#curiously caucasian cavepeople

[mst3kproject]

Yeti: Giant of the Twentieth Century

Now for an actual Bigfoot movie.  This one is...uh... well, they sure don't make 'em like this anymore, do they?  I'm rather fond of it because it’s set in Canada for some reason, possibly because that's the only country the film-makers could think of that has both glaciers and big cities?  No matter, I never turn down an opportunity to make fun of my native land.  Nobody in this movie was ever involved in MST3K as far as I can tell, but all of them were in plenty of cheap and terrible Italian films that would make prime fodder for the SoL.

So, like, global warming and shit, right, the glaciers are melting.  This is probably connected with millionaire Morgan Hunnicutt finding a giant hominoid trapped in ice like the Deadly Mantis. Hunnicutt ropes an old friend, crusty paleontologist Professor Henry Waterman, into helping him thaw the thing out for study, and naturally it turns out to still be alive.  The Yeti smashes its way out of its cage and carries off Hunnicutt's grandchildren, Herbie and Jane.  Luckily, Herbie's dog Indio is able to lead the adults to the Yeti's hiding place, and by the time they arrive, captor and captives have bonded.  Could the children be the key to controlling the Yeti during Hunnicutt's planned publicity campaign?  Not if his rivals at Maple Leaf Factors Ltd have anything to say about it!

If you like terrible movies (and you're reading my blog, so I'm gonna assume you do), this one is a gem.  Yeti: Giant of the Twentieth Century is engaging and watchable, but it's also absolutely misconceived on every possible level, from the script to the acting to the special effects.  It is unfortunately a little long at an hour and three quarters, but other than that it's just about perfect.  Anything you could do to make it technically 'better' or 'worse' would only render it less enjoyable.

The opening scene plays out like something from a cartoon, or maybe a skit from Royal Canadian Air Farce: Waterman is trying to enjoy a nice fishing trip when Hunnicutt drops in on him from a helicopter, smokes a huge cigar, helps himself to Waterman's lunch, and generally bothers the poor man until Waterman gives up and agrees to help him with his Yeti.  Fat, jolly Hunnicutt and jowly old Waterman even kind of look like cartoon characters, and the dialogue doesn't give them any more dimension than 'jovial millionaire' and 'grumpy scientist'.  It doesn't really matter, though, because the whole movie is so silly that this actually sets the tone perfectly.

The major source of giggles in the ninety minutes ahead is, of course, the Yeti himself.  The costume is terrible in the best sort of way, being just a fur hood and a foam muscle suit with a little hair on top of it.  There's also a giant fake hand that captive humans can sit in, and a pair of giant fake legs that are unavoidably and hilariously reminiscent of the giant fake Beau Brummel legs from Village of the Giant. Nor can we forget the huge hairy toes that are the first part of the creature we see, sticking out of the block of ice (to melt this, Hunnicutt's employees use flamethrowers, which would not have occurred to me but is certainly efficient.  From now on I will believe that this is also how they got Captain America out of the iceberg and you cannot tell me otherwise).  Forced perspective and greenscreen, both terrible, are used to try to make the Yeti look gigantic.

That's funny enough in itself, but what makes it all even better is the fact that Mimmo Crao, the guy in the Yeti suit, is absolutely giving it his hundred and ten percent!  He has no lines, so his only tools are his facial expressions and the occasional grunt or scream, but I'm damned if he doesn't pour his entire heart and soul into every moment.  Good for him, honestly, because the marriage of the shitty costume and effects with his total dedication is a thing of beauty.

A second fountain of hilarity appears in the shape of scenes in which people go nuts over things like yeti-branded gasoline and breakfast cereal.  We see crowds running down hallways and across parking lots to buy the stuff, jumping in the air and whooping in excitement as they go.  I'm sorry, director Gianfranco Parolini, but the only thing Canadians get that excited over is hockey.

Third, there's the music. I don't talk about music very much on this blog because film is primarily a visual medium, and because music in old movies is rarely noticeably bad – at worst it's kind of mediocre, but that rarely takes too much away.  The music in Yeti: Giant of the Twentieth Century is amazing. The main theme is an off-brand version of Carl Orff's O Fortuna, which probably tells you enough about why it's humorous – we've got this self-consciously dramatic music laid over this unbelievably shitty yeti, trying its hardest to convince us that we should be on the edge of our seats.  Incredibly, they manage to make this even sillier, too, when they do a disco cover with lyrics. As the toy helicopter lowers the yeti cage onto the roof of a Hunnicutt Hotel in Toronto, a chorus of voices sings lines like, “he is so big!  He is so strong!  He is the yeti!”

Between that and the women wearing the Kiss Me Yeti t-shirts, I have some questions for the film-makers.  Humans being what we are, if somebody proved the existence of the abominable snowman tomorrow the Himalayas would be flooded with hopeful monsterfuckers, but this yeti would be a worthy opponent for Glenn Manning.  His little bigfoot must be the size of a human being all by itself, and I can't imagine...

You know what?  Forget it.  I don't want to imagine it.

Also in that rooftop scene are a couple of people waving the flag of Ontario, and at least one of those flags is upside-down.  I rewound it a couple of times to be sure it wasn’t just that the flag was hanging funny, and it wasn’t.  This is particularly amusing because you don't need to be thoroughly familiar with Canadian heraldry to recognize it.  Ontario's flag has a shield on it with an obvious top and bottom.

I haven't even really gone into the plot yet, have I?  Well, don't worry, that is also terrible in all the best ways.  You don't get far into Yeti: Giant of the Twentieth Century before you realize that it's a version of King Kong, with the serial numbers only very gently filed off.  If it seems weird that anybody would make a King Kong ripoff in 1977, I'm afraid I have to remind you that Dino De Laurentiis had remade the movie the previous year.  I guess nobody in Italy foresaw that De Laurentiis' version was going to be an epic bomb, so they made Yeti in order to ride that film's potential coat-tails.  With this as its pedigree, I quite reasonably expected Yeti to end with the giant plummeting from the CN Tower to land with a splat in the middle of the Skydome, and then Hunnicutt could deliver some pithy closing line.

