The Wasp Woman (1959)

"Oh, women!"

This Roger Corman film is, I admit, a bit of a cheat. The picture you see opposite is in no way represented in the film, which shows no women turning into anything resembling wasps until the last ten minutes, and that just brief shots of fairly crap prosthetics, with most of the exciting stuff happening off screen.

And yet... this is actually a pretty impressive B movie, if admittedly most certainly a B movie, with an actual subtext on the subtext of hubris. Even the inevitable dodgy sexual politics, definitely present, are blunted by the fact that Janice, the protagonist, is the boss.

In fact, although the characters are admittedly all ciphers, and the closest thing to a hero is a fairly flat pipe smoking bloke, you can identify with both Janice and the obligatory mad scientist Zinthrop (played by an actor born in 1886 in the Russian Empre of Alexander III, incredibly), in their hubris of wanting both youth and scientific fame respectively. Importantly, the wasp injections do in fact work in rejuvenating Janice until they are taken too far. The film’s faults lie in its budget only; the script is sound and the concept actually quite strong, as one may expect from Corman. Alas, though, there’s very little wasp-related spectacle here.