Stop Motion Dreams: One Million Years BC!

Article theme: Back to the Cave - Lita Ford

Grugkino One Million Years BC opens with the cavemen of the Rock Tribe catching a wild hog in a pit trap. As they make off with their prize, an old grampa they brought along because ???? falls into the hole, and they leave him there for the vultures. This made me laugh for the rest of the movie.

"I've fallen and I can't get up!"
"..."

Upon returning to their home cave, some gruglennial yeets a rock at another caveboomer, making this the most brutal elder abuse kino since that Biden debate.

"Listen here, Jack, you just walk right in the front door, give the manager a firm handshake, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Why, when I was at Woodstock..."

The remainder of the runtime is likewise comprised of random violence, partly because the characters can only speak in grunts and a handful of made-up grugspeak words, and partly because it was a Hammer production, and to Hammer everything looked like nails. Anyway, Tumak (our nominal hero, but it's a relative term) gets exiled from the tribe and finds himself wandering the prehistoric wastes, where he bumps into things like this:

Could be a dinosaur.

And this:

Oh come on, that's an iguana.

Eventually he makes it to the ocean, where he meets Raquel Welch (Fantastic Voyage) and her Shell Tribe. At first I thought they were all women, making them the Clam Tribe, but it turns out they have men too, meaning you can use that joke in your own parody.

The 1960s hairdos are so funny to me. If they remade this today, they'd all have those half-shaved cuts and the men would all have zoomer perms.

They take Tumak in and nurse him back to health, BUT MEANWHILE at the Rock Tribe cave, this dude seizes power by Mufasa'ing another old man off a cliff.

Day of the Pillow (1,000,000 BC, colourised).

This is a very important plot point, because when Tumak eventually returns to his home cave, he will now be fighting a different guy than the dude that exiled him the first time. IDK why that's important, but the screenwriter with Earth's easiest job determined that it was. Anyway, back at the coast, Tumak helps the Shell Tribe fend off a dinosaur attack by cleverly/accidentally causing it to impale itself on a large stake.

Harryhausen diligently animated the model with the stake still embedded rising and falling with the dinosaur's dying breaths, which is a level of perfectionism wholly out of proportion to the stature of the project, and that autismal refusal to phone it in is what made him the GOAT.

Sadly for Tumak, his popularity is short-lived, and he ends up getting exiled from the Shell Tribe too, prompting the audience to wonder whether he's the problem. Not Racquel, though, who chooses to accompany him back through the wasteland, during the course of which they stop off in a cave occupied by a family of sasquatches who beat one of their own to death and stick his head on a spike. This seems to get Racquel wet as fuck.

Really, babe? Sasquatch beheadings? I mean I'm not saying no.

Because it's a dinosaur flick, and for not a single reason more, they then witness a dinosaur fight:

As a kid I always liked the triceratops, and was mad as hell when it got merked in Fantasia and just lay in a field with a stomache ache in J*rassic P*rk. Well, here it is, tricerabros: /ourdino/'s turn to shine.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone famously articulated a rule of storytelling whereby plot beats should never be joined by "and then", rather, "therefore" or "but". In Harryhausenkinos, the line between "and then" and "but" is often gossamer-fine. Everything that happens might be rendered "and then a dinosaur emerges!" or "but then a dinosaur emerges!", with little causal infrastructure being laid. But Harryhausen could do what he liked. Does anyone complain when Rammstein just bust out a flamethrower in the middle of a set? Spectacle for the sake of spectacle is only rubbish when it fails to entertain. Audacity and raw talent separate the greats from the also-rans; one law for the lion and the ox is Oppression.

Anyway, Tumak and Racquel make it back to Rock turf, whereupon Racquel immediately gets into a sweaty, hairpulling catfight with Tumak's cave-ex (Martine Beswick, Thunderball) because she tried to take her favourite bone (not an euphemism).

Wow, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast.

The old geezer eagerly proffering a rock for Racquel to bash Martine's head in with made me bray like a fucking donkey.

Naturally, this brings the Rock Tribe together in a spirit of celebration, and Racquel is enthusiastically adopted and shows her new BFFs how to swim and/or bathe, which I think is supposed to be the kind of upgrade for them that those apes in 2001 received from the monolith. But then a pteranodon snatches up Racquel and takes her to its nest to feed its young. But then it gets mauled to death by a pterodactyl, causing Racquel to drop into the ocean. See what I mean about stretching the "but" (careful now)?