But no, Jane persuades the Yeti to return to the wilderness from whence he came, and he just wanders off into the woods somewhere in southern Ontario.  Um.  Okay.  That sounds like a terrible idea.  At the zoo in my city we have a grizzly bear who had to be kept in captivity after he learned that humans have food and wouldn't stop trying to take it away from us.  This is a common problem with bears around here and is one of the main reasons I don't actually believe in bigfoot – if this creature existed it would be a huge pain in the ass to campers and parks employees.  Imagine how much worse it would be if the hungry wildlife were a fifty foot tall caveman.

Besides the origin of its monster, the other way Yeti: Giant of the Twentieth Century tries to differentiate itself from its model is through the relationship the beast has with its captives.  Whereas every official version of King Kong very unfortunately treats the ape's interest in Ann Darrow (or her equivalent) as romantic, the Yeti's fascination with Jane and Herbie is explicitly paternal.  They're far too small to actually be young of his own species, but the impression we get, later confirmed by Waterman, is that their winter coats make them look like tiny yetis. When he has them alone, he is never violent towards them.  He brings them fish to eat, and tries to comb Jane's hair with the bones.  It's honestly kind of sweet, as if he's playing with a very fragile little doll.

Of course, this is a monster movie, so the Yeti also has to kill some dudes.  The main villain, Maple Leaf vice-president Cliff (everything in Canada is called Maple Leaf this or Canada Goose that or Shaved Beaver the other thing.  I'm not even joking.  One of our most popular clothing brands in the 80s was called Beaver Canoe) gets stepped on, but my favourite is the guy who is strangled by the Yeti's toes. I could not make this shit up.

As far as truly enjoyable bad movies go, I would rate this one nearly as high as things like Starcrash and Teenagers from Outer Space. It is inexcusably terrible and yet everybody's hearts were in it, and the result is downright sublime in its ridiculousness.  Yeti: Giant of the Twentieth Century can be hard to find but if you get an opportunity, definitely check this one out.

[mst3kproject]

Fire Monsters Against the Son of Hercules

This here Sword-And-Sandal epic was directed by Guido Malatesta, who wrote the screenplay for Colossus and the Headhunters, and stars Margaret Lee, of Secret Agent Super Dragon; Luciano Marin, of Hercules and the Captive Women; and Andrea Aureli, of The Loves of Hercules. Clearly this one is fully qualified, even without the hilariously unconvincing monsters that peer out of every corner.  My copy is an ancient VHS that looks like sun-baked shit and for some reason has no title card.

A tribe of cavemen, who I will call the Sun Tribe, are migrating south to escape the ice age.  They reach the edge of the glacier, I guess, and build a village, but soon find themselves being menaced from multiple angles.  There’s a stupid monster puppet living in the local lake, and another tribe already making their home nearby, the Moon Tribe, who have a strict anti-immigration policy.  Lucky for them, Maxus the Son of Hercules happens to be in the area, and he’s all about fighting monsters and protecting the rights of refugees!  Lots of people swing Styrofoam clubs and throw fake spears at each other, more terrible puppet things show up so Maxus can kill them, and I sit and think about how Cave Dwellers would be a much better title for this movie than it was for Cave Dwellers.

Holy fuck, you guys, this movie is so bad.  It has its dull stretches but most of them don’t go on too long, and whenever something is actually happening it is hilariously awful.  I could fill this whole review with a bullet list of the moments that made me laugh.

We’ll start with the dubbing, which critic Howard Hughes (not that Howard Hughes) described as the worst of all time.  He clearly hasn’t seen Gamera vs Guiron but it’s still really bad.  It’s not so much the performances, which are kind of crappy but no more so than in a thousand other lousy imported movies.  It’s the lipsync, or rather, the lack thereof.  Nobody made any effort to match the English dialogue to the way the actors’ mouths move. Sometimes it’s distracting. Sometimes it’s funny as hell. Sometimes it’s annoying. Sometimes it loops right back around to being funny again.  The best part is that to re-release Maciste Contro i Mostri as Fire Monsters against the Son of Hercules, they had to dub the name Maxus over every occurrence of Maciste.  The guy they hired to do so has a voice several notes higher than the original dub actor for Maciste, and introduces himself like he’s on a phone sex line.

The onscreen cast are pretty bad, too.  The actors look like they belong in the ice age about as much as anybody in Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell belonged in the Hyperborean.  They’re all standing around dressed in fun fur and those cow rugs you can buy at IKEA, and they all look kind of awkward and embarrassed about it.  Maxus has an amusing henna pompadour and his primary facial expression is the ever-popular smug smirk.  The women wander around in fake leather miniskirts and bouffant hairdos like they have no idea what they’re doing here.  The cannibal tribe wear little horns on their heads, like they’re Vikings who haven’t invented helmets yet.

The monsters are unbelievably bad.  I can’t actually think of an adjective to describe how magnificently terrible they are. They’re the fakest, fabricky-est puppets I have ever seen in a movie.  The first water dragon Maxus slays looks like a cheap plush toy version of that thing from The Neverending Story. Another is represented by stock footage of what I think is a perentie lizard, which is only seen in a cutaway because they couldn’t be bothered to back-project it.  A three-headed cave dragon looks like a hand puppet you’d buy on eBay and leave a bad review about because it fell apart the moment you took it out of the box.  It looks like it’s made of construction paper and felt.  It makes The Loves of Hercules look like Jurassic Park.  The screencap doesn’t do it justice.  You’d need to see this thing in motion to truly understand just how stupefyingly shoddy it really is.

Oh, and despite the title of the movie being Fire Monsters, not one of these stupid things breathes fire.  I am both disappointed and relieved, in that I would have loved to see it but if they’d tried it on this budget they would probably have burned their sets down.

This delicious chocolate icing of badness is slathered on the rich, gooey cake of what actually happens in the movie, almost all of which is ridiculous.  Maxus fights a bunch of boneless water serpent creatures while the camera pays loving attention to his crotch.  There’s a bit where several people theatrically lose their balance on a log bridge and fall into the ravine one after another, and it’s funnier every time.  Maxus and his love interest get buried up to their necks as a form of punishment and people stand around throwing things at them but never hit them because nobody in this movie can aim.  Then they’re freed by a random earthquake that just happens to split the ground right where they are.  I was staying with my parents at the time I first saw this movie, and to keep from waking them up in the wee hours with my laughter I had to munch pillows like a vampire wedding night.

