#he believes in bullshit only insofar as it convinces other people to believe in it. thats the kinda guy he is. slime man.........

[identityquest]

i got a request for sock and i had to pause and just draw a bunch of him. my favorite slimeball

[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.

[sage-nebula]

homlnkyvs replied to your post “I am so, so, so, so, so beyond sick of seeing Alan hate. And you know...”

PEOPLE STILL GIVE HIM HATE AFTER SIX FUCKING MONTHS?!

Unfortunately, yes. 

I pulled this comment off a trailer for the upcoming movie---you know, the movie that has absolutely nothing at all to do with Alan? Yeah, people still found reason to bring him up and bash him in the comments of that video, and trust me, this person was not the only one. Someone else said that he was “a shitty excuse for a rival who won battles with brute force and no skills” and that’s so wrong I don’t even know where to begin, particularly since Alan actually uses real-world competitive strategies in matches (Agiligross, anyone?). I also saw more hate on my dash tonight (the OP was not someone I follow, of course, because I’d never follow such trash), and I just . . . I’m so goddamn fucking tired of this nonsense. So beyond tired of this nonsense. So, so, so beyond tired.

theyugiohtrashcan replied to your post “I am so, so, so, so, so beyond sick of seeing Alan hate. And you know...”

AS I BELIEVE WE SAID IN OUR MESSAGES: ALAN IS YOUR FAVE'S FAVE SO YOU PROBABLY SHOULD QUIT WHILE YOU'RE BEHIND...................

PRETTY GODDAMN MUCH. Ash cares about Alan so much, and he’s so in tune and in sync with him, he would never stand for this, not ever. I mean, Ash wouldn’t stand for such nonsense in general, but especially for someone he clearly likes as much as he likes Alan? As much as he has liked Alan since pretty much the moment they met (in which Alan and Lizardon came in like Big Damn Heroes and helped save Pikachu)? God damn, he and Alan saved the world side-by-side. There is no goddamn way Ash would stand for any of this bullshit, much less in his name.

yoshi12370 replied to your post “I am so, so, so, so, so beyond sick of seeing Alan hate. And you know...”

People really need to get over the league. Yes it's disappointing that Ash lost but there's nothing y'all can do

I seriously still don’t understand how it’s disappointing that Ash lost. I haven’t understood it since it happened and I don’t understand it now.

To begin with, it was absolutely ridiculous that people became so convinced that Ash was going to win. It was stated ages ago---AGES---by one of the show’s directors (Hidaka Masamitsu, in specific) that the show will end when Ash becomes a Pokémon Master. Specifically:

Now an overall question about the show. Will Ash ever become a Pokemon Master? He laughed and fell back on the couch. He blatantly said that when Ash becomes a Pokemon Master, the show will end. It will be the last episode. Going back to my first interview, I did not mention that he stated the show was cyclical because it could be the audience is constantly replaced (since children get older and leave, and new children come in), so they are allowed to get away with having the same repetitive goal. So, the show would probably continue the same way collect badges, travel through different regions, never age. Will Ash and Pikachu ever be replaced? No. Will they ever age? No. Will there be a 5th generation of Pokemon and will the show keep continuing? He laughed even harder and said of course. Pokemon will continue for many generations to come, and as he made it sound, probably forever.

Hidaka-san was a director until the Battle Frontier arc, and a storyboard artist until Best Wishes. While I don’t think he’s actively working on the show anymore, I highly doubt that he was the only one to hold this opinion, particularly since he was only one director out of several, and his reason for it makes absolute sense. The show is cyclical because it could be the audience is constantly replaced (since children get older and leave, and new children come in), so they are allowed to get away with the same repetitive goal. The eight year old who starts watching the anime now won’t have decades of disappointment of Ash not winning a League. There are children for whom the XY&Z anime series was their first. The Kalos League was the first League they ever experienced. So for them, yeah, Ash lost this one, but that’s their first loss, and the anime is for them, not for the adults who have been watching from the beginning. While it’s true that the exact criteria for being a Pokémon Master is never stated, I’ll bet you every bottom dollar that the showrunners are thinking of winning a Game League to be equivalent to becoming a Pokémon Master, or at least a huge step in that direction that would put them on a fast track to the show ending. Since they don’t want to do that---since they would be stupid to do that---Ash is never, not ever, going to win a Game League. He’s just not. It was absolutely ridiculous and beyond inexcusable for the adults who have watched this show for generations now to delude themselves that badly. (And I mean, the mere idea made Hidaka-san laugh. He actually laughed. Which, I mean, ouch insofar as Ash’s feelings go, but still, that should give people a clue.)

But even setting that aside, I still don’t see how this was disappointing. Without counting the Orange League, which doesn’t “count” in terms of his longterm goal due to being anime exclusive, Ash made it farther in the Kalos League than he ever has before. He has never made it to the finals before. The closest he made it was Top 4 in Sinnoh, and there he got booted out so badly that he lost 6-2 (because his opponent, Tobias, had a team of legendaries). Otherwise? He made it to Top 8 in Johto, Hoenn, and Unova, and Top 16 in Kanto. The Kanto loss was particularly bad, considering the fact that it wasn’t a fair fight (since he didn’t have a healthy team beforehand due to Team Rocket’s interference) and he lasted a grand total of five real world minutes. Yeah, that’s right---his Kanto League loss didn’t even take up an entire episode. It took up the very end of one episode. That’s how bad Kanto was, and yet people are going to bitch and moan about Kalos?

Ash made it to the finals of the Kalos League after absolutely curbstomping every single opponent he faced to get there. His match against Alan lasted two entire episodes, he and Alan went at each other beat for beat, Pikachu was so OP that Alan had to send out Lizardon against him because no one else could take him, and Ash even had some plot armor to make Greninja last longer than he should have, by all accounts. And yet people are still going to say that’s disappointing? People are going to sit there and seriously claim that he lied to Delia, or that Delia would be disappointed, because he told Delia that he was going to do better in Kalos than he did in Unova, when in Unova he was Top 8 and in Kalos he was Top 2? How is that not better? How is that not good enough? Honest to Din, some of Ash’s stans sound exactly like his haters with the way they place unreasonable standards on him and whine about his genuine accomplishments as if they aren’t good enough. What was it that Nietzsche said? Ah, yes: “He who fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster. And if you stare for long into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you.” Ash’s stans sound just like his haters sometimes and they should honestly check themselves so they can learn to knock it off, for real.

So yeah, I really don’t see how Ash’s Kalos League loss was disappointing in the least bit. The only thing disappointing is the behavior of Ash’s stans, full stop.