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But what is surely the strangest film about our doomsday fantasies arrives this Friday(. Called "Collapse," it features a spell bindingly weird one-man monologue by Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD officer and investigative journalist who believes that we are about to run out of oil, an event sure to plunge the world into a state of collapse since Ruppert is convinced that our entire world economy is built on an unsustainable addiction to petrol. If you ever thought it was impossible to top Beck's over-the-top fantasies, listen to Ruppert, who says that "what I see now is the end of a paradigm that is as cataclysmic as the asteroid event that killed almost all the life on Earth, and certainly the dinosaurs."

The film is directed by Chris Smith, who has made a number of documentaries about oddball characters pursuing impossible dreams -- his 1999 film "American Movie" chronicled the story of a hapless slacker trying to make a $3,000 homemade horror film. But what makes "Collapse" so sneakily compelling is that we have no inkling of what Smith thinks of his subject. Filmed with one camera over the course of two days in the basement of an abandoned meatpacking plant in downtown L.A., "Collapse" is a hermetically sealed package, open to whatever interpretation we might bring to it. It allows us the same freedom we have in watching Beck's show -- we can take it as gospel, be appalled by its wild, undocumented claims or simply watch bemused, appreciating Ruppert's gifts as a performer.

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To say that Ruppert is Beck's psychic twin would be an understatement. Beck comes from the right and Ruppert seems to live on the left -- he believes, for example, that we invaded Iraq for its oil reserves, arguing that we have no intention of ever leaving the country since "we built an embassy compound in Baghdad that's bigger than Vatican City." But both men transcend politics, since no amount of partisan posturing could justify their gloomy certainty about the future.

Asked by Smith at one point in the film if he's ever been called a conspiracy theorist, Ruppert offers the kind of answer you'd expect from Beck. "Of course," he says triumphantly. "But I don't deal in conspiracy theory. I deal in conspiracy fact." Once you get past his brisk dismissals of every form of alternative energy ("Ethanol is an absolute joke -- it takes more energy to make ethanol than you can make burning it"), Ruppert's view of the future isn't so different from Beck's. Neither man is an optimist. If they were optimists, they'd be out of business. What fuels them is a chronic pessimism that is surely born out of years of personal anxieties and career setbacks. Beck is a recovering alcoholic with ADHD while Ruppert, even though Smith offers us little personal biographical information, is clearly a man without family ties who appears to live alone with his dog.