But I’m not here to laugh – or at least, not only to laugh – I’m here to analyze.  Believe me when I say that very little in Fire Monsters against the Son of Hercules merits analysis, and even less is intended to be analyzed.  The movie tries to set up a dichotomy between the two tribes. Our heroes, the Sun Tribe, worship fire and the sun god, live outdoors in wattle huts, and hold religious observances during the day.  The bad guys, the Moon Tribe, worship the moon goddess, wear seashells and live in caves around an underground river, and sacrifice at night.  Sun/Moon, Fire/Water, Day/Night, Peace/War, Light/Darkness, and to some extent Male/Female.  It’s a list of opposites, so simplistic that I really can’t think of anything more to say than just to write them out.  I doubt any deeper meaning was intended by it.

If I want something to actually talk about, Maxus never has an arc (I guess being the son of a demigod, he’s already perfect), but some of the minor characters do.  The young chief of the Sun Tribe is supposed to be growing into that role, though he leaves most of the actual heroing to Maxus and it’s unclear how old he’s supposed to be (Luciano Marin was thirty-one when the movie was released). There is an interesting bit where he rails at the sun god for his misfortunes and is warned against it, but whether the gods actually exist or are active in this universe remains mysterious.  It is true that a convenient eclipse halts a series of sacrifices, and that Maxus is saved by the volcano, but these could just be coincidences.

The odd thing about these two events, now that I think about it, is that while among the humans the Sun Tribe just want to live peacefully while the Moon Tribe wants to make war, their gods seem to have the opposite idea.  If the eclipse (portrayed by effects people who clearly have no idea what an eclipse of the moon actually looks like) is the goddess’ doing, it is a frightening but peaceful intervention.  Her worshippers asked for a sign, and she sent one that she does not approve.  If the volcano is the work of the sun god, it is a catastrophic event that destroys the Moon Tribe’s home and livelihood, and kills many of the tribesmen.  Not to mention that the main villain dies when the solar idol falls over and literally crushes him.  Who’s advocating violence now?

I’ve gotten distracted, though.  Getting back to the characters – the Sun Tribe’s leader is secondary not only to Maxus, but to Moa, the deposed rightful leader of the Moon Tribe. Moa probably gets more screen time than any other single character, and has the best claim, after Maxus, to main-character-hood.  Her father and brothers have been murdered by the evil Fuan, who now wants to cement his claim to being legitimately in charge by marrying her, but she can’t stand him.  I think she’s supposed to be one of those Strong Female Characters, but if so she’s a pretty half-assed effort.

For starters, while her introduction makes a big deal of her lost inheritance, she never does anything to try to reclaim it until Maxus turns up inside the caves. You’d think she could nurse a rebel cell biding its time or something, but all she does is sit on her shapely bottom and refuse to marry Fuan.  I’m left with the impression that while she may be the obvious genetic heir, she actually doesn’t have any support base. The rest of the Moon Tribe prefers Fuan for some reason, and she’s left to sit there and pout and wait for a man to save her.

At the end of the movie, Maxus tells Moa that her job now is to make peace between her people and the Sun Tribe.  One might expect the usual trope in which she does so by marrying the Sun Tribe’s leader, who is much more polite and less hairy than Fuan.  He’s already got a wife, though, and saving her from the sacrificial block was a big part of his motivation.  It’s no surprise, then, that Moa instead chooses to walk off into the sunset with Maxus. I guess she’s learned that nice girls don’t want political power.

That’s all pretty lousy, but the rest of the movie is all so deliriously fucking awful that there’s no point in taking it seriously, even as an example of shitty gender politics.  Give this one a watch if you can.  It’s a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.

[mst3kproject]

Conquest

This movie has long been something I wish MST3K would have tackled, but I figured they never would because there are simply too many gratuitous boob shots in it.  Imagine my delight, then, when Avalanche introduced us to the Titty Drones!  I imagine they'd get a hell of a workout from this one... perhaps in a host sketch they'd end up lying exhausted on the table while Jonah and the bots sing a song to inspire them to carry on.  Other than that, the movie is just one long, foggy, dubbed, what the fuck am I watching sword-and-sorcery experience with Jorge Rivero (yep, Yuri from Werewolf) as our hero.  Bring it on.

A young man named Ilias has decided to set out on a quest.  The wise old elder of his people gives him the Bow of Kronos, which can shoot arrows of light, and off he goes in search of some Hero Stuff that needs doing.  Y'know, monsters to slay, maidens to save, that kind of thing.

I did not alter that screencap.  That is what the movie actually looks like.

Anyway, he arrives in a country in the thrall of a topless brain-eating sun goddess named Ocron and her army of coke-snorting wolf-men (I swear to you I could not make this up if I tried). In a drug-induced vision, Ocron sees herself being shot by a faceless hero wielding a laser bow, and decides she'd really better nip that in the bud.  Her first attempt to ambush Ilias is foiled by the wandering barbarian Mace, who wants the magical bow and needs Ilias to teach him how to use it.  The two become fast friends – indeed, Ilias is the first friend Mace has ever had in his life, so when Ocron finally succeeds in killing the kid, Mace decides to take up his cause and avenge him.

There is an awful lot of nudity in this movie.  Even with the titty drones, they would still have to make some deep cuts to get PG-13 out of it, and Jonah would probably face some awkward questions from Crow and Tom.  The nudity ranges from the very matter-of-fact to the extremely leering, and weirdly most of the latter is saved for the villainess.  The camera lingers on her nipples and groin as she writhes in the throes of precognition, while a phallic snake crawls up her abdomen.  Yikes. Elsewhere, other topless women appear to be completely incidental. A scene in which a near-naked girl is torn to pieces by the wolf-men is much more about the absurdly artsy violence than the nudity.

