#curiously caucasian cavepeople

[mst3kproject]

Untamed Women

As far as I can tell nobody in this movie was ever on MST3K, although quite a few of them were in other crummy movies that I've featured as Episodes that Never Were, and at least one (Lyle Talbot) achieved the very pinnacle of anti-stardom by being in Plan 9 from Outer Space.  I picked it mostly because I felt like watching something with some really crappy dinosaurs in it, and on that front at least, Untamed Women delivers in spades.

A bomber plane is forced to ditch in the ocean after being hit by enemy fire, and the men on board take to the life rafts.  After over a week at sea (which is mercifully narrated at us rather than being shown in the excruciating detail one might fear from a movie of this type), four of the survivors wash up on a mysterious island, where they are captured by a tribe of snowy-white cavewomen with impeccable makeup and no body hair whatsoever, who speak Ye Olde Englyshe. These are apparently descendants of the last druids, who fled the British Isles when the Romans invaded and eventually found their way to this island where they've lived ever since.  It's about fifty-fifty whether the ladies will use our heroes as husbands or human sacrifices, but to escape, they'll have to cross a land teeming with prehistoric monsters.

I think Untamed Women may have actually had a budget, at least by Lousy 50's Dinosaur Movie standards.  If nothing else, they have a surprisingly impressive miniature volcano and an awful lot of lizards.  At least one of the latter actually dies onscreen, while others are tossed around willy-nilly and all have suffered the indignity of having various spikes and fins glued to them in the forlorn attempt to look more dinosaur-ish.  There's also one hilarious Tyrannosaur hand puppet that hobbles through the background of a shot.  Some elephants in fur coats stand in for mammoths and don't look totally terrible, but my very favourite dinosaur in the movie is the rubber-spike-bedecked armadillo (you can see the spikes bend when it brushes against foliage) representing a belligerent Ankylosaurus.  The scale compositing for some of these creatures is honestly quite acceptable, which renders their craptitude all the more entertaining.

Sadly, these inexpensive approximations of prehistoric life don't really do anything in the movie besides wander across the screen trying desperately to look cool.  The entire sequence in which the men attempt to cross the island to freedom is just filler and drags a bit, although it's a heck of a lot more fun than Rock Climbing. Supposedly the encounters convince the women that these men are brave warriors here to protect them rather than enemies here to do them harm, but in the final confrontation with some kind of iguana, it's the women who rescue the men by causing a rockslide (how this buried the lizard but not the men is not explained).  The monsters are only there to have dinosaurs in the movie, but that's exactly what I came here for so I can't complain too much.

The main characters are rather less fun to watch than the supposed dinosaurs. The four men are a bit more distinguishable than they are in many such movies, although they still look an awful lot alike and I'm not sure of all their names.  The dude in charge is called Steve.  I kept thinking he looked familiar and eventually realized he reminded me of the Dilbert's-Boss-Looking piano player from Reefer Madness, but it's not the same guy.  Two of the others are Eric and Andy, and I think Eric is the one with the Mommy Issues and Andy is the one who grew up on a farm (neither of these facts are ever important), but I couldn't pick either one out of a lineup.  The fourth guy is the Brooklyn-accented, unfunny comic relief who insists upon using the most opaque slang possible in trying to communicate with the women.  None of them are remotely likeable.

Except for the imperious High Priestess, Sondra, the women have no personalities at all.  Even Sondra's behaviour is deeply inconsistent.  She doesn't seem to approve of her underlings' plan to use the men as mates, but can't seem to decide what to do with them instead.  The others just hang around in short skirts and don't have much dialogue, not even the ones who eventually pair up with each of the men.  Shots of them doing things like making tools and gathering firewood are meant to demonstrate that they've been surviving quite capably on this island with no men, but this is undermined by the actresses themselves, who are willowy in build and look like they have no idea what they're doing.

The plot is basically Fire Maidens of Outer Space except not in space – the last members of an ancient civilization have been living in an isolated area, and now they're down to only women because of some ill-defined disaster.  The idea that these women are druids is used as an explanation of why they speak English, but that doesn't work – the druids would have spoken a Celtic language that we can only barely glimpse through Roman writers' attempts to transliterate fragments of it.  It certainly wouldn't have borne any resemblance to the pseudo-Shakespeare that appears in this script.  I guess it is at least a reason why they're so European, although we're given no explanation at all of either the presence or the whiteness of the tribe of apparently unrelated 'hairy men' who menace them from time to time.  Other than that, the movie is not interested in druids at all and I doubt the writers did so much as read an Asterix comic by way of research.

All these things are problems, but Untamed Women is light and fluffy and enough fun that you don't really care.  What's more annoying is that the plot seems to make several false starts, only to end suddenly before ever really having a chance to get going.

