The Hellstrom Chronicle

In the early 1970s, science-fiction author Frank Herbert (Dune) created the character of Dr. Nils Hellstrom, a rebellious scientist who tries to breed a superior race of humans with insect attributes. Filmmaker Walon Green's The Hellstrom Chronicle—which won the Best Documentary Oscar for 1972—is like a nonfiction (or quasi-nonfiction?) prequel to Herbert's novel Hellstrom's Hive. The pariah Ph.D., played here by actor Lawrence Pressman, attempts to warn the viewer about his controversial theory: namely, that the “lowly” insects, not Homo sapiens, are at the top of the food chain. Given the seemingly relentless stream of environmental toxins produced by man, the creepy-crawlers—ruthless and endlessly adaptive—will be the only ones left after an eco-apocalypse reduces cities to ruins. Striking nature footage (accompanied by a Lalo Schifrin soundtrack) shows extreme close-ups of marauding ants, bees, mosquitoes, butterflies, spiders, centipedes, and beetles to illustrate Hellstrom's various points about bug versatility and behavior, and the macrophotography is every bit as good as the visuals seen in 1996 in the less dire French art-house hit Microcosmos (VL Online-9/97). While the sturm-und-drang rants and prophecies here regarding human extinction might seem heavy-handed, they were standard for an era when industrial pollution made frequent headlines in newspapers and magazines. Of course, many would say the message is still valid in 2012, whether the bearer of bad news is genuine or a storyteller's invention. Highly recommended. (C. Cassady)