There is an equally shocking amout of fog.  Not a single frame of this movie appears to be fog-free.  I think it's supposed to create atmosphere.  Mostly it just makes me want to clean my glasses over and over like I’m searching for Robert Denby.

As thick as it is, the fog cannot disguise just how much the movie's visuals suck.  Ocron's army of werewolves are on the same believability level as bear-headed Ivan from Jack Frost, and leap from above like the cavemen in Starcrash. Mace's bird friends look like if Birdemic had used terrible puppets instead of terrible CGI, and make the same sound.  Night-time is represented by a blue filter so intense it looks like we're filming through jell-o and the exact same colour is used for an underwater scene.  One entire sequence takes place in pitch blackness, and all we hear are monster noises.

And that's not even getting into what these crummy effects are depicting. Angry grass, swamp zombies, a caveman nunchaku fight, chirping cocoon-people... every time you think you've seen the weirdest possible thing, Conquest throws you another curve.  Mace's long hair and the angular symbol tattooed on his forehead look like they're supposed to remind us of Charles Manson, but I can't imagine for what purpose.  There are loving close-ups of oozing pustules covered with flies.  The laser-arrows look like something out of Tron. The music falls somewhere in between 'funky disco' and '80's mellow synth'.  It's all so weird.

You can enjoy the movie purely on that 'wtf' level.  It's especially fun to show it to friends and watch their facial expressions as the movie piles oddity upon oddity.  But if you want something to think about, this movie is actually full of themes and commentary!  Mostly, it's looking at the 'hero's journey' motif and pointing out the weaknesses in it, but there's also an element of Greek tragedy, in that it's impossible for Ocron to escape her fate even when she's the most powerful woman in the world.

Ilias sets out on his quest with no specific goal in mind.  It seems as if he wants to be a hero, but he hasn't yet settled on a heroic deed – he'll take whatever comes his way.  His first attempt at a 'heroic' act is saving a girl from being bitten by a snake, and then he pouts when she laughs at him and runs away, rather than sticking around for the kissing he assumed would follow.  Then, once the action begins, we quickly find that Ilias is terrible at heroing.  He gets his butt kicked by Ocron's trolls, and Mace has to save him.  It is Mace who finds them a way out of the cave when they are lost and trapped, and Mace who goes to find healing herbs when Ilias is poisoned.

This is all totally understandable, though – Ilias is in a strange place, and has no idea where he's going or what he'll do when he gets there.  Although he's a good shot with his bow, he has no combat experience and growing up in peaceful agricultural society has not prepared him to survive in this wilderness of lawless hunter-gatherers.  When Mace warns him that Ocron and her goons are more than he can possibly handle, it seems like he has a good point, and Ilias eventually comes to think so as well.  There is a point when he nearly turns back, actually getting on a boat and setting off for home.

The moment of lost hope is a common part of the hero's journey story.  As the Death Star prepares to fire on Yavin IV, it seems that the Rebellion will be unable to destroy it in time.  The Fellowship of the Ring is nearly broken by the death of Gandalf.  Moana tries to throw the Heart of Te Fiti back into the sea.  In all of these stories, this moment is followed by a turn as the characters find a source of inspiration: Luke hears Obi-Wan's voice telling him to use the Force, and is able to destroy the Death Star.  Aragorn urges everybody to continue on to Lothlorien, where they can rest and regroup.  The spirits of Moana's ancestors show her what she has already accomplished and give her the strength to try again.  Ilias, too, remembers his original goals – vague as they were – and turns back, arriving just in time to take care of the cocoon-people who have crucified Mace and thrown him off a cliff.

Yet even this is kind of a failure, as Ilias is unable to save Mace from downing in the ocean at the cliff bottom.  Instead, friendly dolphins come to Mace’s rescue (in yet another what the fuck moment), and shortly thereafter Ilias is killed by a cave monster! The Callow Youth ultimately fails to defeat the great evil, and it happens because he is a Callow Youth.  Mace, who is rougher and tougher and used to looking after himself in this country, ultimately succeeds because he has the skills and experience Ilias lacks!

Meanwhile, Ocron's own fate is as coldly inevitable as that of Oedipus in Sophocles' play.  As the story begins, she and Ilias have never even heard of each other.  When one of her minions mentions her by name, Ilias doesn't know what he's talking about and has to ask Mace. Ocron herself never even learns Ilias' name, always simply calling him 'the Wanderer'.  She sets out to kill him not because he has actually caused her any trouble, but because her visions tell her that he will in the future.  Yet it is Ocron's attempts to get rid of Ilias before he can threaten her that first bring her to his attention and make him a threat, when he decides this is the great heroic task he's been chosen for.

But Ilias is not the one who defeats Ocron – his death, instead, spurs on Mace to kill her, and this fulfils another aspect of the prophecy.  For one thing, Mace is far more of a 'wanderer' than Ilias is.  Ilias comes from a settled society and intends to return there when his task is done.  Mace, on the other hand, is some kind of outlaw, with the mark on his forehead to denote that he is 'everybody's enemy'. He has wandered for many years and sees no end to it.  Ocron's prophecy is entirely self-fulfilling, and as in Oedipus Tyrannus, it is the efforts to avoid it that make it come true.  She even has a harmatia, a single mistake that seals her doom.  When we look at her visions in light of the ending, we recall that the warrior she saw had no face. It is, instead, the bow of Kronos that is fated to kill her.  Her fatal error was focusing on the wielder rather than the weapon!  

There's way more I could talk about here.  I could go into more detail about how the film uses Ocron's nudity to dehumanize her, covering her face and nothing else. I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about the homoerotic love story between the two heroes and its derivation from the Greek tradition of erastes and eromenos (the names in the story, Ilias, Kronos, Ocron, are almost all either Greek-derived or just intended to ‘sound Greeky’). I could contrast their positive philia with the film's negative depiction of eros as embodied in Ocron. I could boggle over the fact that Mace uses strangers as target practice or wince at Ilias shooting trolls in the crotch.  Conquest is as endlessly fascinating as it is endlessly weird.  I'm pretty sure Lucio Fulci failed at whatever it was he was trying to do with the movie, but man, he failed with style.

