Today’s featured insect movie is The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), which I watched at the recommendation of my friend, Michael Maren. Michael knows pretty much everything there is to know about movies, and he thought I’d appreciate it. He was right.
As many reviewers have described it, the movie is part-documentary, part science-fiction. Dr. Hellstrom is a fictional entomologist, played with unctuous creepiness by the actor Lawrence Pressman. He reminds me a little of Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; like Wilder, Pressman darts his eyes back and forth and has that tight little smile that seems to hint that he is dangerously insane.
The script was written by David Seltzer (who would go on to write The Omen) and is full of portentous pronouncements and apocalyptic warnings about how insects are going to outlast us, and that the Day of Reckoning is coming any time now.
What especially surprised me was the music. It’s a huge sound track with a full orchestra—and it stood out as so unusual that I remembered to note the composer in the credits. Wouldn’t you know, it’s Lalo Schifrin. He wrote sound tracks for a bunch of movies and TV shows, among them, the theme from Mission: Impossible. (Side note: Like so many forty-something-year-olds, I grew up watching the show. I happen to think the opening music to Mission: Impossible is one of the best theme songs ever written. And I wanted to marry Barney and BE Casey.)
Despite its somewhat bizarre story frame, the movie is totally, completely worth watching if you have even a passing interest in insects. The camerawork is incredible. We can watch in time-lapse photography the stages of metamorphosis of a butterfly, battles to the death between ant species, the grotesquely-swollen body of a termite queen belting out eggs, and the brief life of a Mayfly. And thanks to the use of hyper-sensitive microphones, we can hear caterpillars munching leaves as easily as we can a kid chomping Cap’n Crunch.
All right, so I could have done without watching Dr. H deliberately make a bee sting a living mouse so that we could witness how quickly the venom killed the mouse. No question, it’s a weird movie. But the insect footage really is remarkable.