Weirdhouse Cinema: The Wasp Woman (1959)

Speaker 00:00

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. [upbeat music] Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Robert Lamb· Host0:09

[upbeat music] Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Joe McCormick· Host0:20

And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're gonna be talking about the 1959 drive-in sci-fi horror movie, The Wasp Woman, starring Susan Cabot, directed by Roger Corman. It is a tale of beauty, vanity, uh, mortal anxiety, and science gone wrong, shot in two weeks for under $50,000. [laughs] And this one is classic late '50s Corman. It is lean, mean, funny, weird, stupid, and smart at the same time. Uh, it's barely over 70 minutes runtime in the longest cut. I think there are shorter cuts that are sub-70. I don't know which one you watched but- I watched the theatrical cut, which is the shorter. Oh, okay.

Robert Lamb· Host1:04

And I believe, we'll get into this later, but I think you watched the TV cut. Um- Okay. Yeah.

Joe McCormick· Host1:10

So I got some stuff you didn't see, I guess.

Robert Lamb· Host1:12

Right. Right. Namely the, the w- the intro. Um- Okay.

Joe McCormick· Host1:16

Okay.

Robert Lamb· Host1:16

So we'll get into some of those differences as we proceed.

Joe McCormick· Host1:18

Yeah. Uh, I think it's funny that like some of these late '50s Corman movies, it is extremely short and quite brisk in the storytelling, and yet still feels