How many potent ideas went unnoticed under the guise of no-budget jazzing in Roger Corman's zesty quickies? The title of this sci-fi chiller suggests links to the insectoid-menace films of the '50s, yet the mordant tone already belongs to the following decade, the satire of cosmetics trying to cover up systematic body-panic. The anxiety is Susan Cabot's as the New York queen bee facing insecurities, a former glamour girl whose company, as befits the cult of appearances, has taken a dip in popularity as aging lines materialize on her advertising-layout visage. The search for youth, according to Leo Gordon's screenplay (not as witty as Charles B. Griffith's throwaways), braids aesthetic vanity with economical stability, thus Cabot takes in kooky scientist Michael Mark, whose experiments with wasp enzymes have regressed dogs back into puppies. Cabot offers herself as guinea pig, but patience turns out not to be one of her qualities; serum dosage gets jacked up to speed up the rejuvenating process and kick in the genre's de rigueur side-effects -- Cabot springs a big hairy wasp noggin, complete with buzzing jaws, the better to munch on the necks of pipe-smoking William Roerick and rotund Corman regular Bruno VeSota. She may end on the floor with a faceful of acid, but to the director such absurd monstrosities will always be collateral to the world he was so fond of vaporizing. With Anthony Eisley, and Barboura Morris. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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