Date: 5 Jan 2001 Watched the following movie last night: "Twilight of the Cockroaches", part-animated and part-real-world late-80s Japanese movie. Human-cockroach interaction, from the roaches' point of view. Plot: A man named Seito is living in deep depression. His wife left him several years ago. He has fallen into a rut, doesn't clean up his house, leaves food and drink sitting all over the place. Spends hours sitting around brooding. Naturally, the roaches love it. They've become so spoiled that they walk around openly in his house, unafraid. They give praise to Seito for ending the constant warfare between man and roach. For his part, Seito has found the roaches to be a sort of perverse entertainment which suits his mood perfectly. So he does nothing to try to keep their numbers down. Elsewhere, roaches don't have such a good life. They live in a highly militarized society, making commando raids for food, staying under cover at all times, and suffering a staggering mortality rate. In Seito's house, only the oldest roaches can remember the days when they lived the same way, when Seito still made an effort to keep his house clean. Their warnings about the hazards of the roaches' current well-fed lifestyle go unheeded. But they are about to suffer a holocaust. Seito has met a new woman, and wants to impress her by cleaning up his act. First priority: kill the cockroaches. Verdict: two antennae up. Bonus for frat-boys: this movie contains what may be the most socially-responsible talking-turd scene in cinema history, in which a talking turd berates a pretty young female cockroach (never thought I'd say *that*)for being prejudiced against talking turds. But 'Twilight of the Cockroaches' is not the strangest movie I've ever seen. Not even close. That honor goes to "Wax; or, the Discovery of Television Among the Bees." This is an early-90s film which makes extensive use of simple, homemade computer generated images. The background: In the late 1910s, an Englishman who has taken part in efforts to photograph the souls of dead soldiers, and who is also a beekeeper, imports into England a load of bees native to Mesopotamia. They soon prove to be, in all respects, superior to normal bees; they begin to spread quickly across the English countryside. Before long, he packs up his bees and moves to America. The present: the grandson of this beekeeper grew up in the town founded by his grandfather: Garden of Eden, Kansas, a community filled with eerie, disturbing statues of Old Testament people. Now, he lives in New Mexico, working as a computer programmer with the Defense Department, as does his wife. His hobby is beekeeping; he spends several hours per day working with the descendants of his grandpa's Mesopotamian bees. One day, he blacks out and begins receiving visions. When he comes to, he begins to slowly come to the realization that the bees have implanted into his head a tiny television receiver, through which he is receiving signals. Under the influence of the bee-TV, he goes on a journey, first by car and then by foot, across New Mexico, wearing his beekeeping suit the whole way. His eventual destination: Carlsbad Caverns, where he intends to find the Garden of Eden. I won't spoil the rest for you- the last third or so of the movie is pretty impenetrable anyway- but it involves the main character being reincarnated as one of a pair of twin female scientists. Verdict: One Antenna Up. Pretty interesting until the muddled final section. And my description really fails to do justice to how weird this movie is. I rented both of these movies at the local Blockbuster, by the by. Joel T.