University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

'Chronicle' Marred Only By Hellstrom

By Paul Chaplin

There's a mild war going on.
Mild in the sense that it's
undeclared, but brutal in its
eventual consequences. According
to "The Hellstrom Chronicle," it's
the war of survival, being fought
between man and the insect world.
Our luck, the bugs are winning.

I have to admit that the whole
premise of insect superiority as the
subject of a movie made me
anticipate something like "Willard,"
or "The Andromeda Strain."
"Hellstrom Chronicle," however,
has the happy distinction of being a
documentary produced by David L.
Wolper, perhaps the dean of
television documentaries. The
footage that we see has the double
power of fascinating us and making
us uneasy during the film.

The best performance by a bug,
or groups of bugs, will have to go to
the field termites and their efforts
to save their colony from an attack
of black ants. The narrative speaks
of battlegrounds, and while it does
sound a bit silly on paper, the
magnification a movie screen can
offer does wonders for the conflicts
in such a tiny world. Second best
acting goes to the courageous mate
of the Black Widow, succumbing to
her "obese sexuality."

The one human in the film
doesn't come off as well as the
insects to. "Nils Hellstrom," a
fictional spokesman, is portrayed
by a second rate-actor, who makes
it quite conceivable that the good
doctor just might be mad, despite
the fact that members of the
Department of Entomology of
the Los Angeles Institute of
Technology went over the script to
check for scientific errors. Poor Dr.
Hellstrom isn't even filmed as
nicely as the bugs, being degraded
to some very shoddy color film
stock.

Exactly what we, the audience,
are to make of "The Hellstrom
Chronicle" is a bit hazy for me to
decide; I wasn't sure if I should bat

'Hellstrom': Counting Flies