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Tagline: Travel back through time and space to the edge of man's beginnings... discover a savage world whose only law was lust!

Preshow Entertainment: None

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.
FEATURES THREE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS:
RAQUEL WELCH AND STOP-MOTION DINOSAURS.

What do you mean humans and dinosaurs weren't around at the same time?! Have you not seen how Fred Flintstone gets off work when the whistle blows?

Raquel Welch, in an inteview about ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.: "I probably did overthink it. Not that it mattered. I went to the director, Don Chaffey, very early in the shoot and said, 'Don, may I have a word with you?' And he sighed and said, 'Yeah, what is it?' I could tell right away that he was not very interested. 'Well, I’ve read the script,' I said, 'and I’ve been thinking...' And he turned to me and said, 'Don’t.'"

Yes, you're going to be doing a hell of a lot of belief suspension when watching ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), but it's okay. It's all in fun, just like Fred and Wilma but with menacing dinos and Raquel Welch in that iconic fur bikini. Speaking of which, did you know that just last year, Time Magazine named Raquel Welch in ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. # 7 of the top 10 Bikinis in pop culture? She beat Phoebe Cates (so did Judge Reinhold, I suppose) in FAST TIMES and also Princess Freakin' Leia. It wasn't just the bikini and the movie that were popular. That picture of her wearing it became a very, very, very, and very popular pinup poster. And in time, that poster would also serve as an integral part of the movie THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (in the novella, it was a Rita Hayworth poster).

"This is a story from long, long ago," our narrator (who speaks the only dialogue in the movie other than an occasional caveman grunt and some caveman language) tells us. I can't imagine who wouldn't know that going in, what with the movie's title and all. Still, I'm not sure if this 'long, long ago' story happens before or after STAR WARS' "a long time ago," but who cares? We have Cleavage & Dinos (wasn't that a 70s cop show?). But we do learn that it takes place "when the world was just beginning," so out of the gate - wrong!! The world didn't begin 1,001,966 years ago. But who cares? Cleavage & Dinos! (New! On NBC this Fall!) Anyway, Narrator Man is right about one thing - it is "a hard, unfriendly world." A world devoid of every amenity, except apparently Max Factor and Aqua Net. Yes, things may look simple back in this age, with not an iPhone, Facebook timeline, or wheel in sight; but there are creatures here that want to eat you. This is a problem for The Rock Tribe, led by Akhoba (Robert Brown). And as if Akhoba doesn't have enough trouble contending with food acquisition and giant man-eating turtles, his son Tumak (John Richardson, who was nearly James Bond instead of George Lazenby) leaves the tribe after a bitter dispute. The Sonny Corleone of the Family, Tumak would have been wise to invest in some anger management classes.

Along the way, Tumak must avoid a gigantic angry lizard (not stop motion), which was actually pretty scary, as well as a tarantula (the movie's only other non-stop-motion beastie) and a brontosaur. But the good news is that his journey through the blazing prehistoric sun eventually leads him to the cave of The Shell Tribe, and into the arms of hottie cave-babe Loana (Welch). This may have been Shakespeare's inspiration for that whole Capulet/Montague affair. Anyway, through bad pantomime, we quickly learn that this new Shell Tribe is more civilized (and blonde) than the (brunette) Rockies (Narrator Man informed us that no tribe knew of any others). In fact, when we first meet Loana, she and her BFFs are spearfishing. This is huge to Tumak, as his tribe didn't even know they can get in the water, which means their cave must have smelled like Ron Jeremy and Robin Williams after a racquetball game. Anyhow, yeah, The Rockies were more savage-y and the Shellies more civilized. Why, they even have morals - when Loana wins a catfight, she refuses to bash her opponent's head open with a rock. The Shellies, whose men looked like members of Styx, end up teaching Tumak to hunt and fish. But first, they emasculate him by pointing at him and laughing when he fails.