The first of these missed opportunities is when the men are initially taken captive by the tribe of women.  Sondra and her followers discuss either marrying or sacrificing them, but the council never comes to any conclusion.  Sortly thereafter, Sondra herself sets them free and directs them to cross the valley full of dinosaurs to safety.  It turns out that this was a trick – she figured they wouldn't survive the journey – but before we can get into the survivalist adventure either, the women come back to rescue them.  Then we find ourselves back in Fire Maidens of Outer Space as four of the women single themselves out as potential girlfriends, which angers Sondra because she's not yet sure she wants to allow these newcomers to marry into the tribe, even to save their culture from extinction.  The spectre of human sacrifice now rears its head again... but before that can go anywhere the 'hairy men' attack.

The men drive these aggressors off with their guns, which makes the women think they'll be safe forever with their new protectors.  They won't be, of course, because now the guys are out of ammunition, but they have a hard time explaining this to their hosts (in one of the few things the movie did right, they can’t even compare it to having a bow but no arrows because the women are not archers). Another attack will surely see them defeated and back in disgrace, or perhaps require a daring rescue!  But before that can happen, a volcano erupts and kills everybody except Steve, who gets a whack on the head and is later found in a life raft with amnesia!  This happens so we can have a framing story about him getting his memory back, which adds nothing except five minutes of run time.

I've ranted about this kind of ending before – The Alligator People ends with Joyce an amnesiac, and The Land that Time Forgot ends with the volcano.  I hated it in those movies because it undoes everything the characters accomplished, rendering all that we have seen pointless.  Joyce set out to find answers, and at the end she doesn't even remember the questions.  The submarine crew of The Land that Time Forgot were close to escaping Caprona when the volcano snatches everything out from under them.  Why, then, did we have to watch all of that, if it were all going to come to naught? If a character's hard work is undone by their enemies or by their own hubris, that's a tragedy.  If there's no reason for it besides the middle finger of God, that's just nihilism.

Nihilism has its place in art, of course... but a movie called Untamed Women doesn't really seem like that place.  The fact that the movie never really seems to start, just wandering from potential plot to potential plot without ever settling down to a story, just makes it even more frustrating.  There were so many ideas here that would have been perhaps not good, but still a lot of fun.  We could have watched the guys learn to survive in the prehistoric wilderness!  We could have seen them prepare for an epic battle with the 'hairy men'.  Heck, if the writers didn't have any other ideas, we could at least have gotten a bit of meat on the bones of the love stories.  Instead, all of these things are touched on and then thrown away, as if the writers ran out of time to decide what they wanted their movie to be about.

In spite of all that, I did kind of enjoy this movie while I was watching it.  We've got several kinds of stupid cheap dinosaurs and some very embarrassed dancers in silly cavewoman costumes, and that's a certain amount of fun.  Sadly, Untamed Women doesn't linger. It needed to pick a plot and stick with it, rather than offering us a variety of appetizers but no main course.

[mst3kproject]

The Neanderthal Man

Since I'm taking a break from fishmen, I might as well let Bigfoot catch up a bit.  The Neanderthal Man isn't exactly a Bigfoot movie, but it’s along the same lines and its entire starring cast has MST3K pedigrees.  Robert Shayne was in Indestructible Man and Teenage Caveman. Richard Crane was Rocky Jones, Space Ranger! Beverly Garland was in Swamp Diamonds and Gunslinger. Even the composer, Albert Glasser, wrote music for Invasion USA, Last of the Wild Horses, and almost all of MST3K’s Bert I. Gordon movies.

Some little mountain town in the middle of the Sierras (which the Portentous 50's Narrator takes some trouble to tell us is a primeval place where 'the defacing hand of civilization has fallen but lightly') is having a rash of saber-toothed tiger sightings!  At first these are laughed off, but when the game warden himself sees one cross the road in the middle of the night, it's time to do something about it.  The warden shows a cast pawprint to Dr. Ross Harkness in Los Angeles, who is interested enough to come up and see for himself. Local Mad Scientist Dr. Groves pooh-poohs the whole thing, which is enough to tell me that we're not dealing with a local cryptid here.  Somebody is making prehistoric monsters.

So... I may not have actually run out of movies, but I seem to be running out of plots, because this is a remarkably similar movie to Monster on the Campus. The major difference between the two films is that Dr. Blake turned himself into a caveman by accident, while Dr. Groves here is doing it on purpose.

Another difference is that Monster on the Campus' story, while silly, was linear – events escalated in a way that felt logical, and there were reasons why things happened when and where they did.  By contrast, The Neanderthal Man feels like a first draft.  At the beginning of the film, we're dealing with the saber-toothed tigers that Groves has been creating by injecting cats with his de-evolution serum.  We hear about these slaughtering game and livestock, and it seems like only a matter of time before they move on to human beings.  The beginning of the film is quite upfront about the fact that Groves is responsible, too, as it is only mildly mysterious in its depiction of one of the creatures escaping his lab.

