jennyhor2004 One of my favourite science fiction films since I first saw it in the mid-1990s on video loan from the University of Wollongong, "Wax or the Discovery of Television among the Bees" is a home movie featuring inventive computer animation, archived film reels, stills, experimental filming methods, not a little humour and some live action; together these illustrate an unusual science fiction plot of body horror, a murder mission, a particular view of history (especially the history of communication technology, Iraq, World War I and the travails of the Jewish people) and an existence beyond death.The film tells the story of Jacob Maker (director David Blair), a disaffected nuclear technician at the Los Alamos nuclear science laboratory who feels guilty that his work in designing and testing remote-controlled missile guidance systems leads to refined mass slaughter; he tries to cope with the dissonance he feels between the nature of his work and his need to support himself and his wife by spending afternoons communing with his hive of bees. These are no ordinary bees: they're descended from a special breed of honey-makers brought back from Iraq, then British Mesopotamia, by Jacob's grandfather James Hive Maker (William S Burroughs – yes, that William S Burroughs, famous junkie and novelist!) and his wife's grandfather in 1917. One day while in a trance with his bees, Jacob receives an unexpected gift that totally transforms his life: the bees penetrate his head through his ear and punch the Bee TV into his brain. The Bee TV gives him a mission and a purpose in life: the universe is unbalanced and he must restore the balance by killing someone.So a strange odyssey begins: Jacob ventures out into a missile test area, following the directions of the Bee TV, where he comes to The Garden of Eden Cave where he finds giant bees related to his Mesopotamian friends living in the Land of the Dead. Revelations about his family history, the true nature of his bees and details of his mission, including the identity of his victim, come to him. He may be the reincarnation of his wife's grandfather Zoltan Abbasid who married James Hive Maker's half-sister, a former telephonist, inventor of a kind of telescope and enthusiastic member of a society dedicated to communicating with the dead. James was jealous of Abbasid and arranged for him to be killed by his bees so he, James, could inherit Abbasid's bees. After death Jacob passes through lives in other dimensions before he is transformed into a missile sent to kill the reincarnations of those responsible for Abbasid's death, now living in Iraq on the eve of the first US invasion of that country in 1991.It's a hokey story, yes, but one made serious and even plausible by the first-person / stream-of-consciousness point-of-view documentary style of narrative structure, presented in a casual, monotone and above all calm voice by Blair himself. Superficially linear in its story-telling, the plot flips back and forth between past and present, and between present and future, and presents a bewildering mish-mash of philosophies and mythology including esoteric occultism and spiritualism, Bible stories, motifs and themes, belief in karma and reincarnation, and New Age ideas about the karmic connections among the living that continue into their next lives after they have died. Startling and unusual computer animation tricks flip the screen, roll it, spin it around and even turn it into silhouettes of lever-arch folders to simulate the movements of birds and other flying creatures. Animated images can look quite dated but are still very inventive and Blair and his wife, both computer programmers, use them cleverly to create three-dimensional figures and geometrical shapes and patterns, and to emphasise the alien nature of the bees, the Bee TV and the worlds they normally inhabit.The information overload fleshes out the very bizarre story of karma and transcendence with the goal of atonement and redemption for past sins and the love for humanity that overcomes violence and death. The joining of Jacob, Zoltan Abbasid and their two bomb victims after death suggests forgiveness on both sides. Karma works in such a way that those who kill with violence will themselves be punished with death by violence, as the dead seek vengeance on those who kill them. Jacob himself is both victim and murderer … or is it the other way around? In its own, rather flat way, "Wax …" turns out to be a surprisingly moral and political film. It passes no judgement on the morality of the Iraq War or the wars that follow in its wake but it does suggest that those who kill may themselves be killed in the same way … if not in this life, then in the next.Repeated viewings are needed to understand the film more fully; each repeat reveals something new and unexpected humour emerges as well – how can there be telephones to dial the emergency number even in the deepest caves or the most barren deserts? Those overwhelmed by the many esoteric references that relate to nothing in their current lives (to say nothing of what they might have experienced before their birth and what will greet them in their next lives) can just relax and enjoy the strangest of strange head trips.

