout this feature and it’s pretty graphic for a made-for-TV movie.

The ending is tension-filled with one of the scientists being in a VW Beetle (Herbie Goes Buzz!) which is totally covered by the bees and being slowly moved into a sports stadium so that the temperature in the venue can be gradually lowered so it’s low enough to kill the little blighters. It’s surprisingly effective as I can testify as my fingernails are now bitten down to their nubs.

I love it when movies made-for-TV made their way to the big screen, even if it was in another territory. Spielberg’s Duel was also released theatrically in the UK and with extra scenes added.

The Savage Bees deserves a fantastic Blu-Ray release and hopefully, it will arrive courtesy of Scream Factory. Whilst researching this piece, I also learnt that there was even a sequel made. It’s entitled Terror Out of the Sky and it’s on YouTube. I’ll check it out soon.

You’ll think of The Savage Bees the next time the news trots out the perennial ‘Brazilian killer bees’ moral panic when it’s a slow news day.

I’m so glad that the two films still deliver after all of these years and that it wasn’t just the poster that scared me. Both movies epitomise cult cinema but in very different ways and will forever hold a special place in my diseased brain.