Sometimes the saber-tooths are represented by an actual tiger, usually filmed from behind or at a great distance so nobody has to put the prosthetic teeth on it.  They do have prosthetic teeth, but they're only visible in a couple of shots. Imagine being at a bar and some guy tells you his job is sticking fake fangs on real tigers for a caveman movie!  For close-ups, there's a hilarious puppet head that looks like the sort of thing you'd see mounted on a frat house wall as a joke.  The director had the sense not to linger on this in motion shots, but later we see still photographs Groves has supposedly taken of his experimental subjects and they're even stupider-looking than we imagined.

Anyway, this goes on for a while with rising action, as the game warden goes to get Harkness and they manage to shoot one of the animals, only to have it vanish from the kill site when they try to show it to Groves (the movie never bothers to explain how that happened, incidentally. The ending suggests that the creatures change back when they die, but there's definitely no dead kitty cat at the scene, either).  The whole movie could easily have just had the cats and their creator as the antagonists, perhaps even ending the same way as Dr. Groves proves his work to the other characters by injecting himself. That's not what happens, though.  Instead, the story mostly forgets about the cats one we find out Groves has also been carrying on human experiments.

(Before himself, Groves' first experimental subject was his disabled Latina housekeeper.  Another series of photos show her half-transformed into a cavewoman who for some reason is wearing drag queen false eyelashes.  And as long as I'm talking about the movie being gross and bigoted, there's a bit where a woman is violently raped.  This happens off camera, but the audience is not allowed to entertain any illusions about it.)

The problem is that before we see him give himself an injection in the arm, we have had absolutely no indication that Groves has been giving his serum to anything besides the cats! Cats are stealthy, cryptic creatures and if one of those has been seen wandering around killing things, then surely a full-on caveman beating people to death would not be able to stay out of sight!  If what we were seeing were the first time Groves had tried the formula on himself then that would be an explanation, but his notes reveal that he's been doing it for so long that he's on the verge of losing control of the transformation and permanently reverting to a pre-human status, as indeed he does for the climax.  Much like the stupid dinosaur in The Beast of Hollow Mountain, the movie's main monster is given no build-up whatsoever!

There's worse yet, though.  The main characters, Dr. Harkness and Groves' daughter Jan, are barely involved in the 'caveman' part of the plot. They get phone calls about the various murders that Groves is committing in caveman form, and they snoop around the lab to figure out things the audience already knows.  The same story could have been told without them, perhaps with the game warden and the hunter as protagonists, and it would probably have been more interesting. The script also repeatedly has Dr. Groves wander in and bluster about how the tiger sightings are hallucinations and tall tales, which seems a little unnecessary when we already know he's responsible. The film-makers can't seem to decide whether they want us to know that or not.

Dr. Groves wears glasses.  Maybe the reason his primitive alter-ego is angry and breaking shit (although it does politely open and close the window it climbs out of, which made me laugh) is because it can't see. This is also my theory about why the Hulk smashes, and what do you know?  In Avengers Endgame he's got Hulk-sized spectacles and only smashes when he's told!

The direction of The Neanderthal Man can probably best be described as 'serviceable'.  It shows us what's going on, but doesn't particularly add anything to the proceedings.  The 'Neanderthal' mask is immobile and uninteresting, not much better than somebody's Party City Sasquatch costume.  Even the eyes are just painted on, meaning the poor guy in the costume can’t do much because he can’t see where he’s going.

The dialogue is often very strange, with characters talking like they're in a Jules Verne novel. If only one person did this, it might seem like a character quirk – it works for Dr. Groves, for example – but it's everybody. Seeing the cat carcass is gone, Harkness declares, “I refuse to believe in the supernatural!  There must be some logical cause and effect to this unholy adventure!”  Groves' fiancee Ruth berates him for ignoring her, saying, “I want you, the man I once knew!  The good companion, the cheerful friend.  I want the happiness we once found in each other.”  It's bizarre to listen to, and often audibly awkward for the actors.

Monster on the Campus was kind of trying to be about how humanity must choose to evolve away from our inner savage, although the finale didn't bear that out.  There's a scene in The Neanderthal Man in which this movie seems to be trying to go in the opposite direction, saying that we were never savage to begin with.  Dr. Groves is speaking to a panel of scientists about the size of the brain in various 'primitive' species of human.  He points out that by the time we reached Homo erectus we were already working with four times the cerebral jelly of a chimpanzee, and argues that our ancestors would have been recognizably human in their behaviour and problem-solving capacity.

(Amusingly, his chart of human evolution includes Piltdown Man, which was proven to be a hoax literally a few months after this movie's release.  What makes this even more tragic for the writers is that their list of primitive humans seems to be the only place where they actually did any research.)

The problem with Dr. Groves' theory is that he already knows it's wrong. We soon learn that he's been experimenting on himself with his serum for a while already, and his notes show that he knows very well he regresses into a near-mindless animal.  The movie does not even try to reconcile these ideas.  If Groves were continuing his experiments in the hope that perfecting his serum would give him a more accurate reconstruction of ancient man, that would be one thing, but the script never goes there.