[mst3kproject]

1114: At The Earth's Core

Well, as long as I'm Journeying to the Centre of the Earth via MST3K, there's this.  I don't know if it's possible to be the Rob Liefeld of prose, but if it is, Edgar Rice Burroughs is our man – his books are peopled entirely by musclebound, practically-naked individuals who never strike a realistic pose.  I can't stand his writing, and the more a movie based on his work deviates from the source material, the better I tend to like it.  I haven't read the novel At the Earth's Core, but the movie version is dull, stilted, and generally misconcieved, so I suspect it's fairly faithful.

Brilliant steampunk scientist Dr. Abner Perry, funded by dim-but-wealthy David Innes, has created the Iron Mole – an exceptionally phallic digging machine designed to penetrate the most private parts of Mother Earth, which are doubtless impregnated with valuable minerals.  When Perry and David test this mighty tool, they find it has far more thrust than they anticipated, and soon they've plowed themselves right into a prehistoric world At the Earth's Core!

Okay.  I'll let that go now.

The land of Pellucidar turns out to be populated by cave people, orcs, and men in ridiculous rubber monster suits, and ruled by giant telepathic pterodactyls who use the rest of the inhabitants as slave labor or snack food.  Dr. Perry sets about translating ancient tablets in search of the pterodactyls' great secret, while David runs around beating up the cave people and orcs and whatnot.  Together the two men unite the warring tribes of Pellucidar and overthrow the pterodactylocracy, then return to the surface after David's new girlfriend, Dia the Cavewoman, breaks up with him – probably because she wasn't willing to trade in her leather miniskirts for a corset and sixteen layers of petticoats.

I'm so glad Joel decided to do some Caroline Munro movies – basically everything she was ever in would make for good MST3K subjects, and you can expect to see her in the Episodes that Never Were section shortly.  Then there's Doug McClure, who was apparently the Ben Murphy of the 60's; a dull, mediocre actor, who bargain basement studios liked to pretend could carry a film.  He doesn't have half the screen presence of Peter Cushing, and this movie features Peter Cushing at the worst I've ever seen him.  Cushing looks like he's already been dead for two weeks and clearly does not give a single lonely, isolated fuck about this film.

I first saw this movie as a teenager in the 90s, having rented it from Blockbuster (that was back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, but fortunately I was able to outrun them on my rollerblades).  I think I might have been thirteen, but I remember recognizing even then that Grand Moff Tarkin did not care. He'd been given stupid comic relief lines about excitable foreigners and remembering his umbrella (in case it rains at the centre of the earth), and he whistles his way through them while waving his arms in a weirdly C3P0-ish fashion.  If I'm being honest, the result is surprisingly enjoyable.  Dr. Perry could have been the Dropo of this movie, the character we all want to see die but know won’t, but Peter Cushing manages to keep him tolerable.  Jonah and the bots are never reduced to yelling “SHUT UP!” or begging David to kill him, and that’s actually quite an accomplishment.

At least part of the reason Cushing comes across relatively well is because everybody else is so thoroughly bland. Doug McClure is as dull as an overcast day and never seems very committed to his cause or particularly interested in Dia.  Even when he vows that the pterodactyls have to be destroyed, he looks and sounds more like he's annoyed about a child's poor report card than enraged by the needless death of innocents.  Caroline Munro doesn't have anything much to do except deliver exposition and pout cutely. She's not nearly as into it as she was in Starcrash, but then, Starcrash gave her a much meatier role (I mean, it was ridiculous, but at least Stella Star was part of the plot). In At the Earth's Core she doesn't really seem to be trying.

Of course, At the Earth's Core isn't really about its characters – as in a lot of modern movies (by now you can probably guess the one I'm thinking of), the story and characters in this movie only serve as an excuse to show us fantastical sights. Rivers of lava!  A steampunk digging machine!  Prehistoric monsters of every possible description!  This is a film meant to be all about its visuals, so how do those fare?

No surprise, the answer is 'badly'.  The lava looks okay in some shots, mostly the ones in which it is represented by liquid lit red-orange.  Scenes in which there is fire on the surface look like exactly what they are: water with a little burning oil on the top.  The caves all this lava is flowing through look distinctly stryrofoam-ish.  The Iron Mole, on the other hand, actually looks pretty neat – it's obviously a model, but it's a large and detailed one with many moving parts, and the designers put a lot of thought into how it would move through the earth, although none at all into how one might steer it.

As for the creatures... well, the orc-like Sagoths are all right, looking like something one might see in Star Wars.  Everything else is terrible.  The stupid Parrotsaurus that menaces David and Perry soon after they leave the Iron Mole looks like it should be fighting Gamera.  The carnivorous bipedal brontotheres are significantly less convincing than the 90's Ninja Turtles movies.  The hippo monster David fights in the arena mostly makes us think about how much better Return of the Jedi would do this scene six years later.  There's a giant glow-in-the-dark Venus Flytrap that looks like it's mostly made of fiberglass, and we can't possibly forget the random fire-breathing frog that appears out of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere to menace Dia in one scene. It's definitely the cheapest monster in the movie, which is understandable when you consider that they were planning to blow it up.

And of course there are the pterodactyl monsters, the rulers of Pellucidar.  Since they're the most important 'creatures' in the film, one would expect some effort to have gone into their portrayal, but they're stiff and cheap and barely move, because whenever they do it becomes laughably obvious that they are people in suits.  The fact that all their monsters are people in suits is the single biggest movie-ruiner for At the Earth's Core.  Not a single one of the beasts we see on screen has a plausible anatomy except for the Sagoths, and they only work because they're supposed to be humanoid.  If ever there were a movie that really should have sprung for stop-motion, this is the one.

Now that I've looked at the execution, I guess I have to talk about the concept.  Is this movie one hundred percent spectacle, or is it actually about anything?  Well, like pretty much everything else Edgar Rice Burroughs ever wrote, it's about how white people are best at everything.