One thing that bothered me, and it's just a stupid thing as this is meant to be a cartoony movie, is that these tribes weren't very populous. Yet, it seemed that each day they'd lose a member or two to a dino or by being left behind so a vulture can eat them or from intra-tribe fighting.

Now I'm no statistician, but wouldn't that mean that a tribe would disappear within a few months, just by virtue of running out of people? Maybe that's what happened. Maybe there were twenty million cavemen per tribe, and each day thousands were eaten or beaten to death, and we just came in at the tail end when there were only maybe 35 left. Even the colony of apes beat on each other, as did the different species of dinos. There's even a pterodactyl on pterodactyl beat down. It's just lawless. Though the catfight, that was pretty hot. (There's that catfight again. If I am able to, I'll try and squeeze it in one more time.)

Watching the fun campfest that is ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., I realized that life isn't much different than as it is now. There's sibling rivalry, fighting over women, and families fighting around the dinner table (though now it's not always physically). We've evolved in so many ways, but when it comes to primal instincts and behaviors, we're just encoded back to the stone age. I think men and women will always have trouble communicating, only now, it's unlikely an allosaurus will happen by.

Speaking of which, Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion work here is, not surprising, nothing short of spectacular. That pterodactyl was amazing, and the T-rex and triceratops battle fun and thrilling, much more impressive than my dino knowledge is. Okay, I decided to not be so lazy and look it up. It was a ceratosaurus and a triceratops. And it was a species of pterodactyl, a pteranodon. I also learned that they've found fossils of pteranodons in Alabama! Imagine, hanging out in Alabama and seeing one of those winged things fly by! Anyway, I am pretty sure I have digressed. And possibly regressed. Harryhausen did four more films in the next 15 years, including his much loved THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS. He himself is a Titan, and a dinosaur, I suppose. He'll be 93 in a few months. Oh yeah, I also wanted to mention that besides the dinosaurs, I thought the volcano/earthquake scene was pretty great, effects-wise.

There are two versions of ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. We saw the British version, which is longer by nine minutes and features stuff like Tumak's ex, Nupondi (Martine Beswick) doing a primitive and way hot dance (don't worry, both versions feature her catfight with Tumak's new girl Loana). By the way, Tumak and Nupondi, in real life, ended up getting married, so I guess it all evens out. Nupondi was also in a catfight in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

Two things I didn't realize about this iconic movie. One is that it's a Hammer film, the same studio that brought us a wonderful deluge of horror films. In fact, ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. was marketed as "the 100th Hammer film." The other thing I learned - it's a remake. The original, from 1940, starred Victor Mature as Tumak and Lon Chaney, Jr. as his father. Both versions list silent film pioneer Hal Roach as a producer (though he's uncredited in the latter), which sort of makes sense as this is practically a silent movie. ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. was directed by Don Chaffey, who went on to became a prolific TV director, helming episodes for such shows as CHARLIE'S ANGELS and MACGYVER. It was written by Hammer Films producer Michael Carreras (based on that original 1940 movie). The movie was popular, and it didn't hurt that Welch was still on fire from FANTASTIC VOYAGE, which was released six months earlier (out of all the remakes Hollywood has decided to do, obvious choice VOYAGE has yet to be remade...it's been in "development" since 1985, though there are now rumblings of James Cameron producing).

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. is a great movie for the 14 year old boy in us (there's a line that can get me arrested). At that age, you're losing your love of dinosaurs while gaining your love for women. And both of those, as we have learned, happen to be this movie's two strong suits. For some odd reason, I couldn't find one dinosaur picture!

Posted by Rich at 7:00 PM | Permalink |

Your Random Movie Club Results Are In!

Tagline: If the world's most powerful computer can control even Superman...no one on earth is safe.

Pizza: Big Mama's and Big Papa's

Preshow Entertainment: MORE THINGS THAT AREN'T HERE ANYMORE

"AS YOU MAY KNOW, BEFORE SUPERMAN III WAS SUPERMAN II AND
SUPERMAN THE MOVIE."

