The Hellstrom Chronicle was a 1971 docudrama based on the work of a fictional Dr. Nils Hellstrom, and produced by David L. Wolper which put forth the thesis that insects will inherit the earth. Backing up his assertions, he detailed the insect's ability to adapt over hundreds of millions of years, and survive the global cataclysms that have doomed the dinosaurs, innumerable other life forms, and which will ultimately doom us. Featuring excellent close-up photography, usually of the insects relentlessly getting the best of mankind, and his efforts to dominate the earth. I saw this movie in junior high, and although it was criticised for being overly sensationalistic, I thought it was both thought provoking and entertaining, a must see for kids even today, as they start to think about man's place in the universe.

After going into the history of insects through the eons, complete with cockroaches the size of cats, the good doctor catalogues a variety of todays arthropods, as they fly around devouring our houses, crops, and spreading diseases among us, in spendid gory and graphic detail. While watching all of this eye candy, the narrarator describes insects as an implacable natural force that have managed to sidestep mankind's ever escalating warfare with them, and the inevitable conclusion that the war will have.

The conclusion was driven home in the final scenes in the Nevada desert, barren except for the myriad of insects crawling and flying around. The narrarator announces that this spot was recently ground zero for a number of nuclear weapons tests, then describes how insects can absorb several times the amount of radiation that would do us humans and most other animals in. The insects would not only survive, but feast on our bloated corpses in the event of nuclear war, a spectre which loomed large during the height of the cold war.

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