Although there are a few black extras in some shots, the Pellucidarians are mostly played by white actors wearing various amounts of makeup.  Caroline Murnro is far darker here than she was in Starcrash, and David's BFF Ra looks particularly ridiculous in his spray tan and perm.  The ambiguously non-white tribes have no technology more complex than a spear, and have been unable to unite their squabbling peoples against their obvious common enemy.  Then Perry and Innes show up, discover how to beat the pterodactyls, and turn these dispararate peoples into a trained army of bowmen in what appears to be a few days.

Dr. Perry re-invents the bow and arrow despite having nothing to work with but a bunch of bamboo and his umbrella.  This could be forgiven, since as an engineer I suppose we could believe he has a good understanding of the principles behind the weapon – but then he masters it immediately, despite his own admission that 'I never had occasion to use one before'!  The cavepeople have to be trained in this new way of fighting, but with Perry it's 'bullseye!' on his first shot.  Cushing was nearly seventy when this movie was made, and not exactly in fighting shape.  I don't think anybody on the writing staff knew how difficult it is to pull a bow.  David, meanwhile, despite being a somewhat doughy-looking rich kid, wins wrestling matches with cavemen and battles with monsters, and squeezes through secret passageways.  Sure, that's plausible.

Now that I think about it... David doesn't do a whole lot in this movie that's particularly plot-furthering.  He fights a couple of creatures and kisses Dia, but it's Perry who designed the Iron Mole, Perry who figures out how to read the pterodactyls' writing and what their 'secret' is (pity he never shares the latter with the audience in any comprehensible form), and Perry who arms the cavemen against their oppressors.  Why isn't this movie just about Dr. Perry?  A comedy about a Victorian scientist who stumbles upon a lost world at the center of the Earth, saving the day and becoming a hero by total accident?  That at least sounds like it would have more personality than this movie, which at the end of the day is pretty beige.

At the Earth's Core is cheap and shoddy, but cheap and shoddy movies can be a lot of fun.  The problem here is that nobody thought they were making anything but a cheap and shoddy movie, and so nobody bothered to put in the effort that might have elevated it into an entertaining cheap and shoddy movie. A little of Caroline Munro's Starcrash overacting would have gone a long way, as would a bit more effort on the part of the screenwriter.  The stupid monsters are fun, but At the Earth's Core just isn't good enough or bad enough to be worth watching.

[mst3kproject]

301: Cave Dwellers

Have you ever gotten the feeling that they were just making these movies up as they went along?  Oh boy, have I got a story for you!

Achronus the Great One has discovered the secrets of the Geometric Nucleus, which is… um… okay, I admit it, I have no idea what it is. Lord Zor, the Darth Vader to Achronus’ Obi-Wan, wants the Nucleus for himself, so Achronus sends his daughter Mila to find the warrior Ator, the only man capable of protecting such a terrible weapon.  Mila convinces Ator and his sidekick Thong that their planet needs them, and although it only took her four hours to get to their place, the three of them spend approximately six weeks heading back, stopping for a couple of side quests while Achronus and Zor trade bullshit philosophical dialogue.  At last Zor is defeated, and Ator takes the Geometric Nucleus away and detonates it in stock footage of a 50’s nuclear test.

This movie is fucking amazing.  Nothing in it makes sense. Achronus keeps the Geometric Nucleus in a hole in the wall and Mila has never noticed this bright glowing thing before despite the fact that she lives there.  Ator apparently carries a fucking hang-glider around in his loincloth or something.  Literally all of the dialogue is nonsense, especially the stuff that comes out of Achronus’ or Zor’s mouths.  Thong never talks, although Ator makes several references to him having been right about something… I like to imagine that he actually doesn’t speak English and is doing some other quest of his own, with no idea why Ator and Mila are following him around.  They never give us the slightest idea of what the Geometric Nucleus actually is, besides it being bright and shiny and able to destroy the world if it falls into the wrong hands.  Maybe it’s the seventh infinity stone.

But I promised you a story, didn’t I?  All right – well, according to an interview with David Cain Haughton, who played Zor, Cave Dwellers is the way it is because they literally improvised the whole thing.  The actors turned up to be in some completely different caveman movie, but that got canned at the last minute.  Director Joe D’Amato still wanted to make a movie, so he decided to make one anyway, whether or not he had things like a ‘story’ or a ‘script’.  He’d already made Ator, the Fighting Eagle starring Miles O’Keefe, so since O’Keefe was there they did an Ator sequel, literally making the whole thing up as they went along!

That explains so much. It explains why we never learn what the Geometric Nucleus is – they never bothered figuring it out.  It explains why the conversations between Zor and Achronus are total nonsense – they were literally first drafts.  It explains the invisible assassins – they didn’t have any extras that day.  It explains why Ator’s love interest from the first movie dies offscreen in narration – the actress wasn’t available on such short notice.  It explains the random caveman footage in the opening – that was the only thing shot for the original movie before they were told they couldn’t make it anymore.  I could probably list every single confusing or nonsensical thing from the entire film and explain it in this way��� except the hang-glider.  There’s no explaining the hang-glider.

That would be a boring review, though, and my specialty is analyzing that which defies analysis.  What is there, then, to analyze in Cave Dwellers?  The movie seems to have two intentional points that are repeated throughout, and these are explicit enough that I think D’Amato and the cast probably talked about them and agreed to use them as unifying themes.  The first is the idea that human ingenuity is both our greatest strength and the greatest threat to our survival.

This is hardly a new or unique idea – we saw basically the same thing, much better-executed, in First Spaceship on Venus.  Although Cave Dwellers is pretty explicit about this theme, it doesn’t actually put a lot of effort into it.  The Geometric Nucleus, which seems to represent human hubris and which Achronus didn’t dare to show even to Mila, never does anything and is only a MacGuffin.  Achronus states that imagination – ingenuity, the ability to invent – is as important as knowledge, which is a sentiment I’m sure any scientist or engineer worth their NaCl could get behind, but we don’t see a lot of ingenuity saving the day in this movie.  Mila is able to break out of the cell by making her own gunpowder Captain-Kirk-style, and Ator later uses gunpowder against the cavemen and during his castle flyover, but the payoff of this doesn’t seem to match the setup.  Ator and Thong throwing their cloaks over the invisible ninjas is some nice improv, but when confronted with the giant snake Ator simply fights his way out.

