“Tsunambee” (2015): Confusing Killer Bee Movie Has No Sting

Tsunambee. It’s a great title, a title that fills your imagination with images of wave after wave after wave of killer bees rolling over hundreds, perhaps thousands of ‘innocent’ people vainly trying to flee from the death by a million stings. (Those allergic to bee stings, if course, violently explode in a burst of blood, guts, and honey.)

So, imagine the disappointment and anger you will feel after sitting through the actual film and discovering there are hardly any bees even in it. There are a few badly animated bee swarms, beefed-up with closeups of giant bees that look like cardboard cutouts being waved in front of the camera, but they are outperformed by the hammy actors pretending to swat them away. There’s a lot of gibberish about biblical passages about how those who believe in God won’t get stung, but not nearly enough to make sense or add anything to the plot. There are even a few zombies who rise to attack after having been killed by badly animated bees, although no connection between zombies and sting victims is ever explained.

There’s a lot of stuff going on…just nothing that deserves a cool label like Tsunambee. It’s more of a Puddlebee.

Codirected by Thomas Martwick and Milko Davis Main Director (codirectors of the equally awesomely titled Z/Rex: The Jurassic Dead). Tsunambee tells the story of a disparate group of survivors who band together to escape…something. Sometimes it’s the bees, sometimes it’s an earthquake, sometimes it’s zombies and sometimes it’s each other. All of it is badly acted or animated. None of it is believable or explained.

There are several different factors in the group, including a local sheriff named, we kid you not, Feargo (Stacy Pederson, Eat), a whiny redneck named Jesse (Shale Le Page, Justice League: Dawn of Apokolips) and a cliché street punk named JB (Ruselis Aumeen Perry, Justice League: Dawn of Apokolips) and his almost unintelligible sister Chica (Maria DeCoste). As you would expect, none of them get along at first, reluctantly start to become friends and then bond together when the script tells them to. There isn’t any real character development; the only one you will remember 10 minutes after the movie ends is Le Page, but only because his performance is so annoying you spend all his screen time praying for a wave of killer bees to swarm him to death.

Spoiler alert: Your prayers will be answered, but like the rest of Tsunambee, the thing you see isn’t worth watching.

Tsunambee   (1 / 5)

John Black

John Black still remembers his first horror movie, sneaking in to a double-feature of Horror House with Frankie Avalon and a Boris Karloff film he can’t remember the name of but will always remember for giving him his first glimpse of cinematic nudity as one of the actresses moved from the bed to the door without putting on any underwear! (Fond family memory: That glimpse, when discovered by his parents, cased John’s mom to call the theater and yelling at the manager for letting her son see ‘such filth’.) Luckily, John was more impressed by the blood and horror than the bare haunches and quickly became a devotee of the genre.

John has been a professional movie reviewer since 1987, when his first review – of a Robert De Niro film called Angel Heart – appeared in the entertainment section of The Cape Codder newspaper. He’s been writing about film ever since, primarily now as the entertainment editor at Boston Event Guide. Hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t watch at least one movie, which is how he thinks life was meant to be.