THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE Blu-ray Review

I had never heard of The Hellstrom Chronicle before seeing it posted as a Blu-ray release from Olive Films. Now, I think I'll be showing it to everyone I know.  The film is disarming in its sincerity. The passion with which Professor Nils Hellstrom addresses the camera when talking about his fears for the future of humanity is alarming. Olive Films' Blu-ray presentation of this film is quite solid, the only thing that bums me out is the lack of bonus material for this film that is begging for context. However, don't let that keep you from watching it, it is a masterpiece.

Professor Hellstrom, a famous entomologist, is so shaken by the savagery and ferocity of the predatory insect world that he films this "documentary" to warn mankind of its danger. Featuring stunning microphotography of a variety of insects and plants that include ultra close-ups of wars between ant colonies and a gigantic praying mantis practicing cannibalism. This unusual blend of horror film and nature study won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1972.

The Hellstrom Chronicle is a documentary, as you can see above it even won the documentary prize at the '72 Academy Awards.  The film is much more than that, and at the same time, barely a documentary at all. The Hellstrom Chronicle is a warning from Dr. Nils Hellstrom to the future that the human race is not the dominant one, and that in the race for dominance over the planet, we are bound to lose, to insects.

This film is probably the closest thing we've seen to a mondo nature film. The director, Walon Green, follows Dr. Nils Hellstrom, a scientist with a message of doom, as he compares the insect world to the human world in an attempt to show how feeble we really are in the grand scheme of things. As evidence of insects' mastery of their surroundings, the film employs hundreds of instances of beautiful microphotography that follow show every last detail of the insect anatomy and physiology as well as giving examples of their undeniable natures as perfect survival machines.

The Hellstrom Chronicle feels almost like two films. It is certainly a documentary on insects and a showcase for never before seen microphotography of them in their natural surroundings. It is also a thriller, nay, a horror story about our impending doom. The victim in this film, the one who should be hiding in the closet with a knife waiting to fend of his eventual enemy, is you, the viewer. The information is presented in a ludicrously dramatic way, yet it is straight forward and all backed up by scientific evidence and first hand video footage.

Hellstrom's madness and insistence on proving to you that he's right goes some strange places during the course of the film. One of the most unsettling scenes in the film shows him killing a laboratory mouse with a wasp, just to show you that it can happen. Watching that little mouse convulse and die was a strange experience, and I felt as though the film was going somewhere I didn't understand. It was just another example of Hellstrom's maniacal obsession with getting his message out that unless something drastically changes about the human animal, that we will eventually lose the race to become the dominant species.

This film is incredible in both the world it explores and the characters it involves in the telling of the story. The beautiful glimpses into the insect realm are both horrifying and engrossing. The sights and sounds of a world that we literally trample in our daily lives are lush, dangerous, and engaging. It will certainly make you think, hell, it even made my skin crawl a few times, but it was well worth the ride.

Spoiler alert:

The crazy thing about Dr. Hellstrom is that there is no Dr. Hellstrom. He is a character played by then relatively unknown character actor Lawrence Pressman. He's gone on to become a familiar face in film and on TV, but back then, he could pass for a mad scientist in such a convincing way that it isn't until the final credits roll that we learn he wasn't who he said he was. Nevertheless, the documentary footage is astonishingly good in most cases, and even when it isn't tack sharp, it is fascinating to watch.

The Disc:

Olive Films has brought The Hellstrom Chronicle to Blu-ray/DVD for the first time, and brought with it a very good, if imperfect image transfer. The film has obviously suffered over the years, and I'm sure that some restoration was done, but the image won't win any prizes. The microphotography has survived rather well, though, even if some shots are cleaner than others I tend to think that is the result of how narrow the plane of focus is in such tight quarters rather than any fault of the transfer. Most of the narrative sequences with Hellstrom wold probably fare just as well on DVD, but the close ups of insects and individual moving parts and minute actions definitely shine on Blu-ray. That is what this film is all about, and it is amazing.

The film was scored by Lalo Schifrin (Mission: Impossible), who took the to the task like it was a horror film. The music ratchets up the tension as Hellstrom grows increasingly unstable. The horrifying battles among enemy insect tribes are scored as though they are in a war film. It is really an ingenious way of conferring emotion onto these automatons, seemingly build for destruction. The audio track supports his score and the various bits of dialogue nicely, though they all sound overly ADR'd and detached from the film at times. I'd imagine this film wasn't shot with live sync sound, and that is why everything is looped. I'm used to it.

Unfortunately there are no bonus material to go along with this. I would love to go further into the world of these filmmakers or even see some unused insect footage. Oh well, at least I've got a great film to fall back on.