The Lost World (1960) - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - July 24, 1960]

Producer-director Irwin Allen glued some plastic fins onto some live, and no doubt disgruntled, lizards, shot them with macro lens, and christened them DINOSAURS for this loose adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's classic adventure tale.

This might be on par with the colorful and campy television productions (i.e. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space) that made Irwin Allen something of a household name in the sixties, before he became the legendary Master of Disaster in the seventies. I have yet to see it, but my experiences watching reruns of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space, and Allen's lackluster and characterless direction of the both The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, do not fill me with hope.
 

The Swarm (1978) - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - July 13, 1978

Irwin Allen's production of The Swarm is one of the crown jewels of my childhood. The pre-release hype and ballyhoo was impressive, causing the "killer bee" fear mongering of the late-seventies to reach a fever pitch. I had the movie-tie edition of the Arthur Herzog novel and examined each and every black and white photo, wondering if this movie would do for bees was Jaws had done for sharks.

Then the movie opened and, well, the rancid stench of flop sweat and fresh turkey manure filled empty theaters across the nation. Ineptly made and poorly written, The Swarm is a bombastic mess of a movie that was woefully out of touch with the era in which it was made and set. The meandering plot wanders and drifts at a pace that makes a glacial seem like a speed run.

Allen seems to have spent most of his big budget on wrangling an all star cast that, despite all having done solid to great work elsewhere, give performances here that range from wooden to operatically over the top. I think Michael Caine and Richard Widmark, who spend a majority of the film arguing with each other, made bet as to who could chew the most scenery and boy do the splinters fly when they  go at each other.

One of the many joys this film has given is the gleeful delight whenever I take the Warner Bros Studio tour. Being able to see and walk around the raw material with which "Marysville, Texas" was created on the Burbank backlot is an intoxicating joy that will forever have me wanting to take just one more tour and just a few more pictures.
 

The Swarm (1978) - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - July 14, 1978)

For those that might not be paying all that much attention to the posting pattern of these clippings, I switch back and forth between the San Francisco Examiner and the Oakland Tribune for the sake of variety. If I were to post by the when or the where I lived at the time I first saw a particular movie, then the corresponding clipping should be one taken from the Oakland Tribune.

Irwin Allen's Production of The Swarm, as I love to refer to it, was one of the most anticipated movies of 1978 for me. That its release just so happened to coincide with my 12th birthday was just icing on the cake.

I had skimmed Arthur Herzog's source novel, but would not actually read it from start-to-finish for another year or two, and studied the tie-in edition's collection of black and white stills from the upcoming movie. Some of those stills were from scenes that were ultimately trimmed from the theatrical prints.

While I enjoyed The Swarm's bombastic silliness and over-the-top cartoonish style, my parents did not. At all. This movie lived in infamy within our household.

But I still enjoyed The Swarm enough to see it an additional two times on the big screen that month. I think it only lasted a mere two weeks in general release before being yanked from most theaters by its humiliated distributor, Warner Brothers.