So now that we've had two 'man turns into caveman by injecting science juice' movies, of course I have to ask which one is better.  Monster on the Campus wasn't a good movie but it was definitely an improvement on The Neanderthal Man in several respects, and although I don't have any way to find out for certain, I suspect it was an intentional remake.  It's definitely more entertaining and gets bonus points for including the Meganeura dragonfly, but nothing in it is nearly as funny as The Neanderthal Man's fake tiger head.  I guess if you're gonna watch one or the other, stick to Monster on the Campus, but if you're gonna watch both, start with The Neanderthal Man and do them in chronological order, the better to spot the inspirations and references.

Before I go, a fun paleontology fact: current thinking is that the saber-toothed cat's eponymous fangs actually didn't show when it had its mouth closed!  There are zero cave paintings or ancient sculptures of a saber-tooth cat with teeth visible, and when scientists looked at the structure of the enamel in the canines, it suggested that in life the teeth were hidden by big, fleshy, St Bernard jowls.  Google 'smilodon lips' and behold how this looks fully three hundred percent more ridiculous than you're imagining.  I love nature.

[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]

1107: The Land that Time Forgot

Watching the opening credits of this actually made me do a double-take – the name Colin Farrell appeared on the screen and I was like, wait, what the fuck?  Wouldn’t he have been like two years old?  Well, I looked it up and learned that I was wrong: The Land that Time Forgot was made in 1975, and the Colin Farrell I was thinking of wasn’t even born until a year later.  At least that woke me up.

It’s World War I, and a passenger ship is torpedoed by a German submarine.  The only survivors are a few sailors, Doug McClure, and a Dr. Lisa Clayton who serves as the movie’s designated pretty girl.  The nearest thing to rescue in sight is the submarine itself when it surfaces a few hours later – so they climb aboard, storm the hatch, and take over the ship.  At first it seems that all they have to do now is head for home, but they soon learn that the Germans have sabotaged the compass.  They’ve come ashore instead at the mysterious lost continent of Caprona. Naturally this is a land of cavemen and dinosaurs, and in order to escape the British and the Germans must put aside their differences and work together.  Only then will they be able to get back to the real world and resume shooting at each other.

While At the Earth’s Core comes across as a movie nobody gave a much of a shit about, there are places where The Land that Time Forgot is surprisingly artful and well-made.  In particular the first half-hour has several very nice moments in it, especially in the way it uses sound.  After the opening credits, the music totally vanishes for a third of the film.  The only background sounds are the lapping of waves and the creaking of the submarine, which makes gunshots and explosions all the more jarring when they happen.  It also makes this part of the movie seem very grounded and real, which contrasts with the more fantastical stuff that happens in Caprona.  The first sight of the Capronan cliffs is accompanied by the return of the soundtrack, which ushers us out of this more real world and into the fantasy beyond.

I feel like if Amicus had just set out to make a suspense movie about WWI submarines, a sort of early-20th-century Balance of Terror, they could have done a pretty fair job.  Several scenes, such as when the characters are all sitting in the dinghy waiting for the sub to surface, or when they’re diving to escape the British ship firing on them and aren’t sure if the hull will hold, are very effective indeed. The interior of the sub is an appropriately creepy and claustrophobic place, and details like the slight swinging of the lamp in the captain’s office remind us that we’re at sea.  The miniature sub surfacing, with water pouring off it, looks lovely.  The giant squid that passes by them un-noticed in the dark is my favourite ‘creature’ moment.

Unfortunately, there’s also stuff that sucks.  What ought to be the ‘action’ sequences are just a bunch of guys in very similar jackets and sweaters punching each other in the fog, and you can’t tell who’s who or which side is winning.  The conversation between the captain and Dr. Clayton attempts to make the point that when your country’s at war it’s impossible to ‘stay out of it’ no matter how much of a pacifist you, personally, may be, but it’s too heavy-handed to work properly… though I do like how the two of them are able to bond over a shared interest in biology.  I have no idea what happened in the tunnel that damaged the submarine, because the exterior shots are just blackness with a few rocks.

Then we hit the dinosaurs.  These are honestly fairly impressive for the time the film was made.  We don’t get a good first impression, as the first ones we get a good look at are three completely stiff pterodactyls circling like they’re hanging from a baby’s mobile.  The rest are puppets, stop motion, and animatronics, and the people who decided which technique to use for which shot had a good grasp of what each is best at.  The greenscreen work is sometimes crummy but there are some lovely matte paintings, and for the most part the effects here are good enough to tell the story without being distracting.  There’s even some attempt to portray the dinosaurs as animals with behaviours, rather than monsters that exist only to menace the humans.

So I actually have quite a bit of praise for this movie.  That’s not what my blog is about, though.  This blog is about movies that suck, so let’s look at the bad parts of The Land that Time Forgot.