Knowing this was a real movie makes me feel much better about my shitty greenscreen skillz.

The pterodactyl then graphically eats the baby pteranodons. Holy shit, Harryhausen.

Is One Million Years BC high art? Yes, actually. For what deeper well of subject matter can be found than the eternal tug-of-war between the civilising impulse and the savage? Between the cold machines of techno-singularitarian utopianism and monsters from the id? Cave art predating any written script speaks more to us than any astroturfed Important Film or fart-huffing thinkpiece in the papers of note. Like Frazetta, Harryhausen mastered the technical wizardry of his medium to render archetypes from our profoundest dreams and nightmares. You will kneel to my elitist case for populism, and you'll like it.

Stop Motion Dreams: The Greek Myths of Ray Harryhausen!

Article theme: Pi Alpha Nu - Stormtroopers of Death

Brilliant genius Ray Harryhausen made some of the greatest and most memorable kinos of all time, which were my absolute jam throughout my childhood and manchildhood, and hold up just as well today - better, in fact, because they told classic tales of heroism, instead of lamely and redundantly ""deconstructing"" them.

"Nooo you can't just heckin kill evil monsters! I'm going to make a statue reversing this! If you were media literate you'd know evil monsters are misunderstood and cool heroes are the real monsters" - both unironic Moviebob fans.

Jason and the Argonauts

Remember to stay hydrated.

Jason opens with a major plot intrigue never to be resolved: Jason is rightful heir to the throne of Thessaly, but in exile because the wicked Pelias rose up and killed his parents. Jason saves Pelias from drowning, unaware of who he is, but Pelias is forewarned that Jason will take his revenge, so steers Jason into what he believes is an impossible quest to find the Golden Fleece on far-flung Colchis. You'd expect the movie to conclude with Jason returning in triumph to overthrow Pelias, but this never happens, indicating they were hoping for a sequel. Whatever the case, I never felt short-changed the forty or so times I watched this as a kid, because the movie is packed with great setpieces and imagery.

I always liked this notion of the gods playing chess with the lives of mortals, although now I look at it, this game looks more like Risk.

Jason becomes a proxy in a game between Zeus and Hera, who are on friendlier terms here than they were in Kevin Sorbo's Hercules. Hera grants Jason five wishes, through which he burns at an impressive pace. I suppose he could just wish for the Golden Fleece, but maybe that would be against the spirit of the game. Anyway, Jason assembles a crew for the voyage that includes Hercules, and Hylas, an upstart who presumes to beat him at discus throwing by skipping the discus like a stone over the water. There's a moment where Hercules takes a beat to react to this and then cries out with delight, hoisting the little guy aloft in the air. It's a scene of bro bonding kino numales will sadly never understand.

They then went on a panty raid and TP'd the crusty old dean's house.

Even sadlier, this pair is doomed to disappear from the story in tragic scenes suggesting a redemptive Hercules spinoff was also mooted, but never produced. For the Argonauts run afoul of TALOS, who does this to their boat:

He swaps his sword to his other hand to do this because he's right-handed. Fucking imagine having that kind of attention to detail.

One thing about Harryhausen is that he knew the limitations of his medium of choice, and wisely opted to animate subjects in whom slightly stilted movements would seem natural, like giant bronze statues and, most famously of all, skeletons. For this is the one with the most famous stop-motion sequence of all time: the skeleton fight!

The design on the shield to the right of frame looks a bit like the Kraken that would later appear in Clash of the Titans. It could just be a coincidence, or maybe Harryhausen had a prototype already in mind, making this a reverse Easter egg. In support of this conjecture, note that the one behind it is clearly Medusa.

Harryhausen already dropped one banger skeleton fight scene in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but this one is far more complex, with seven skeletons all fighting Jason's crew at once. The logistical legwork required to make this sequence land is literally incomprehensible to anyone alive today.

To put this in perspective, I can't even draw a fucking skeleton.

That wide shot alone must have taken more effort than most entire films, but the action doesn't tap out at a few sword swipes and shield blocks. Here our hero yeets a skeleton over a cliff using its charging momentum against it:

Come on, dub it with a slide whistle.