I think the big ‘ingenuity saves the day’ moment is supposed to be when Ator appears on his hang-glider, but I refuse to believe he built that thing in the woods in five minutes.  Achronus says he taught Ator the secret of flight, so I find it much more plausible that they’d stashed the glider in the woods somewhere earlier, and Ator just dug it up and patched a couple of holes.

The other ostensible conviction of Cave Dwellers is that all human beings are equal.  This is stated several times, both by Achronus and by Ator, and to their credit both actually act on it.  Achronus asks Zor to treat Sandor the Magician with mercy, even though Sandor is also Achronus’ enemy, and insists that Zor himself stand trial rather than letting Ator kill him outright.  Ator allows himself to be distracted by the plight of the village of Solachek, despite Mila’s objections, because the people there are no less important or in need of rescue than her father.

At the same time, Cave Dwellers presents us with a profoundly unequal world.  In the opening shots we see the titular Cave Dwellers, sitting in filthy caverns eating raw meat and killing each other for no apparent reason. Then we leave them and meet Achronus and Mila, who live in a castle and benefit from textiles, metallurgy, medicine, and literacy.  Somewhere in the middle are the people of Solachek, who seem closer to Achronus and Ator’s medieval world than the Cave Dwellers’ prehistoric one, but are still very primitive.  Exactly what the relationship is between these three levels of society is very unclear. The cavemen seem to live in isolation just because they eat anyone who intrudes, which I guess is fair enough, but what is Achronus in relation to people like the villagers?

The likeliest-seeming explanation to the historian in me is that he is a lord and they are his serfs.  That would explain who feeds Achronus and Mila, since they clearly aren’t out tilling the fields in between conducting science experiments.  Yet Achronus himself seems completely unaware of the outside world except insofar as it contains people like Zor and Ator, who are his intellectual if not always his moral equals.  He is certainly not interested in the crisis in Solachek, though it seems like something he would probably disapprove of.  The villagers never refer to any form of government except for the ‘elder’.

This failure of worldbuilding is, obviously, the sort of thing you get when you make shit up as you go instead of sitting down and thinking your story through properly.  In the film itself, however, it just makes Achronus look like a rambling old hypocrite. He claims that all men are equal, but rather than righting any of the copious wrongs going on around him, he just hangs out in his castle all day wearing a robe and mixing beakers of kool-aid. In fact, it’s possible to make a similar argument about Ator: he says no one person’s life is more important than another’s, but when he wanders off to help the people of Solachek he lets us know that they are actually his own kin – his parents were born in the village.  It’s hard to drive a lesson home in a movie when the characters who embody that lesson seem to be telling us to do as they say, not as they do.

Then there’s Zor, the villain.  David Cain Haughton claims he was meant as a parody of mustache-twirling evil and honestly, that might be the best explanation for why Zor never does anything much.  He invades Achronus’ castle and makes a couple of long-distance attempts to stop Mila and Ator, but for most of the movie we’re just watching him and Achronus stand around talking each other to death.  He claims he could torture or kill Achronus if he wanted to but doesn’t because that would be too easy – indeed it would, then the movie would be over. Nor do we ever find out what Zor plans to do with the Geometric Nucleus if and when he gets it.  I guess they couldn’t tell us that, since we would have to know what the damn thing does for it to make any sense.

Which brings us to what is possibly Cave Dwellers’ third intentional message: the anit-nuclear theme. This would be part of the thing about human ingenuity making us a danger to ourselves, and its hinted at several times. The name Geometric Nucleus and the idea that this object is a terrible weapon imply that it might be something atomic, although the fact that Achronus carries it around in a wine bucket seems to argue against it being radioactive. This actually led to a rather interesting discussion on the Sattelite of Love News episode guide for Cave Dwellers, as MSTies try to figure out if the movie is supposed to be prehistoric or post-apocalyptic.  The opening narration, talking about long ago and the ‘fiery period of man’s ascendency’ seems to imply pre-historic, but the fact that Achronus calls the Geometic Nucleus a ‘discovery’ rather than an ‘invention’, and that the equipment available to him is in no way equal to controlling nuclear energy, would appear to speak to the latter.  The easiest answer, I think, is that Cave Dwellers takes place, as many movies do, in another universe entirely – one that is obviously not constrained to make logical or narrative sense.

The footage Film Ventures International used over the opening credits is apparently from a movie called Thor and the Amazon Women.  I definitely have to see that.

[mst3kproject]

315: Teenage Caveman

This is yet another movie that goes under multiple titles, and like several previous examples, the new title is actually an improvement. Roger Corman wanted to call his movie Land of Prehistoric Women, which would certainly have gotten butts in the seats, but they'd have been very disappointed butts by the time the end credits rolled. Teenage Caveman is a much better description of the movie we've actually got.

A primitive tribe – albeit a very clean one whose women are curiously lacking in body hair – lives in Bronson Canyon, hunting taxidermied deer and men in bear suits.  The 'teenage' son of the cave painter wonders why the tribe lives by such strict rules – particularly, why the taboo against crossing the river into the jungle?  Eventually he decides to go see for himself, and finds a world full of monsters: crocodiles with fins glued to their backs, stolen from other movies!  Adorable dogs who want to lick you to death!  Men in dinosaur costumes even less convincing than that one who used to be a Vine star!  The She-Creature in a cameo appearance!  And oh my god... is that... it can't be... but it is... it's the parrot-bear from Night of the Blood Beast!!!

I was kind of surprised to look up actor Robert Vaughn and learn that he was only twenty-six when this movie was made.  I guess everybody just looked ten years older in the fifties.  He's also got really small ears.  I never noticed that before but now I can't stop seeing it.

Before I try to talk about anything in this movie, I'm going to have to deal somehow with the fact that the characters have no names.  Our hero is referred to only as 'the Symbol-Maker's Son', and other characters have signifiers like 'the Fair-Haired Boy' and 'the Blonde Maiden'.  This seems very strange to us, but there are peoples in the world who do not use personal names – the best-known example is the Machiguenga of South America, who address each other by relationships and occupations, just as the characters in Teenage Caveman do.  The lack of names in the movie seems to serve two purposes: it suggests a very small, isolated group, where everybody knows everybody else and there is unlikely to be more than one 'Symbol-Maker' or 'Fair-Haired Boy'; and it tells us that this group values collective over individual identity and survival.

