It’s been too long since we’ve had a good old creature feature on this blog, so today we’re going to talk about The savage bees. Sure, the creature in this movie is actually a whole swarm of creatures, but it has pretty much all the trappings of the genre. A swarm of Africanized bees, made hyper aggressive as the result of a scientific experiment, is inadvertently brought over by ship to New Orleans and threatens to wreak havoc on the Mardi Gras celebrations. The local sheriff teams up with a couple scientists to meet the threat. Considering the genre, they are remarkably capable.

Especially at foresight. Because all the way back in 1976, they predicted that, forty years later, Jan Smit would knock over a chess set in a music video of his which, seventeen years after, would be discussed on a blog about chess in popular culture. And so they decided, apropos of nothing, to put a shot right at the start of the movie of a chessboard that’s been knocked over, thereby setting up a rare sequel of sorts on this blog.

Reconstructing the position is rather pointless, as most pieces are scattered randomly over the board and the table around it.It being pointless, I immediately did it:¹

Now aren’t you glad I did that? All the knocked over pieces have been left out, as it was impossible to put them on the right square. Admittedly, it was almost impossible for the few pieces that are still standing. For example, the knight I put on g5 is actually standing on the corner between f4, f5, g5, an g4.

So it’s not just the bees that are savage here, it’s the knights too.

Realism: NA I’ve given scores from 0 to 5, I’ve given just a – if the position was not actually a chess position, but I think this is the first ‘non applicable’.

Probable winner: Nobody, due to a lack of players.

^{1. [A very civilized diagram editor.] ↩}