Tsunambee (2015) Review

Tsunambee (2015) Review

 

2020 has showcased a lot of unexpected events, including a brief invasion of murder hornets. So, it seemed appropriate to review a movie about a plague of killer bees trying to ape off the success of other hybrid movies of giant killer animals and natural disasters—at least, that’s what it seems like it’s doing at first. With a title like Tsunambee, how could I resist? Apparently it’s called Waspnado in the UK, and the original full title was Tsunambee: The Wrath Cometh, which makes sense given the bee invasion is touted as some biblical prophecy. Still, sounds like a fun, goofy premise with a little potential for laughs, doesn’t it? 

In the same way 2020 has seen some of the worst events in recent memory, I thought I had seen the worst natural-disaster/killer-animal mashups out there. There’s been Sharknado, Lavalantula, and Avalanche Sharks, to name a few, but nothing on this earth is quite like Tsunambee. It is, without a doubt, a top contender for the absolute worst killer animal movie ever made! In the particular cases of Sharknado and Avalanche Sharks, the filmmakers knew they were making something crappy and just went with it, and those behind Lavalantula actually succeeded in making something genuinely entertaining, not just purposefully so-bad-it’s-good, but Tsunambee carries with it a sense that the filmmakers were making an earnest effort, and it takes itself more seriously than any of the aforementioned films, but that only makes the final product worse than any of them in every single way.

A confusing intro with a woman in a post-apocalyptic world staking the desert ground with a cross fashioned out of branches is followed by an even more confusing expedition of people through the jungle who we don’t see again until the end. Then, we go to a cop shooting a black man in the streets of New York City shortly before buildings start randomly catching on fire, and a little group of survivors tries to escape the big city to seek shelter from the swarms of murderous giant bees, but they team up with Sheriff Feargo (a name that’s possibly a riff on Fargo?) and end up taking refuge in a homestead with some other survivors. That’s the basic plot summary, but there’s so much more stuff that isn’t as easy to explain. There are people who are turned into zombies (ZomBees?) by the bee stings for some reason, and there’s tons of weird religious subtext throughout. Actually, subtext implies subtlety, which this movie has none of, so it’s just text. And that’s only the beginning of what makes Tsunambee so un-bee-lieveable.

Apparently, the budget for this thing was estimated at $780,000. What I think we have here is the most irresponsible spending of a movie budget in the history of Hollywood. Not a dime appeared on screen. Maybe it was some kind of money laundering scheme. The cinematography is overly saturated, badly lit, and awash with a sickly yellow from start to finish. Some of the worst technical moments include visible microphones, the camera appearing in a reflection, recycled effects shots, and even a freeze frame on a dead person to make it look like they’re actually dead and motionless. One of the funniest moments is when the characters are in a car that’s teetering on the edge of a cliff, and it’s not clear if the car is a miniature car on a set or rendered in bad cgi, but what is clear from the aerial shot is that the car is, in fact, not anywhere close to falling off the cliff.

While my review so far may make Tsunambee sound like it’s so incredibly flawed that it’s worth a good laugh, that is sadly not the case. The first 20 minutes are wild, but after that it turns into a cliché Night of the Living Dead-style survival flick, only boring and bad. The runtime is 80 minutes total, but not counting credits it's like an hour fifteen—less than feature length runtime—and it would feel less long to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, extended versions. All the acting is bad, but Sheriff Feargo is the absolute worst. Her line delivery will make your ears bleed. And the bees? Until I saw this I had Empire of the Ants as the preeminent example of bad special effects for giant bugs in movies, which used close-up shots of the ants crudely pasted on shots featuring real actors to create the illusion of giant ants. Even those shots aren’t as bad as the shots of the bees in Tsunambee. It is the worst cgi ever, because it’s used in the simplest way possible, and yet still looks 100 percent fake.

Tsunambee is a travesty of B-movie filmmaking. No pun intended. No jokes at all intended. I cannot stress just how horrible it was to endure, and yet it is also a fascinating example of how wrong a silly little premise like giant killer bees can go.