As far as it goes, this an interesting artistic choice and a nice piece of worldbuilding.  The problem for me as reviewer is that it's very awkward to type out 'the Symbol-Maker's Son' or 'the Black-Bearded Man' over and over.  I will therefore adopt Joel and the Bots' informal designation of the main character as 'Travis' and his rival as 'Allen'.  

The movie has a couple of points to make, although being as it's Roger Corman, it makes them with a sledgehamer.  The first is about tradition and asking questions, and this is indeed so heavy-handed that Joel and the Bots actually talk about the movie in these terms during a host sketch.  Travis is constantly questioning the inherited wisdom of his tribe, despite punishments from his elders.  In the end, his curiosity drives him to investigate for himself, which leads him to the film's second point: that if humans are not careful with our technology, we are doomed.

The 50's Caveman Movie is a genre mostly associated with women in fur miniskirts being menaced by plasticine dinosaurs (exactly the sort of movie one might expect from the working title Land of Prehistoric Women), so having a message at all is honestly kind of impressive.  Teenage Caveman's messages are unsubtle, but they are also surprisingly well-explored.  The film tells us that pushing boundaries is the key to progress, but it does not present this as a smooth road.  When Travis and his friends venture into the wilderness, one of them drowns in quicksand, and Travis himself is injured and cannot immediately return with the others.  He comes back having invented the bow and arrow, a new weapon with a longer range than the spears the tribe normally uses, but also having actually seen the God that Gives Death with its Touch, the monster he believed to be mythical.  Much has been learned, but much has also been lost.

At the end, the laws the clan have lived by for as long as anyone can remember (hundreds of years?  Thousands?) are declared null and void, and they must forge a new way of life in new territory.  This is good, in that new possibilities and better food sources are now open to them, but it is also terrifying, in that they don't even know how to begin.  The God that Gives Death has been vanquished, but other perils, such as the wild animals and the quicksand, are still out there to menace them.  The benefits of exploration outweigh the dangers, but Corman does not romanticize it. More of the tribe are going to die on their journey of discovery.

Opposed to Travis and his urge to explore are the various voices of conservatism within the tribe.  The clan's received wisdom, the Word, represents safety but also stagnation, and the desire to stick to it has two different faces.  One is Travis' father, who warns him away from exploration and is quite stern with him at times, but it clearly comes from his love and concern for his son.  He tried leaving the safe area himself and suffered for it, and he doesn't want Travis to repeat his mistakes.  Yet when the clan wants to punish Travis, his father urges them to be lenient in the hope that the boy has learned his lesson.  When asked to choose between his tribe and his son, he chooses Travis.

The other voice of tradition is the Black-Bearded Man, Allen.  At first he encourages Travis to explore and to question what he's been told, but then turns around and demands the boy's death when he actually does so.  His real motive, as we learn, was to disgrace both Travis and his father and step into their family's important position within the tribe.  He wishes to preserve the existing power structure in order to advance within it – Joel remarks that people like this have been with us since the beginning of time, and they will doubtless be around until the end of it. DOes anyoNe Among my Lovely reaDers wanT to pRovide Us with an exaMPle?

At the end of the movie, the God who Gives Death with its Touch is killed, and turns out to be an old man wearing some kind of college football mascot costume that is probably supposed to be a radiation suit.  We get a voiceover from this man, most likely representing what's supposed to be written in the book he is carrying, telling how the world ended in nuclear war and the land of hairless cavepeople and mutant dinosaurs we've been seeing is actually the aftermath of that apocalypse (so it's basically Yor! The Hunter from the Future without Rip Steakface).  He fears that this is destined to be cyclical – that man will simply rise only to fall again and again and again, until we are finally extinct.

Interestingly, and quite realistically, this message goes entirely over the characters' heads.  They have no idea what the book represents, only that there are pictures of human beings and symbols that clearly have some kind of meaning.  They hope to find other people who may know how to read them, but there is nothing to indicate that they will ever succeed.  The one foreigner we see in the entire movie appears to be just as primitive and illiterate as the main characters, and the old man's voiceover suggests that in a life of perhaps thousands of years in length, he has never seen anyone more advanced.

Throughout the movie, we have seen people persist in spite of warnings, but for the most part this was presented as a good thing: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  Travis' persistence in the face of his elders' disapproval and his own failures allows him to forge a new way of life for his clan.  But like everything else in the world of Teenage Caveman, tenacity has two faces. The people of the past persisted in making war and brought themselves to a bad end.  The ultimate point of the film is that 'progress', whether scientific or social, is never straightforwardly good or evil.

The reason the movie is about a teenage caveman is because rebellion and pushing of boundaries are what teenagers are best-known for doing.  Another level of the film's story asks parents to stop and think about why their children are asking questions and trying out different ways of behaving, but this, too, has two sides: children are also invited to think about why their parents discourage them from doing so.

That's really a hell of a lot of theme for a fifties caveman movie, and audiences must have been rather confused to get this when they were probably expecting dinosaur fights and screaming women.  Looking back on my review, I realize I've probably made the movie sound much better than it is.  Don't get me wrong, Teenage Caveman is still very, very bad.  The costumes are terrible, the dialogue is stilted, the actors are bored, the animals are fake, and the tribe seems to consist of twenty men, four women, and no children.  But if nothing else, I can appreciate the film for its ambition, and the story as presented manages to have a satisfying conclusion without sacrificing the ambiguity that is so important to its point.

Teenage Caveman was remade in 2002, by people who apparently found the fate of the nigh-immortal scientist far more interesting than bland cave kid angst.  They may have had a point, but they were also utter hacks.  Their movie is an aggressively bad metaphor about STDs, where the original is just a blandly bad mull about progress.  Personally, I prefer Disney's recent version, which ditched the post-apocalypse thing, made the God who Gives Death far scarier and more tragic, and featured a fab glam-rock number by a giant crustacean.

Help me.