chaos-rampant Amazing title for a movie, no? It's what made me get it in the first place, that and the promise of weird. They weren't lying. What the hell was that? Something about Mesopotamian bees, souls living inside weapons, the land of the dead in the Moon, Cain, the Trinity site, the tower of Babel, and a planet TV transmitting the dead of the future inside the Garden of Eden Cave which (the dead) are giant bees. There's also stuff about a Supranormal Film Society trying to capture the dead on film in the 1920's, the letter X, missiles turning into flying saucers, a beekeeper who is murdered by his own bees, and the cities of the dead.It sounds like a big ball of spiritual-cum-metaphysical hogwash at first and well... it still sounds like a big ball of hogwash in the end, but somewhere along the way, if you resign yourself to the distinct possibility that there's no profound meaning to be gleaned and that if there is meaning it's flying way over your head, that racking your brain to connect pieces that don't really seem to fit together in any meaningful way and sound more like a science fiction mythological journey, if you can accept it as such and go with it, the movie can still be enjoyed both for the hallucinogenic trance it's prone to inflict if given enough room and the lyrical prose. Every now and then something beautiful comes along ("the graveyards where the new words are born") that doesn't make much sense but it's still beautiful.It's all narrated by someone who sounds a lot like Nobody from DEAD MAN (and a lot of what he says sound like something a spaced-out Nobody of the future would say).IMDb says it's a documentary but it's not. It reads more like the transcripts of some philosophizing drug fiend who dropped acid and walked around in the New Mexico desert and came back to write about it.Here are some excerpts: "our world was puny and finite in comparison with the world of the bees" "one of the dead of the future arrived... it was grotesque with four brains on a single body." "I lived in a mad tower above Trinity site, the day of my death the other dead came to visit me, and they said the bees would come to live there and the flying saucers so you will know that through the grace of God, the maker of people, his Son the saviour of the Christians and those bees who swarmed through the air that though you were dead you were born Zoltan Abbashid on July 11 1882. This was true." "the first place you stop after you die is the pulsating place which is designed to be familiar for people who used to have bodies. I became a short poem in the language of Cain. I would get my new body after I killed." "I followed my enemies through the bee television and arrived over Bashra, Southern Iraq, in the year 1991. Now I was going to kill. That was my job." This played over a combination of grainy stock footage, footage of a guy walking around New Mexico in a beekeeper's suit, and dated video SFX.

Mason1024 Not unlike an acid trip, I don't think this film is meant to be clearly "understood" in its entirety. You have to pay attention and give it some thought, like modern symphonic music or abstract painting, but doing so might just reward you with a strong appreciation. It is (a bit dated) psychedelic eye candy and food for thought. It can be rather depressing, or if taken lightly, can be quite comical. I found myself dumbfounded, asking the screen "WHAT?!" several times, but it was a good kind of "what?" because it's so off the wall. If you discount anything mind-bending or mentally challenging as boring or stupid, if your idea of great film-making is "Signs" or "True Lies," don't bother with "Wax."

Highway-6 it's a weird movie but maybe a little bit less so if you think about it as having a kind-of antiwar message -- the guy gets so overwhelmed by guilt over the job he does that he basically loses his mind and imagines himself to be a missile that doesn't want to hit its target.or, another way of thinking about it is, what would happen if weapons could be haunted by the people that they kill? in order to do that you have to make the weapons into living things, which is a big part of where the movie's weirdness comes from, but at the same time there's a real valid point to it, i think -- which is that it asks us to think about the way we wage war, which is shown on t.v. so that it seems not to have a cost in human lives, when in fact, of course, the toll in human life of wars like desert storm is extraordinary and tragic.i think the movie DOES get a little overwrought with its technical events from time to time, but i think too that it DOES have a basic message that helps to understand it, and it'd be a shame if that message was missed because i think, whatever its flaws, it conveys and explores that message (about the human toll of "pushbutton" or antiseptic modern wars) brilliantly.oh, and it made MY dog talk, too. how about that? i'm convinced anyone who sees this movie seven times can be deemed legally insane. having said all i said above, i have to admit that this is probably the absolute STRANGEST movie i've ever seen, and i've seen some strange ones. i liked it anyway, though.