-Pierre Spengler, Producer of SUPERMAN III

Not since the DVD commentary on BUTTERFLY have I heard such idiocy drool from a producer's mouth. OMZ! (Oh My Zod!) Producer Ilya Salkind is perhaps a, if not the, reason this movie is such shit. On the commentary, I almost slit my throat when he defended the silliest moment in SUPE III, when two blinking stick figure men in a walk/don't walk sign get into a fist fight. His defense? (I'm paraphrasing) "Unless someone can show me proof this cannot happen when a computer goes haywire..." He then admits that since he was involved in this movie, he feels compelled to defend it, continuing to tell us things that he thinks are wrong with the movie, like the hiring of Robert Vaughn who was "too famous" to be the villain. Really? With that logic, he must have really hated having Gene Hackman in the first two movies.

Also, how does a producer of a SUPERMAN movie brag - "That's a real helicopter." Salkind also boasted about the fight between Good and Evil Superman: "I think everybody agrees it's one of the greatest moments of the three films." No, we don't agree, schmucko. Though I concede it's a good idea conceptually, it would have worked so much better if the movie had the tone of the first two movies instead of being a sopho-moronic campfest. I'll give you one more; regarding the last scene, producer Pierre Spengler: "Here, I think, the suspense is working 100%" Here's my commentary: "Here, I think, the suspense does not exist." Suspense? IN SUPERMAN III??? These bozos really need to speak to some people who aren't on their payroll.

SUPE III (1983) was directed, with comic misfirings at every turn, by Richard Lester. He also made a lot of SUPE II (but the far superior version was directed by Richard Donner, released on DVD years later - click HERE for that story). Lester removed the wonderfully human tone that Donner and writer Tom Mankiewicz put into the first two, and replaced it with silly gags not worthy of Urkel. Lester, with screenwriters David and Leslie Newman, wanted the franchise to have more yucks. They got what they wanted. Here comes the first yuck --> YUCK!

Back are Christopher Reeve as Clark/Supe, Jackie Cooper as Perry White, and Marc McClure as Jimmy Olsen. That's it. The rest of the cast - MIA. Sure, Margot Kidder's Lois Lane appears for a few seconds (her role reportedly cut due to her allegiance to Donner over Lester, though producer Salkind denies this...but we've already learned not to trust him). Also absent - all chemistry between anyone. Since there's no Lois, they added Lana Lang (Annette O'Toole) as a love interest for Clark, and a couple of evil-lite villains; Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor, playing Gus as a loquacious Nervous Nellie who will give you a migraine) and Ross Webster (Robert Vaughan, bland). YUCK. Gus and Ross? Even their names are boring.

Two and a half minutes of Gus in the unemployment line leads him to a matchbook with an ad to be a computer programmer, which in turn leads him to be an amazing computer programmer, a wunderkind....in just one day. How did he do it? Gus: "I don't know...I just did it." Guess he's an apt pupil or the writers are l-a-z-y. This Gus/computer bit occurs during the credit sequence, which is the biggest bungle of any Superman movie - over five minutes of ridiculously horrid slapstick akin to the opening of the old MR. MAGOO cartoon (they both even have a car running over a hydrant). YUCK. "I myself was not so enchanted with it (the opening)." -Ilya Salkind, producer. But...but....but you are the producer! You could have....oh, what's the use. Even Christopher Reeve thought the gags were silly and over the top.

So Gus finds a way to make money (illegally) using his newfound (though again, no one, not even himself, knows how he found the) skill. He does so by funneling fractions of pennies from people's paychecks into one large check...for himself (this was used in the movie OFFICE SPACE, where they even mentioned Pryor doing it in SUPERMAN III).