Beheading also works:

His surprised reaction to losing his head is so genuine. There are A-list stars in Hollywood right now who can't sell this much human emotion, and this is a muppet of a skeleton.

We might, however, question the utility of stabbing one between the ribs:

Nooo not the air between my ribs! My only weakness nooo!

Clash of the Titans

Me on the crapper.

Harryhausen's final epic saw him retvrn to the Greek myths at the dawn of the 1980s, when Star Wars was all the rage and Conan just around the corner. Clash concerns the legend of Perseus, who, with the aid of an invisibility helmet must tame Pegasus, the winged horse, rescue Princess Andromeda from marriage to the deformed Calibos, follow a golden owl to the three witches from MacBeth to learn the way to slay Medusa, whose gaze can turn any living creature to stone, and use her severed head to in like manner petrify the Kraken, so saving the princess chained by the sea's edge in sacrifice to Thetis, Calibos' vengeful mother, who has an ongoing beef with Zeus. This might seem like a convoluted plot, but, like all Harryhausenkinos, it largely serves as a shuttle between one setpiece and the next.

weee

Because it dropped at such a specific moment there's a clear time-capsule appeal to Clash: Perseus' pet golden owl boops and beeps like R-2 D-2, and he's given friendly guidance by Mickey (Burgess Meredith) of Rocky fame. In fact the cast was so packed with famous names the guy that actually played Perseus got eighth billing in the end credits, being relegated to the "Mortal" category of cast:

Brutal.

I remember as a kid I always looked away when the Medusa came onscreen in case she turned me to stone. I choose to champion this as evidence of the power of cinéma instead of further proof that I'm retarded, but the memory stays vivid either way. Nor was Medusa the only formative nightmare fuel in the picture: Calibos looked creepy as hell too:

IDK why they chose to switch between an actor for the closeups and a model for the wides. Maybe synching the animation to the character's dialogue would've been prohibitively time-consuming. We should take a moment to appreciate his taste in furniture: this is the edgiest chair I've ever seen (I want it).

But the coolest of all Harryhausen creatures hands-down is the Kraken. Though invariably depicted as an octopus or giant squid in lesser hands, the master said fuck that and designed the sum of all cool monsters land-locked or aquatic. Harryhausen's Kraken is like King Kong meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon but with four arms and an immense crocodilianesque tail. Its arms even appear to have little suckers on them, making them halfway between arms and tentacles.

"I endorse the aquatic ape theory and the historicity of Atlantis" - Ray Harryhausen (I assume).

Top Ten Moar Accidentally RW Movies!

Last time we looked at accidentally right-leaning movies, I was forced to cull a much longer list of candidates to a more wieldy top ten. But since art is truth and truth is nature, hierarchy and God, whenever a movie is good it must in some sense also be rw. With that in mind, here are some more subtly self-defeating recs and how to parse them:

Hud

Imagine putting this line in your movie having no idea what it means.

One of the most revealing instances of the propensity for audiences to misunderstand and/or improve upon the intended messaging of a film is 1963's Hud, in which Paul Newman plays the titular shitheel son of an old-timer cattle farmer (Melvyn Douglas). Simmering resentment between the two prompts a hard choice of role model for Hud's young nephew (Brandon de Wilde). Loosely adapted from the novel Horseman, Pass By, the film greatly expands the Hud character with the aim of rendering him an embodiment of that perrennial pseud boogeyman, cApItAlIsM.

What's most fascinating about audience reactions is that both sides took the wrong intended message - libsoys (who today would presume to lecture you on media heckin literacy) just saw Hud as a cool rebel, while affable chuds empathised with the old man set in his ways who sings along enthusiastically to the corny classics at the movies, proving yet again that economics isn't as important to the right as values, and that leftardry is just a thousand shades of fuck-you-dad.

Zulu

The best part of this flick is the random cattle stampede in the middle of the battle.

I never really understood why chuds like Zulu so much. The British are portrayed as loutish, arrogant, ignorant, quarrelsome, lecherous grotesques. Despite all they do in the movie being to defend themselves, they conclude by agreeing that they feel ashamed of their actions, as though they should have unpacked their heckin privilege and let themselves be massacred instead. In spite of this highly dubious messaging, the sole pacifist character is also portrayed as a buffoonish strawman, because it gives the lib filmmakers a pretext to give Christianity its customary kicking.