Well, there’s the standard stuff.  The day-for-night is bright enough that it was obviously shot in the daytime while still being dark enough that you can’t tell what’s going on. The human inhabitants of Caprona are stupid cartoon Neanderthals with dark makeup on their faces but not their arms and legs, who become whiter and whiter as they move up the evolutionary scale. The motion of the dinosaurs may be pretty good but the design of them is ugly and lumpy, with far too many teeth even on the herbivores.  This is partly because we didn’t know nearly as much about dinosaurs in the seventies, but the movie’s fat carnosaurs with their lizard-like heads would have been ugly and inaccurate in the thirties.  Compare them, for example, to Charles R. Knight’s Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops from freaking 1927.

Many ‘lost world’ scenarios will simply present us with t-rex fighting a saber-toothed tiger and expect us not to question it.  The Land that Time Forgot gives us an reason of sorts for its mixing of geological eras, but not one that makes any sense.  From Om’s conviction that he will become a ‘Stolu’ and Dr. Clayton’s explanation of what’s going on in the giant coconut hot tub, we gather that each individual organism on Caprona evolves from a single cell to a complex being, following the entire history of its species’ evolution.  This appears to have been inspired by the fact that embryos ‘evolve’ as they develop, going through phases in which they have things like gills before losing them.  The phenomenon, called 'recapitulation', was considered one of the original pieces of evidence for evolution and I guess I can accept how they use it here.  The problem is that the movie refuses to state it clearly, which gives the impression that the writers were kind of embarrassed by the idea.

The biggest problem with two-thirds of The Land that Time Forgot is that once the characters reach Caprona, the story more or less comes to a screeching halt.  The parts set on the submarine were quite tightly-focused.  Now we are technically still seeing the same story, as they try to find fuel in order to get them back to civilization, but we also stop for long sequences of people climbing hills and dinosaurs wandering around in the dark, or pointless arguments between the British and German sailors.  In a dinosaur movie we obviously need a little bit of people standing around going oooooh and aaaaah, but they go about it all wrong here.

Then there’s the ending, which quite literally destroys everything we’ve seen so far.  The characters are on the verge of saving the damsel in distress, escaping the island, and celebrating the power of international cooperation, and then at the last minute the volcano erupts and it all goes to hell.  A volcano erupting at the end of a movie that is not about a volcano erupting will always be a deus ex machina, because there’s nothing characters can do to cause or prevent it – it’s never anything but a coincidence.  The need to escape prompts the Germans to turn on the British and try to leave without Dr. Clayton and Doug McClure, and their karmic punishment is to be cooked to death by volcanic gases in their own submarine.  Clayton and McClure are left behind on the shore while everything around them catches fire. This doesn’t feel like a conclusion to the story we’ve just seen.  It feels more like somebody just really hates happy endings, and ripped one out from under us at the last moment.

There are a few things in this movie that could have counted as thematic material if anyone had cared, but nothing is ever done with any of them. Om is a ‘bolu’, a lower order of cavemen, and he never seems to notice Dr. Clayton, nor do the slightly higher ‘stolu’.  It is the ‘golu’, the most human-like of them all, who attempt to kidnap and rape her. I doubt this was an attempt to say anything about human nature.  It seems to have been done that way just because it wasn’t yet time for Dr. Clayton to be in peril until the climax of the film.

Likewise, Jonah and the bots comment on the fact that this is a movie about Europeans coming to a new country, shooting the inhabitants, and generally making a mess as they search for petroleum.  Within the story this is not a colonial urge, as the characters have no plans to settle, but a matter of life and death, and again it seems like nobody thought very deeply about it.  It was just a thing that needed to happen to make the plot work.

Enough went right in this movie that the things which went wrong really do become a terrible shame.  A great deal of effort seems to have gone into just about everything, but a few poor writing choices mean that the result is not very good, yet not bad enough to be enjoyed on that level either.  If I were contemplating this as a potential Episode that Never Was, I honestly think I would have decided against it.  It just doesn’t have the kind of personality I associate with a good MST3K movie.

[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]

104: Women of the Prehistoric Planet

Ah, another fine Misleading Title.  It's true that there are women in this movie, and there is a prehistoric planet, but the two are not related in the way the phrase would lead you to expect.  In fact, when we do meet beings native to said prehistoric planet, every last one of those on screen is male.  Whoops!

A convoy of roomy pastel spaceships are on their way home when there's a mutiny aboard one of them, resulting in a crash landing on a primitive jungle world.  One of their sister ships turns around to go look for them, but because they were travelling at so nearly the speed of light, what's only a short trip to the crew is eighteen years to the survivors on the planet.  The would-be rescuers arrive to find only one person left, a young man named Tang who is the son of two of the crash victims.  The Admiral's half-Centaurian daughter Linda falls in love with Tang and they choose to stay in the jungle and start a family together.  In a supposed 'twist ending', it turns out the planet is prehistoric Earth, and Tang and Linda are the ancestors of the entire human race.  It's a wonder we don't all have six toes and three eyes.

