Wax: Or the Discovery Of Television Among the Bees

"It was the dead wife of Zoltan Abassid calling me from the moon." Catchy dialogue, eh? I found this title listed in my newspaper, and called a colleague to find out if he knew anything about it. He not only knew the film, he'd managed to watch half of it before bailing out. I thought this was a little extreme: until I reached the halfway point of Wax myself, and realized that my colleague had huge reservoirs of patience that I could only marvel at. I finished it. My children bowed out early, as did the dog, but my wife empathized and stuck with me for the first 20 minutes, after which a distinct nasal whine informed me that she'd embarked on a journey to the land of winken, blinken, and nod. David Blair's Wax is the story, and I use the term very loosely here, of a man named Jacob Maker, a weapons-guidance designer and beekeeper in Alamagordo, NM. What happens is best described by the video jacket: "When the bees drill a hole in Jacob's head and insert a television whose supernatural images control his will, Jacob enters a hallucinatory alternative reality--a radiant world where A-bombs, the Gulf War and insects collide." Got that? Wax does feature a lot of nifty video special effects and a handful of decent computer-animated sequences, but the "story"--even when its halfway coherent, which is rarely--is so lacking in character and dramatic tension that the experience overall is more numbing than quaffing a Big Gulp size container of saki. Of course, there will be those sadomasochists out there who say: wait a sec, this can't be that bad. Ha ha. Call me after you've watched the whole enchilada: we'll compare pejoratives. Not recommended. (R. Pitman)