But flash forward to the 2020s and Zulu was named alongside such other dangerous works as those of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R.R. Tolkien, and Shakespeare, on a list of things your kids might read that will radicalise them into ebil far right natzees. Apparently the fear that someone, somewhere might root for any white faction against any black faction for any reason renders this lib fantasy of yesteryear unacceptable to today's right-thinking people. Perhaps this fear set in long before the thoughtcrime list was published, since a prequel, Zulu Dawn, was released in the 70s hammering home the message that The White Guys Are The Villains with the subtlety of a late night talk show monologue. What a pity, because the Zulus had a cool, innately cinematic aesthetic, and had this material been treated intelligently, it could have produced the classic its cheerfully oblivious fanbase imagines it to be.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Trust the experts, biggot!

There are so many ways the big screen treatments of Tolkien's beloved novels might have turned out awful that it is a movie miracle they didn't. Many deserve credit, but the core reason they worked was the decision Jackson et al made not to impose their own politics on Tolkien's stridently Catholic, traditionalist vision. While the great man's autistic refusal to confirm any direct allegorical meaning to his writing afforded him plausible deniability that let his work inspire everyone from John Boorman (who planned to make a film version with the Beatles as the hobbits) to Gary Gygax to every single heavy metal band, it's scarcely possible not to see your slimy lib ""friends"" in the prideful, glory-supporting sellout Saruman and his odious gimp Wormtongue, who whip up historical ethnic grievances in the men of Dunland against the Rohirrim and poison the king's mind against his loyal but blunt and guileless friends (compare Eomer to Kent and Theoden to Lear for an idea of how things might have turned out had not Gandalf set things right). The extended editions make the parallels with today's rainbow flag dystopia even plainer: the orcs, who make nothing beautiful themselves, have torn down a statue of one of the old kings of men. Mostly Peacefully, one assumes.

A Few Good Men

Hilariously, this famous line appears on all these inspirational quote templates, and is attributed to Nicholson, as though he just randomly said it.

For years I legit thought the entire point of this movie was that Jack Nicholson is right. Of course he is right, but I would later learn that wasn't meant to be the point - the point was that he's Wrong Anyway. The steelman version of this flick I had imagined I had seen acknowledged two realities: that Nicholson & co.'s treatment of Pvt. Santiago was harsh at the interpersonal level, but that it was necessary at scale, because no man is an island and a society requires that each man do his part. This seemed intelligent, nuanced and tragical, and allowed every character in the drama to follow his or her convictions with an implicitly disastrous result for the country down the line. Astonishing how poorly Sorkin understands his own writing - if, indeed, he doesn't, and has not simply retreated to keep pace with the Overton window's endless leftward slide.

Glengarry Glen Ross

What did he mean by this?

David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross while a lib, intending it as a critique of - you guessed it - meanie grim bleak peepee poopoo capitalismerino. Later, he became a pro-market ziocon, perhaps upon realising there existed strange new worlds of loathsome cuntery in which to wallow just across the aisle. None of this has any bearing on how I read Glengarry Glen Ross, though - it's obvious the seething commie Moss (played by the seething commie Ed Harris, who sulked through Elia Kazan's Oscar moment because how very dare he Name Names in the face of the worst ideology in history totally dominating the most powerful propaganda machine that's ever existed?) is meant to be a thin-skinned, narcissistic douche, while amoral hotshot Roma (Al Pacino, as himself) justifies his grandiosity by being funny, and talentless-but-diligent token autist Aaronow (Alan Arkin) survives by keeping his head down as the the neurotypicals steal, cheat and bicker all around him.

The Star Wars prequels

While I'm ancient enough to belong to a world that saw the prequels as new-fangled trash, it must be said that prequel fans are much less douchey than OT purists and the prequels, having had a second lease of life as memecore, now work wonderfully as unintended comedies. While everything Lucas has ever written was intended as a Boomer Truth allegory of World War Heckin Two, the story arc of the prequels belies a far more striking and relevant historical resonance. An elected leader manipulating a secession crisis to create a war to grant himself tyrannical emergency powers isn't the story of Heckin Hitl0r, it's the story of Abraham Lincoln.