I do sort of have to give this movie props for a couple of things. For one, it's one of the oldest movies I know of to realize that aliens who look like humans don't necessarily have to look like white humans.  Even Star Trek took a while to figure that out.  Unfortunately, the casting director of Women of the Prehistoric Planet decided that all the aliens would be played by East Asian actors (except for the one who is played by Hawai'ian Hans Wedermeyer.  East Asian... Polynesian... what's the difference, right?) – while all the humans would be played by white ones.  So in a movie that professes to be about racism and prejudice, they end up implying that whites are 'more human' than anybody else.  Again, whoops.

Much more impressive is that it's also one of the oldest movies I know of to understand the concept of time dilation.  Not only that, it actually makes it important to the plot!  Einstein would have been proud had it only been a better movie.

This is one of those rare instances when I'm a hundred percent sure I'm not making up the subtext – despite its amusingly exploitative title, Women of the Prehistoric planet is much more than just a movie about pretty girls in leopard-print sarongs (though it has one of those).  This is a movie about how we're all human and need to treat each other as such.  No surprise it was released in 1966, when a lot was going on in the civil rights movement.  There's also a moment in which it seems to comment on the idea of immigration: when Tang says the troglodytes don't want him on their land, Linda protests that this is irrational, since there's lots of room and resources for everybody.

And hey, these are important issues that should be explored in art!  The movie's heart is definitely in the right place.  Too bad they fuck it up, royally and repeatedly.  The casting is only the portal into a whole magical realm of Unfortunate Implications.

For starters, we don't really get an idea of the Centaurians as a culture.  All the individual Centaurians we see speak the same language as the humans and dress in similar clothing, with only arm bands for adornment.  They are clearly already partially assimilated into the human society and can expect to do even more blending in when they reach the human homeworld.  The closest we come to what's intended to be a Centaurian moment is Linda recognizing and praying before the idol in Tang's cave.  A movie that wants us to get along with foreign cultures can't even bother to show us one.  I bitch about Avatar a lot but at least we got to know the Na'vi both as individuals and as a people.

There's also an early blow to the idea of equality in that the Centaurians are not part of the spaceships' crews.  The humans' uniforms have insignia of rank – the Centaurians' clothing does not.  Occasionally we see one of them doing something but we're never given any specific titles or responsibilities for them as we are for the human characters.  They are mere passengers, possibly because the humans don't trust them, and the mutiny seems to illustrate that we were right not to.  When the Centaurians try to take over one ship they cannot properly pilot it (presumably because they were never trained to), and crash-land, leading ultimately to the deaths of everybody on board.  When the other ship arrives to look for survivors, no Centaurians go with the search party.  We’re not told why, but I assume it's a trust thing again.

The movie also does an awful lot of something you may have heard mentioned before on tumblr – 'white savioring'.  Admiral King says that the Centaurians used to be a great culture before they descended back into 'savagery' for some unknown reason.  The humans want to help them become great again – implying that they cannot do it on their own.  Furthermore, helping them 'become great' seems to involve teaching them human language and culture rather than rediscovering or developing their own, and taking them away from their world rather than bringing help to it.  The human characters discuss this in a very condescending way, talking about how Linda is 'a fine example of what might be accomplished', as if she's a work of art or a well-tuned car.

And of course there's the end, with Linda and Tang remaining on the planet to spawn the human race.  Their romance seems a little weird to begin with – Tang has never met another civilized person other than his parents, and Linda had earlier commented to one of the women on the crew that she'd never been around another Centaurian her own age.  It feels like they're not so much 'meant to be' as both leaping at the chance to relieve their sexual frustration.  Tang seems perfectly happy living as a caveman, but he has never known anything else.  Linda, on the other hand, is supposedly a bright and ambitious student, though she also comes across as anxious and unhappy in the human-dominated world.  Alone with Tang on the planet, she relaxes and becomes more cheerful.  This seems to imply that she's in her natural habitat, that Centaurians are cavepeople at the core and must be guided by some outside influence if they're to be anything more (see previous paragraph).  Somehow I don't think that's where the movie was trying to go with that ending.

I suppose somebody's going to bring up the fact that the natives of the prehistoric planet, which Tang describes as savages who can only hate and kill, are also played by white actors.  I guess these troglodytes occupy the number three spot in the movie's hierarchy of acceptable humanity.  They are marginal to the story, though, and while the Centaurians are supposed to be a unique culture, these are merely stock primitives, themselves a stereotype and a cliché. Besides, even if there were anything more to them, being racist in a movie isn't like losing points for your house at Hogwarts – you can't make up for it by doing something cool later.  No matter what the cavemen were like, the Centaurians would still be patronized and portrayed as in need of (white) human help to advance.

