The Worst Movies... Ever -- Wax and the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

I suppose it is inevitable that there have been many more bad movies made in the not-so long history of cinema than good ones. After all, being good at something takes time, dedication, skill and luck. Not too many people have those things, and even the very best fuck up every once in a while.

Making a piece of shit, though, is easy. I should know. I mean, look at this blog.

So I suppose the point is that I will probably never run of out movies to write about for this series. And even if I managed to write about every shitty movie that has ever been made (which of course is impossible), they're still cranking out new ones every week.

So far I've tried to be selective, to weed out those well-meaning hacks whose only sin was to get caught in the buzz saw of their own inescapable hackitude. After all, who but a bastard enjoys kicking an old, sagging dog in the balls?

What I've tried to focus on, rather, is people who either had some sort of really fucking evil/stupid intent, or were just trying to make an easy, exploitative buck, or who managed to fail on such a grand scale of every level of moviemaking it makes you wonder if they'd ever watched a movie in their life... and if they have, whether they've had poisoned dog shit injected into their brain stem since then.

Today's movie is like that. And man oh man, is it a doozy.

It's....

Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

Go ahead, read that title again. I'll wait.

Doesn't help, does it? Believe me, I can sympathize. I watched this movie in college for a class called Writing Through Media, one of those classes that's supposed to be easy but ends up, in my case, being taught by a 95-pound grad student who I'm sure went home every night and smashed his shriveled nuts between biographies of Ingmar Bergman.

So anyhow, he sat us down at made us watch Wax, and I'll be damned if it wasn't one of the most befuddling experiences of my life.

This is the first image that comes up when you do a Google search for "befuddling."

Anyhow, the movie starts with James Maker, a member of the Supernatural Film Society (motto: fuck you, audience!), whose goal is to film the spirits of the dead walking among the living.

Because clearly this isn't a subject that's been covered before.

Suddenly we cut away from James Maker and are introduced to his grandson, Jacob, a flight simulator programmer who also moonlights as a beekeeper of Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather.

With me so far? At least sort of? Good, because this is where things sort of go sideways.

One day, Jacob's bees decide to drill a hole in his head and insert a television.

Seriously.

The bees start using the television to show Jacob various things (though I'm willing to wager it isn't things freakier than this movie). For instance, Maker has a statue of Cain and Able on his front lawn. The bees show the Cain statue murdering the Able statue and then being branded with an X, forcing you to wonder: what really counts as dead for a statue?

This next part I'll just quote directly from a summary of the movie I found:

"Then at work, Jacob wonders why his co-workers never wonder what happens to the missiles they launch that don't come back (never mind that a programmer probably doesn't deal with missile launches), and he realizes that they turn into flying saucers which fly to the moon where the dead live."

At about this point, sitting there, wondering what the fuck is going on, realizing I'm going to have to write about this thing and get a grade, I began to wonder whether someone was going to burst in and tell me I was on Candid Camera.

Sadly, this didn't happen. And by "sadly" I mean, on Candid Camera they usually stop whatever shitty thing is going on.

Wax just went on and on. And on and on, and into (if you can believe this) ever weirder areas. The bees start showing Maker what are supposed to be very strange images, but what are actually just piece-of-shit computer effects that look as though they were rendered in CorelDraw. These are then crossed with stock footage of bombs crossed with stock footage of bees crossed with stock footage of audiences burning themselves to death rather than continuing to watch the movie.

At some point, Maker decides to make a pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden Cave. And by pilgramage I mean like really long, totally inexplicable shots of Maker walking across the desert. In his beekeeper's uniform.

Don't believe me? Click this, if you dare. And yes, you can use this link to watch the entire movie. Speaking as your attorney, I would advise you to avoid this and do something more worthwhile, like clubbing baby seals.

Back to the summary, whose matter-of-factness betrays the sheer insanity of the movie better than anything else possibly could:

"When arriving at the cave, Jacob learns that the cave is actually the entrance to a planet inside of our planet where the bees live. There, he dies and goes to join the world of the dead. For a while, he becomes the X symbol. Then he becomes a poem in the language of Cain. Then he travels to some other planet, including the Planet of Television. Next he decides it's time to fulfill his destiny, which is to kill someone. So, he becomes a bomb and blows up two Iraqi soldiers in a tank. Then he becomes the X symbol with himself, his grandfather's arch enemy, and the two soldiers he blew up."

I've discussed/made fun this movie so many times with friends it's been at different points suggested to me that the movie must have some sort merit to be have been at least so memorable.

These people are wrong.

I mean, I'm sure the director, David Blair -- who spent six years making this filmic equivalent of dead babies -- was trying to make some really serious, deeply felt points about missile launchers, the after-life, and, you know, beekeeping.

But seriously, the thing makes absolutely no sense at all. Watching it, you realize the magnificence of it's ineptitude can only be topped by those rare, majestic turds that rise ever so gracefully out of shitty toilet water.

I wish I could find the essay I wrote that night about the movie. The only thing I remember was that I wrote it in this very Baroque English style, like Dickens, and was bursting at the seams to control myself from what I've been doing right now, and then went downstairs and got drunk with my chums.

Other than that, I don't have the slightest clue what we did that night, but of this I'm sure: a movie about it would have been a lot better than Wax.