The Swarm

The Swarm (1978) is Irwin Allen's all-star disaster picture, free to watch online on iFILM. A distress call from a Texas air base brings General Slater's unit to a room full of corpses. One man is still breathing: entomologist Bradford Crane.

Crane has the answer nobody wants to hear. African killer bees wiped out the base, and the swarm is now racing toward Houston, dropping bodies in every small town it crosses. The brass dismisses him until the death toll grows too large to argue with. Michael Caine takes the lead as Crane, backed by Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland.

Allen, the producer behind The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, poured the budget into spectacle here — including a passenger train sent off the rails by the bees. Reviewers savaged it on release, yet that straight-faced commitment to a ridiculous premise is exactly why 1970s disaster buffs keep circling back. Stream The Swarm (1978) on iFILM.