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 Racquel 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).

Stop Motion Dreams: Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad!

If I were ever to bring a little goblin of my own into this world, I have a plan to show him only silent movies in his early years, raising him to appreciate that lost art and believe it was the full extent of the potential of cinema (which is not far off base). I have always maintained the great tragedy of film is that the values of Griffith and Chaplin - didactic messaging, editing for logical continuity - took hold whereas the values of Méliès and Keaton - dream logic, editing as magic tricks - did not.

1,000 hours in MSPaint.

But when my spawn has emerged sufficiently from its larval stage, I will spring on it another kind of long-abandoned cinemagic in the form of the creations of Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion animator behind Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and One Million Years BC. Besides Greek myths and dinosaurs, Harryhausen persistently returned to the topic of Sinbad the Sailor from the 1001 Nights. Unburdened by continuity, I like to think of these films as simply other stories about Sinbad that might have developed out of word of mouth over the centuries. Like classic James Bond, the details change but the sense of adventure and wonder provides the only throughline we need.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Opening to the catchy strains of Bernard Herrmann's score, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad freely adapts episodes from any voyage of Sinbad's but the 7th as well as Homer's Odyssey. Landing on a strange island Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and his crew encounter Sokurah the magician (Torin Thatcher), fleeing with a purloined magic lamp from a one-eyed belligerent obsessed with roasting Arabs alive.

Harryhausen tried to warn us.

Fortunately Sinbad and his crew are able to hold Rep. Crenshaw off long enough to escape to their ship, but the cyclops capsizes their boat and recovers the lamp. Sokurah is determined to get back to the island and reclaim the lamp, but Sinbad keeps refusing all the way back to Baghdad. Eventually Sokurah resorts to magic to shrink Sinbad's princess gf (Kathryn Grant), telling him the only way to restore her to normal size is to return to the island and brew a potion out of roc eggs.

A subplot introduced but never mentioned again is that the shrinkening fucks up diplomatic relations between two kingdoms, threatening war if it is not reversed. The fact that this is totally incidental fallout from Sokurah's monomaniacal plot makes him such an endearing villain. All he wants in the world is his lamp! Sokurah INNOCENT!

Despite the amazing coincidence that the only way to reverse the spell is to go back to Sokurah's island, Sinbad never seems to figure out that Sokurah is behind the shrinking, giving us the only clue we have to Sinbad's characterisation: he's an immense dumb-dumb. This is wildly consistent in spirit with the original tales, in which Sinbad was not so much a hero who set out to right wrongs as he was an Arabian W.C. Fields whose trade voyages always ran into disaster after fuckup until he made it back to Baghdad with an inexplicable fortune in gold, only for the same thing to happen to him again a few years later. This may be attributable to Scheherazade making shit up on the fly, but if in nothing else these movies are remarkably faithful to the fact that Sinbad has the best and worst luck in the world at the same time, whereas his endless succession of hapless crews have all the worst and none of the best.

Damn, Brittany and Abby Hensel look like that?

It's fun having kind of a double plot in which Sinbad has one goal and Sokurah another, both barely tolerating the other until the first opportunity presents itself to fuck the other over. Even the crew, who get variously rekt by the roc, the cyclopses and mother nature, are mostly scumbags on conditional release from the hangman's yard who think nothing of betraying their captain whatever chance they get. Yet this is charmingly offset by the tiny princess and her interactions with the genie of the lamp, which have a well-judged childlike whimsicality. The movie ends with a cool creature fight in which Sokurah's pet dragon pwns Crenshaw epic style.

America first bitch.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Harryhausen returned to Sinbad in the 70s with Golden Voyage, a non-sequel featuring TV's Doctor Who, Tom Baker, as its villain, Prince Koura, who seeks a magic fountain that will restore his youth which he keeps losing every time he casts one of his spells. Despite this, he keeps doing it throughout the movie.

There's nothing quite so intimidating as a villain who will die if he uses his powers too much. Fortunately he makes it to the third act, because Sinbad would have felt awkward otherwise. This rather dumb device aside, Golden Voyage has some great animated antagonists to make up for Grampa's brittle spine, most memorably the Kali statue, who busts some sicc moves:

I guess they never miss, huh?

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger

Disappointingly, Eye of the Tiger doesn't feature Sinbad fighting Rocky to the strains of Survivor, but it does feature a prince transformed into a baboon, a retvrn to monke Sinbad cruelly seeks to reverse in order to stop some other dude from ascending the throne and Sinbad's love interest (Live and Let Die's Jane Seymour).

Do not try this with a real baboon.

The said other dude is the son of Zenobia (Margaret Whiting), a main antagonist more campy and hammy than a panto villain. Sinbad and his crew travel to frozen Hyperborea to find a cure for the prince's simian transfiguration with Zenobia, her son and a gold minotaur ("Minoton") who rows their very coolly designed boat in pursuit:

Since Zenobia's whole plan is to get her rather dopey son onto the throne, presumably so she can puppeteer him, it seems really dumb of her to bring him along with her, especially when we know she can conjure minions with her magic, which she does in the opening scene. At least her characterisation is consistent though, as everything else she does in the movie shows a similar amount of cognitive reasoning skills. At one point she turns into a seagull, shrinks herself, gets caught and put in a jar by our heroes, and has so little of her magic potion left to reverse the transformation that she ends up with a seagull foot permanently. Good thing it wasn't the head.

Womp womp.

It's a shame Zenobia is such an egregious bumblefuck because her boat and Minoton are cool. Or would be, except the Minoton goes out like a bitch pulling away a block to create a door into the pyramid.

And it was all for nothing. Zenobia would have chewed her way through that much scenery in no time.

Fortunately this is offset somewhat by the climactic creature fight between Troglodyte and the sabre-toothed tiger. This location was cool and the fight was particularly brutal.

Eye does the least out of the three to disguise the fact that these movies are written around a bunch of stop motion setpieces, but as a kid I didn't give a fuck because the creatures were cool. There's no way they would ever do more of these with stop motion animation, and that's probably for the best because Hollywood would balls it up like they do everything, but maybe one day we will see more unrelated Sinbad adventures.