LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Susan Cabot: Janice Starlin
built 674 days ago
Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) was the face that sold a million cosmetic products, but now – 18 years later – her cosmetics business faces declining sales as she has grown older. Walking right in from the streets is the eccentric Dr. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark) with a miracle solution that’ll reverse the effects of ageing, namely an extract taken from a queen wasp’s jelly.
Source:
The founder and owner of a cosmetic factory, Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot), is concerned with the dropping sale results of her company. The scientist Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark) offers to her his research with wasp enzymes that makes animals younger, and she immediately accepts to hire him, provided she becomes his human subject. She decides by her own to accelerate the treatment injecting additional serum trying to see earlier results, becoming the lethal "Wasp Woman".
Source:
The Wasp Woman does indeed have virtues - or at least, one big one; and that is the intelligent, detailed and quite moving performance of Susan Cabot as Janice Starlin. In justice, it must be pointed out that Cabot was given quality assistance by the film's cinematographer, Harry Newman, and its make-up artist, Grant Keats. Cabot was in her early thirties when she made The Wasp Woman, and over the course of the story has to look both ten years older, and ten years younger. She succeeds at both admirably. Many film productions, even those made by major studios, insist upon aging an actress (even one who is only meant to be about forty, as here) by slapping a grey wig on her and burying her beneath about three inches of latex and greasepaint. In contrast, the work done here is commendably subtle.
Source:
Cabot is sexy and effective as the determined Starlin. Her sleek dresses and black hair foreshadow the nimbleness she employs to become an evil Queen Wasp. Starlin commands everyone’s attention, viewers and corporate puppets alike, because of her looks and the power she wields as a corporate executive.
Source:
Susan Cabot’s most famous role was ... her final film. In 1960 she played cosmetics company president Janice Starlin in ‘The Wasp Woman’. The $50,000 film has since become a cult classic. In order to save her company and reverse the aging process and 40-year-old Starlin injects an experimental drug made of wasp enzymes to turn her into a 22 year old…but this experimental drug has some wicked side effects. Eventually the vain and powerful businesswoman becomes a ruthless buzzness-woman --- periodically taking the form of a giant wasp and attacking, “stinging”, and devouring her enemies with aplomb. In the end, the giant insect/woman gets hers and is doused in carbolic acid and falls out a window to her death.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Janice Starlin