Bees should be in more horror movies, in my opinion. As it stands, the only notable horror movies to really use bees as a motif are Candyman and the timeless Nicholas Cage classic The Wicker Man. Royal Jelly could have gone the way of either. Unfortunately, it chose a third option for its execution: over ambitious to the point it’s barely a movie and more a string of poorly connected plot beats.

“Royal jelly” refers to special formula larval worker honeybees are fed, the enzymes of which trigger a biological process that turns ordinary workers bees into queens capable of reproduction. Royal Jelly is the tale of Aster (Elizabeth McCoy), a lonely teenage girl straight out of 2012 Wattpad. She’s ~not like other girls~ with their makeup, dyed hair, and being judgmental for fun! She has glasses and brown hair, and wears shirts featuring popular British rock bands instead of floral prints! And, worst of all, she has interests. Aster’s main source of joy in life is beekeeping, a hobby that helps her feel close to her dead mother. A hobby her stepsister, Drew (Raylen Ladner), feels compelled to mercilessly bully her for, pulling “pranks” to embarrass her that are either irrationally contrived or irrationally childish.

It’s a ham-fisted homage to Cinderella (Aster’s stepmother is literally credited as “Tremaine”  – a nod to Lady Tremaine of Disney’s Cinderella), and Aster’s fairy godmother arrives in the form of a substitute teacher who immediately spots Aster’s outcast position and proceeds to get way too cozy with her, way too fast. Tresa (Sherry Lattanzi) acts more like a fellow student with Aster, pranking and teasing Drew and her friends, giving Aster rides home, and taking her out for dinner within days of arriving at her school. And because this behavior apparently isn’t weird or, you know, incredibly predatory in the universe in which the movie takes place, no one seems to care.

Then, one night, Tresa instigates a prank that’s a step too far for Drew’s friends, and they retaliate by smashing Aster’s beloved beehives. Or, more accurately, somewhat violently knocking over empty boxes meant to represent beehives–the hive boxes don’t even have frames in them (which is where the actual honeycomb where the bees live and make honey is), and there are no bees to be seen. I understand needing to be careful with your props on a limited budget, but Royal Jelly takes itself far too seriously for such a milquetoast scene to have the impact it’s supposed to.

Heartbroken that her empty hive boxes got knocked over, Aster runs from the scene of the felony, and Tresa is already waiting. She whisks Aster off to her family farm, where Aster immediately gets comfortable, with no real thought about school, or her family, after that point. And even though an actual person would call the police if their daughter disappeared in the middle of the night, it never comes up again. Aster spends her time at Tresa’s like an expected guest, and after Tresa finds a late relative’s old hives for Aster to start a new apiary with, the film quickly rockets entirely off the rails into even more nonsensical territory than before.

Royal Jelly hits so many bad teen movie tropes (“weird” loner protagonist bullied for no reason, one-dimensional antagonists, well-meaning but useless father, ableist makeover scene–she’s not suddenly drop-dead gorgeous because she took her glasses off, she always had the potential to look pretty, glasses or not. Now give those back, she needs them to see) and doesn’t even try to put a spin on them in any way. Aster doesn’t even get revenge like Carrie.

Royal Jelly is also paced more like a limited series, with major chunks cut out that would’ve helped it make some kind of sense. The timeline is incomprehensible and there’s no suspense because most things just happen, with little to no buildup, or there’s an insane escalation that could’ve made sense if they’d just slowed down and focused on telling a story.

And while a cutesy post-credits message about saving the bees is nice and all, the bees deserve better than this.

2 out of 10 Bees