I can't call Women of the Prehistoric Planet a total loss, though.  If you can stop rolling your eyes at its backfired attempts to be progressive, there is a certain amount of bad movie joy to be found here.  There are the 'sneaking' shots that seem rather enamored of Hans Wedermeyer's legs (they are nice, I gotta say). There's the most lifeless giant spider outside of a Bill Rebane movie and the silliest model space ship since The Human Duplicators. John Agar cracking up during the scene in which Paul Gilbert describes his 'karate lessons'.  The stock footage lizard and the bit in which the men must make their way very carefully over a log across a pond, despite the fact that they could just go around (it is clearly the same pond two other characters went around a few scenes earlier, and is suspiciously rectangular and swimming-pool-like).  Tang's instantly healed laser gun wound.

And the dialogue, my god, the dialogue.  We get gems like when a female crew member tells the man trying to flirt with her, “there are some men who can send me right into orbit.  You couldn't even get me onto the launching pad.”  There's the weird flowery speech a crewman gives as he wonders what the survivors' last days were like.  There's Tang and Linda's terrible romantic interactions, which include that ridiculous cliche moment when she slaps him, then he slaps her, and then they kiss.  There's Wendell Corey slurring every word, just as he did in Agent for HARM and The Astro-Zombies – I think he just spent the entire 60's flushed as hell.

I do have a soft spot for movies that display some ambition, even if (sometimes especially if) they fall short of their goals by miles. This one I have mixed feelings about.  It's ridiculous enough to be fun to watch, especially in MST3K form, but it never reaches the delirious heights of things like Teenagers from Outer Space, and it's just so obnoxiously wrong-headed, sashaying blithely down the road of good intentions straight into politically incorrect hell, that I can't bring myself to like it.  Women of the Prehistoric Planet is, in my final analysis, one of the 'meh' ones.

[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.

[mst3kproject]

Monster on the Campus

This movie has one of the best MST3K pedigrees I’ve seen.  The cast includes Whit Bissell, the mad scientist from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and director Jack Arnold also brought us Revenge of the Creature and The Space Children (and four episodes of Love, American Style).  That alone would qualify it as an Episode that Never Was, but wait... there’s more!  Monster on the Campus boasts a veritable menagerie of background weirdnesses that the Brains could have gone to town on, including an inexplicable bust of Genghis Khan, a woman who appears to have her dress on backwards, and a door in constant use despite being marked USE OTHER DOOR.  Add a werecreature plot even more bizarre than Track of the Moon Beast and I am at an utter loss for how they managed to miss this one.

Professor Donald Blake (no, not that Donald Blake) is a paleontologist who has just received an exciting new specimen: a preserved coelacanth, all the way from Madagascar!  He hopes this will take him down roads of science few have ever trod, and oh, boy, will it ever.  When Blake cuts himself on the prehistoric fish’ teeth, he transforms into an ape-man and sets out on a rampage.  The police investigate his trail of murder and vandalism, while the coelacanth (which Blake pronounces 'silla-canth') continues to infect anything it touches with a sort of de-evolution, like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Genesis except much, much sillier.

I didn't think coelacanths actually had teeth, but I googled it and it turns out they do.  This is possibly the most scientifically accurate part of the movie.  The rest of Monster on the Campus' science is on a par with things like the carbon-dated metal statue in Terror from the Year 5000 or Glenn Manning's single-celled heart in The Amazing Colossal Man.  As a major part of its premise, this film proposes that somehow, coelacanth blood actually resists evolution.

This is really, really not how evolution works.  If you could sequence the genes of a modern coelacanth and compare them with those of its ancestors eighty million years ago, you'd find that genetically it's about as closely related to them as we are to whatever little possum-like creatures were around back then. Coelacanths might look like they haven't changed, but that's simply because, like sharks or cockroaches, they have happened upon a body plan that works so well for what they do that there's been no reason to change it.  Instead, the tweaking happens on the inside – mutations accumulate whether they cause physical changes or not, and modern coelacanths must deal with completely different environmental conditions than prehistoric ones.  Factors like predators, prey, temperature, ocean and atmospheric chemistry, and diseases are changing constantly and means that coelacanths must evolve, even if they do so where we can't see it.

Another thing this movie apparently believes about evolution is that creatures in the past were innately angrier and more violent than modern ones.  We see several 'primitive' life forms over the course of this story: a saber-toothed German Shepherd that apparently represents the ancestor of modern dogs (and makes about as much evolutionary sense as the saber-toothed squirrel in the Ice Age movies), a giant dragonfly, and the caveman Dr. Blake becomes.  All three are shown attacking anything that moves, and sometimes things that don't.  There is some implication that the caveman has access to Blake's memories even it can't make sense of them, but its reaction to the things it thus 'recognizes' is still violence.  The idea that the past was 'brutal' and modern man must overcome his instincts to progress is a constant running thread in the movie.

