Swarmed is a 2005 Canadian made-for-television film directed by Paul Ziller, produced by Neil Bregman and Stefan Wodoslawsky, distributed by Syfy, and starring Michael Shanks, Carol Alt, Richard Chevolleau, Booth Savage, Christopher Bondy and Tim Thomerson.
Scientist Kent Horvarth (Shanks) invents a new pesticide and tests it on a group of yellow jacket wasps; the result is that all but two of them, who had pheromonal advances, were killed. When the two remaining wasps are kept locked, a janitor accidentally releases them, which opens up a threat to the entire town. With help of people like Cristina Brown (Alt) and his exterminator friends Q (Chevolleau) and Rafe, Kent now has to find a way to stop the wasps from attacking and killing the population.
Swarmed provides examples of:
- Asshole Victim: The Chief and Washburn pretty much get this treatment since they just ignored about the threat the wasps posed until they attacked them. A minor case of this can also be argued for Melanie, due to her partially sadistic and apathetic nature.
- Atrocious Arthropods: The advanced yellow jacket wasps.
- City with No Name: The town where the movie is set in is never addressed or named.
- Covers Always Lie: In the movie, the sky never gets to the color that it shows in the official poster (pictured above). It always remains in a normal daytime, even during the climax, though the ending that follows after is set at night.
- Da Chief: The Chief of Police is one of a particularly arrogant kind.
- Dirty Cop: The Chief of Police doesn't necessarily commit any criminal acts, but he risks the town's safety with his ignorance of the wasps.
- Kill It with Fire: This is how Q kills the wasps with a flamethrower at first, and the entire hero group kills all of them (except the queen) with an incendiary explosion in the climax.
- No Full Name Given: Chuey is only referred to by his first name, and Mayor Gibson by his surname.
- No Name Given: The Chief of Police is only referred to by his title.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Q is only ever known by his nickname, and his actual name is never mentioned.
- Sadist: The reporter Melanie Sheer is strongly implied to be this.
- Scary Stinging Swarm: The wasps group into progressively larger swarms as the plot advances, eventually reaching their maximum by the time they attack the cook-off.
- Token Black Friend: Q isn't the only black character in the movie's cast, but he's the only one who's part of the main hero group, and is one of Kent's friends.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- The janitor who accidentally released the two advanced wasps that survived Kent's experiment, which effectively kicks off the movie's main plot.
- Q makes the mistake of using Kent’s pesticide during one of his jobs, quickly turning the amount of mutated wasps from the solitary escapee from the lab into a hundred that quickly attracts and mutates more.
- Vagueness Is Coming: Kent, Cristina and Agent Heydon try to tell the Chief and Washburn to cancel the cook-off due to the potential threat of the advanced wasps. The Chief simply ignores them, while Washburn threatens them with legal action in favor of simply taking safety measures, and both are eventually killed off by the wasps.
- What Happened to the Mouse? / Uncertain Doom: The cameraman Chuey is last seen videotaping Melanie as she's killed by the wasps. While he entered a cabin to protect himself from the wasps, we never get to know if he survived the attack in the end, as he doesn't have any further screentime after that moment.
- Wicked Wasps: The yellow jacket wasps, specifically a fictional advanced variant, serve as the movie's villains.
