Who doesn’t love a good bad disaster movie? You don’t go into Sharknado expecting fine cinema, you go in hoping that a guy cuts a shark in half with a chainsaw, and that said shark was delivered to him via tornado. So imagine how excited I was when I first saw a film called Tsunambee. The tagline on the poster is “This is gonna sting a little!” It’s a goofy movie about a tsunami of bees, right? Right…?

No. No it is not.

We open with a woman making a cross out of sticks, then after a Bible passage–IT’S THE “BOOK OF REVELATION,” NOT “REVELATIONS” YOU IDIOTS AND YES THIS IS MY PET PEEVE–we see an expedition come across giant wasp hives. You read right–not bees, but wasps. Then we have a flashback to a lady cop shooting an unarmed black man. The movie actually begins after that, with disasters happening all around the world. Jay B–you have to say it like it’s all his first name, like “Jaybee”–Chica, and Who Cares are I guess members of a gang since they’re all dressed exclusively in yellow and black. GET IT?! YELLOW AND BLACK! LIKE BEES WASPS!! They flee the city but get stopped by some rednecks and held at gunpoint. I have no idea what happened in-between those two moments; it’s a very jarring cut. A lady cop shows up and deescalates, but things take a turn for the worse when a cloud of giant wasps attack. They pick a few people like Who Cares, but then those dead come back as zombies. Yup, this is the apocalypse, I guess! The survivors hide in a house owned by a man and his daughter, and the wasps leave her alone for some reason. The annoying “comic relief” character dies after betraying everyone, Jay B corners the cop because she was the one who shot his brother–the unarmed black man–and he apparently just figured that out, but Jay B is shot and killed by the little girl. In the end the only survivors are the cop, the little girl, and Chica, who was actually a demon the whole time and is commanding the bees. Wasps. Whatever.

A mid-credits scene jumps to 5 months later and shows a guy being killed by zombies, then we cut back to the woman with the cross from the very first scene. She’s apparently the little girl all grown up, which makes the “5 months later” thing kind of pointless. Oh, and she now has glowing blue eyes and energy powers that she uses on the wasps. I don’t know either.

I think I see what happened here. I imagine the original script was about locusts, since that’s very biblical and apocalyptic and all that, but someone during production came up with the pun title Tsunambee, so they were changed to… wasps? It’s not a perfect theory, but it’s me putting more thought into this movie than the filmmakers did! The plot is a mess with dialogue that seems to refer to scenes that weren’t in the film, some characters are just completely useless, and overly long discussions on whether the characters still believe in God. I don’t care that you saw you mother die when you were young, lady cop! It has no bearing on the plot and doesn’t relate to you being trigger happy!

Oh, and the special effects are also very bad. A step above Birdemic: Shock and Terror, but just barely. The point goes to Birdemic, though, because this wasn’t fun at all. It masqueraded as a dumb animal-related disaster movie but was really a religious, apocalyptic drama that just happened to have giant wasps. What does any of it actually mean? Why was Chica really a demon, who IMDB says was named Sherica? Who is that? Why have her pretend to be a normal human for so long that she was adopted by Jay B’s family? How long ago did the jungle expedition scene actually happen, then? And what’s with the Bene Gesserit bullshit at the end? The movie suggested the little girl was blessed, but how does that become a blue aura and energy powers? I’m sure all these questions will be explained in the sequel, which is never, ever happening.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch Ghost Shark as a palate cleanser, because that’s a movie that lives up to its title by having a spectral shark eat a kid on a Slip ‘N Slide, as God intended.

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