The Matrix

"Are you telling me I can dodge bullets?"

The Wachowski brothers now insist the movie about SS-cosplaying übermenschen triumphing by will over the matrix of mass media and global finance was t-totally intended as a transsexual allegory instead, biggot! I believe them (not that it was trooncore; just that it was meant to be a pozfest) due to the prior history of pinko messaging in their flicks. It's just funny that the term "red pill" was immediately co-opted by all the filthy thought criminals they despise because they hid their agitprop intentions a little too well. Note that H*llywood hasn't made that misstep (or a good movie) since. On a similar note...

They Live

Never forgetti Dobson's spaghetti.

John Carpenter accidentally made the most old/pol/ movie of all time, which he predictably protests was about CaPiTaLiSm you guys!!! (how strange that CaPiTaLiSm, like The Patriarchy and Hegemonic White Supremacy allows, funds and markets these critiques of it, and nothing else). I believe him that it wasn't meant to be about Jews, but, hilariously, Jews did not, and protested the movie because apparently bright blue aliens brainwashing everyone made them think of themselves. You think I'm making this up, but I'm not. To be fair, Carpenter's intended message doesn't make any sense because CaPiTaLiSm isn't a secret (or a real thing), and the rich of the late 80s didn't hide in plain view. The movie's implicit metaphor has to pertain to a powerful group that looks like anybody else, but, as we've seen, understanding their own writing isn't H*llywood's strong suit.

Halloween

This guy was the real MVP.

And while we're on the theme of John Carpenter (long the sovlless to Wes Craven's sovl), we'd be remiss not to mention that his first major hit, Halloween, was rendered retroactively reactionary by the academic and critical libstablishment insisting that The Shape was obviously meant as a divine punishment for the teens of Haddonfield, IL smoking pot and having premarital coitus. The theory went that (spoilers!) Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, the IMAGINE copypasta) is the sole survivor of the rampage because she's a morally pure straight edge virgin. Never mind that Carpenter protested this was never his intent, nor the fact that Curtis' character does smoke weed in the picture, contradicting one of the only two pillars of the theory. Shitlibs who would call you schizophrenic for noticing blatant leftshit in 99% of movies projected that Carpenter just must have been hiding a based & redpilled agenda in his low-budget slasher. Carpenter, the basicest of basic bitch libs, being unable to shake the shitlord label foisted on him in an act of unforced friendly fire for decades is one of the funnier meta-stories in cinema.

Once Upon a Time in the West

But by far the greatest of all accidentally-rw movies is Once Upon a Time in the West. Perhaps incensed that no one picked up on his subtle yet embarrassingly dumb messaging, Sergio Leone later went on to quote all-time mass murder and pie-eating contest champion Mao Tse-Tung in his rightly forgotten tantrum Duck, You Sucker, but, seethe though he might, his legacy will always be giving chud icons Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson the spotlight in his better-known works.

Imagine putting THIS line in your movie having no idea what it means.

Bronson's enemies are crippled businessman Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) and his slick hired thug Henry Fonda (as himself). Leone wants you to believe Bronson and Fonda are sort of kindred spirits as opposed to Morton, who is a pathetic loser incel who can't even walk, and represents...well, you know the drill. The thing is, though, the film escaped Leone's clumsy grasp, as great works often do, because the Good is stronger, wittier and wiser than the Adversary, and the Muse serves the Good as the artist serves the Muse. When Morton dies crawling in the dirt, a muddy puddle echoing his failed dream to reach the ocean with his railroad, Leone wants us to jeer like subhumans, but the scene defies his spite-filled designs and resonates with the pathos of tragedy. When Bronson whacks Fonda in the kino's climax, we don't see two equal-and-opposite giants in an honourable duel; we see ascended chud Bronson righteously executing slimy Marxoid Fonda for the crime of lending his blue eyes to the cause of ugliness and evil. In the end, Fonda and Leone lost the creative mandate of Heaven, and the movie closes out with based shitlord Cheyenne (Jason Robards) telling Claudia Cardinale not to be a hash tag me too drama queen as she brings water, her smile and beauty to a flourishing frontier town to the Wagnerian strains of Morricone's score.

"They" cannot conquer forever.