October Horror Challenge 2019 #57: "The Wasp Woman"

I know I've watched this movie before, but I couldn't remember much about it, so I decided to check it out again. I thought maybe I didn't remember much because I watched this the year I watched over 200 movies one October, but now that I've seen the movie again, i think it was just the glacial pace of the movie that put me to sleep, because the same thing happened again, and i had a hard time staying awake.

So this movie is about a woman who is the face of a major cosmetics company, but she's getting older,  and she's obsessed with staying young at whatever the cost. A disgraced doctor who does experiments on wasps and the royal jelly they produce insists that he is developing a serum that can reduce the effects of aging. The woman hires the doctor and fully finds his experiments in exchange for him letting her be the one to test the serum, but as you can probably guess, things go horribly wrong and the serum turns her into a monster.

I like the idea behind this movie. Our society is obsessed with youth and hiding the signs of aging, so the plot seems relevant even now. The main character isn't a bad actress, and her transformation is entertaining. She gets crazy and acts like an addict long before the serum turns her into an actual monster, and it's creepy and even kind of sad.

With so many good ideas floating around in it, I don't know how the movie manages to drag so much, but only the doctor and the main character are played by good actors. Everyone else looks bored, almost like they're sleepwalking, and the elevator music soundtrack seriously sounds like something you'd play to get kids to go to sleep. This is the kind of movie that would benefit from a remake that could build on its strengths and improve everything that didn't work.