This is taken so far, however, that it leaves the viewer wondering – if we evolved from such violent creatures, how did we ever get to where we are?  An argument might be made that the prehistoric dog was vicious because it had not yet been domesticated.  Fine, but how were humans domesticated?  How did the ape-man we see ever stop smashing, raping, and killing long enough to settle down and invent civilization?  Its behaviour shows very little evidence of what we'd recognize as intelligence.  Maybe the female was a civilizing influence.  We never see a prehistoric woman in the movie, and Dr. Blake's display of 'the faces of man' inadvertently implies that woman is the highest form of human evolution.  If, as the stereotypes tell us, men are intrinsically domineering and violent while women are supposed to be kind and nurturing, maybe the more feminine humanity becomes, the better.

Oh, wait, there's one more thing the movie's science gets right: the idea of preserving tissues through irradiation.  This works exactly the way Blake explains: by killing off all the bacteria in the target material.  It's actually a very safe and effective way to prevent food from spoiling – it never really caught on, however, probably mostly because of movies like this one spreading the idea that radiation = oh god, oh god, we're all gonna die.

If we can accept all that, however, the movie is actually very entertaining.  The music is pretty good and the effects are not convincing, but they're fun to look at.  The caveman doesn't appear on screen until nearly the end, but this is done in such a way that it is suspenseful rather than annoying.  We know that something strange has happened to Dr. Blake, and that it's equivalent to what became of Samson the dog and the dragonfly – but the characters don't, at least not at first, and their conclusion that Blake is being stalked by an unknown enemy is an entirely reasonable one given the facts they have.  The theory becomes harder to fit to the facts as more facts appear, and the police struggle to keep it plausible.  The dog and the dragonfly give us some monster action to keep us interested while we wait for the big reveal.

The reveal itself is not as satisfying as it ought to be, because the caveman makeup is pretty damned bad.  The mask almost looks more like a werewolf than an ape-man.  The way Blake gets his doses of coelacanth blood is also pretty contrived.  The first time, when he cuts his hand on the fish' teeth, kind of works, but the second time, he allows blood to drip into his pipe and them smokes it.  This is hilarious in both concept and execution, and even Blake, discussing his theory with his superiors, dismisses a second accident as unlikely.

Donald Blake himself is a reasonably sympathetic character, both the hero and the villain of his own story.  We never entirely like him, but that's mainly a product of the movie's age. The first line we hear him say is as he makes a mold of his girlfriend's face to add to his 'faces of man' exhibit - “the female in the perfect state – helpless and silent!”  This probably seemed harmlessly funny in the 50's – in the 21st century it makes him seem like a pig and it's kind of an uphill struggle to regain any respect for him. The slow burn of him figuring out who the monster is, and the confusion and terror that accompany it, help a lot – as does the behaviour of his colleagues, who understandably think he's going nuts.

At the end of the movie, Blake decides to perform an experiment – he will inject himself with the coelacanth blood a third time and see what happens.  He records a last message, saying “I pray only for the courage to destroy the monster within me.”  Sure enough, the caveman re-emerges and threatens Blake's girlfriend Madeline.  Upon seeing the photographic evidence, he convinces his colleagues to shoot him, so that the monster will die with him.

I think we're supposed to consider this a tragedy: like Oedipus, Blake could not stop pursuing the truth, and the truth in the end destroyed him.  The problem with this is that his suicide seems, quite honestly, totally unnecessary.  To keep from committing any more violent crimes, all Blake would have to do is not come into contact with radioactive coelacanth blood, and it doesn't seem like this ought to be a difficult substance to avoid.  In fact, he probably has the world's entire supply right there in his lab – burn the damn fish, and you're done!  Committing suicide over a problem that easy to solve is the act of a drama queen, Dr. Blake.

It's especially ridiculous when this movie's entire point is that the capacity for brutal violence is latent within all of us, just waiting for an excuse to bubble to the surface.  Is the movie trying to say that we should all kill ourselves to avoid the crimes we might commit?  I could probably kill somebody if I felt it was necessary – do I deserve to be pre-emptively locked up for that?  Blake seems to know that he's not responsible for what his prehistoric alter-ego does, even if the irrational part of him feels guilty regardless. Certainly he doesn't blame Sampson the dog for nearly attacking Madeline while under the influence of the coelacanth blood, so why blame himself?  The point made earlier in the movie was that we must resist our urge to violence, to choose to evolve away from it – but rather than rejecting his animal nature, Blake seems to lose all hope of ever doing so.

Confused as the movie is, this is one of the good ones.  It had me on its side from the moment it included a Meganeura, one of my favourite under-used prehistoric animals – but even outside of that it's a fun story that keeps the audience engaged.  It's definitely not perfect, but the annoying parts don't annoy me enough to detract from the fun ones.  Any lover of silly 50's sci-fi should definitely check out Monster on the Campus.