The Wasp Woman
It's been unusually warm in Ohio of
late—oh, 90s and up to 100 with humidity to match and daily thunderstorms. Last night, we tried to
catch a baseball game (and 4th of July fireworks after)
with the Class “A” Mahoning Valley Scrappers, but it
got thunder-stormed out. Fortunately, I still have power and cable,
and that can mean only one thing---
Movie Notes from the Rust Belt
Youngstown, Ohio
Today's feature (via Netflix) is that
1959 Roger Corman favorite in the public domain, The Wasp Woman.
Almost no story to get in the way here. Woman who owns a cosmetics firm is aging and losing
business. She finds a scientist who makes an age reverser made out
of wasp stuff. The underlying problem is that that, while the wasp
stuff does make you youthful, it also turns you into a blood sucking
vampire-like wasp thing. You know, yin/yang.....the good with the
bad. Vampire-like wasp woman is finally killed off by throwing acid
on her and tossing her out of a high-rise.
If ever confronted by a wasp woman,
remember to throw acid on her then toss her out a window. That most
likely will do the trick.
We got Michael Mark playing the
scientist—he was born in Russia in the 1880s, came to America to
make his fortune in 1910, acted in the movies from 1928 until 1969,
and died at age 88 in El Lay. Not a bad life, Mike.
We got Barboura Morris, a class-mate of
Roger Corman, playing Mary, the good girl with the great smile. She
died at age 43 in Santa Monica of a stroke in 1975.
Finally, we got 5 foot 2 inch Susan
Cabot (born Harriett Shapiro in 1927) as the Wasp Woman herself. The
character is tragic, but that's nothin' compared to her real life.
She was born to a Russian Jewish family in Boston but was raised in a
series of orphanages. Got married and divorced early on, then had a
highly publicized affair with King Hussein of Jordan in 1959, which
ended when the good King discovered that his sweetie was a Jew. In
1968, she married a feller named Michael Roman and that marriage
lasted until 1983 and produced a dwarf son, Timothy. Rumor has it
that her husband, Michael Roman, left her because of her mental
instability due to her swiping the dwarf's growth hormone and taking
it herself. One of her co-workers, an actor named Christopher Jones,
has claimed paternity of the dwarf, though God only knows why. Her
life ended on 12-10-86 in Encino when the dwarf bludgeoned her to
death in her sleep with a weight-lifting bar.
When the police arrived at the murder scene,
the dwarf told them that a Mexican dressed as a ninja broke in,
knocked him out, then killed his mother in her wall-and-ceiling
mirrored bedroom and stole 70 grand in cash. Typical. You know how
those Mexican ninjas are. The police were a tad skeptical due to the
presence in the house of four—count 'em four—attack Akitas. The
police just didn't see how even a Mexican ninja could out-duel 4
attack Akitas. So they took Timothy (age 22) downtown where he
cracked and led the police to the murder weapon, hidden under a box
of Bold 3 laundry detergent.
Timothy is dead now—heart failure, I
believe.
Whoever the biological father of
Timothy is (or was), Susan managed to squeeze regular “you're the
dad” payments out of the King of Jordan.
You just can't make up crap like that.
The most bizarre aspect of this movie,
though, is the presence, in the beginning of the movie, of a dented
1960 or 1961 Ford Ranchero—and later in the movie I could have
SWORN I saw the tail-light assembly of a 1963 Chevy flit past in a
street scene. Only Roger Corman could somehow manage to have a 1960
Ranchero and a 1963 Chevy appear in a 1959 movie.
Worth a look for that alone.
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