I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This film deserves another decent review. This is a surrealist kind of film. If you like art house films, proceed. If you like American blockbuster films stay away. This film moves slowly, has no special effects. It is not narrated by Leiv Shriber or Morgan Freeman. This film is really for someone who wants to delve into poetic film making, someone who doesn't mind moving at this slower more thoughtful pace.This is a highly regarded cult film. Poetic in its tone, and relevant still. It was made in 1991, so this is a fascinating look at bees, poetic filmmaking and the potentially political message, although I see this film as an art film most of all.so please, do not watch if you need a typical narrative and lots of action. very exciting for this poet to take in!!

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.

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.

i gave it 3/10 and even that's a gift. the strange thing is that i can't keep myself from suggesting certain people see it. hopefully you're not one of them. the quality is impossibly bad yet somehow some elements sort of stuck in my brain. if you figure out what that's about, let me know?