Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!
Agck! Bees!
Episode 2.11 “The Sweetest Sting”
(Dir by David Winning, originally aired on January 16th, 1989)
I have never been stung by a bee or a wasp.
I’m extremely lucky. All of my sisters and all of my cousins have been stung once or twice. My mom was stung multiple times when I was little. But I have never once been stung. I once had a wasp fly straight into my hair and I was able to shake it out without it stinging me. I have had bees land on my bare arm and just sit there without stinging. I once knocked a wasp nest off of a farm doorway and the wasps, while obviously angry, made no attempt to sting me in retaliation. For whatever reasons, the wasps and the bees have decided not to mar my beautiful skin with any of their stingers and I appreciate them for that.
Of course, I’m also very scared that they might someday change their mind. I have no idea what it feels like to be stung but I know it’s painful. On a more serious note, I have no idea whether or not I’m allergic to bees or wasps. I appreciate their kindness but I’m still terrified of their capriciousness.
That’s why this somewhat silly episode of Friday the 13th freaked me out. I say silly because it was about McCabe (Art Hindle), a psycho beekeeper who kept all of his bees in a cursed hive. Whenever he would unleash the bees, the cheap special effects were so bad that it would have made me laugh if not for the fact that I’m already scared enough of innocent bees. Imagine how I feel about cursed ones!
The bees produced cursed honey that can be used to restore the youth of people who allow themselves to be stung by McCabe’s bees. (Because they’re magic bees, they don’t die after stinging someone. I always understood that stinging someone caused a bee to be ripped in half so I’m not sure how the magic works but whatever. I actually kind of feel bad for bees now.) However, the people who accept McCabe’s youth treatment have to have a constant supply of honey and McCabe needs a constant supply of dead bodies so that his clients can fake their own deaths. So, McCabe orders his clients to kill if they want to remain young.
To be honest, the whole plot kind of feels like it was made up on the spot but the great Canadian character actor Art Hindle gives an amusingly over-the-top performance as McCabe. McCabe is the type of villain who laughs whenever he’s thinking about doing something evil. There’s nothing subtle about Hindle’s performance but it works in the contest of the episode’s overall absurdity. The bees are obviously fake. Art Hindle chews up every piece of scenery he can get his hands on. The episode’s a lot of fun.
Through the Shattered Lens 