And when he's caught by his boss Webster, he's blackmailed into doing some very bad things. So instead of Zod or Lex Luthor, we get annoying Gus the computer guy and Gus's boss Webster. YUCK. Webster's the owner of several companies that control the world's coffee beans...except for the ones in Colombia (a year after SUPE III's release, Starbuck's bought Peet's. Hmmm...). His idea is to ruin Colombia's crop by having Gus use computers to alter a weather satellite to create a tornado. To do this, Webster sends Gus to...Smallville, where, of course, Superman changes the weather back. But we don't really see that happen. We mostly hear Gus describing it to Webster. Also in Smallville, Clark is reconnecting with high school crush Lana (since Lois is all but out of the picture - literally).

Webster doesn't want to stop at coffee. Now he wants oil. But he has to get rid of Supe first. So Gus points the satellite to find fragments of Krypton so he can analyze them and recreate Kryptonite. Holy shit, I think this write-up is more detailed than the film's original treatment.

So what was that about that Good vs. Evil Superman mentioned earlier? Supe, due to Kryptonite, turns on the dark and becomes Evil Supe, doing things like puncturing an oil tanker (in real life, this was a BP tanker...ironic? Prescient?...watching BP oil spill into to the ocean...), and arrives too late to save a truck driver dangling over a bridge. Then, of course, he must fight himself in an auto junkyard. It's the movie's only halfway decent scene that, like evil Supe himself, arrives too late. Actually, in theory, I also liked the idea of Gus's supercomputer protecting itself and making a Computer Woman (who looks like a metallic Billy Joe Armstrong) out of Webster's sister Vera (Annie Ross). But it's played campy, so it loses its effect. SPOILER, BUT DO YOU REALLY CARE?: Gus having to destroy his own machine would also have worked great had we maybe seen the machine before. But we didn't see it until the last few minutes of the movie. So we just didn't care. And speaking of not caring:

There's one time when Superman takes off, and you can see the wires. That should tell you everything you need to know about how little they cared about the movie. Adding to the suckiness of things like bad green screens and laughable stock shots my 3-year old niece would groan at (if I had a 3-year-old niece), is perhaps the worst executed setup/payoff joke I've ever seen; the Leaning Tower of Pisa gag (Evil Superman straightens it out, and the souvenir sellers break their now unsaleable statues in disgust. Later, Good Superman restores the Tower's crookedness, prompting the same sellers, now selling straight Tower of Pisa statues, to break them again).

More forced gags have Gus, for no reason whatsoever, put on skis and walk up Webster's ski slope... just so he can accidentally ski down and fall over the side of a building, landing on the street in his skis. Salkind admits that this is only slightly over the top. Yet, he still defends it: "There have been cases with people falling from buildings and nothing happened..." Even Reeve himself wasn't crazy about Lester's take, saying "I didn't think that his going off the top of a building on skis with a pink tablecloth around his shoulders was particularly funny." Salkind also equates the fact that because the film was "a big hit" means that it worked. What he never said, or realized, is that people went to see it because they loved the first two so much and thought they were going to get another great movie. And as for "big hit"; while the first movie made 600% of its budget, SUPE III made 150%.

Oh, and say, just when did Superman become a moron? When threshers in a wheat field threaten to chop the shit out of Lana's son Ricky (Paul Kaethler), who was knocked out by a rock (which completely disappears in the next shot), why did Supe stop the thresher? Wouldn't it have been easier, and smarter, to just lift Ricky up?

Okay, I'm almost done griping. But there's more. Vaughn's Webster is a failed substitute for Hackman's Luthor, and Pamela Stephenson's (who's now a Beverly Hills psychologist specializing in sexuality) bimbo Lorelei doesn't come close to Valerie Perrine's Miss Teschmacher. Annette O'Toole's the only one, besides Reeve, that displays chops here. But that's all you get. Everything else, in case I haven't been clear, is awful. Even the movie's trailer is wrong; the supercomputer doesn't change the weather, the Vulcan satellite does. And how come in Smallville and Metropolis, there are signs with limey spellings like defence, colour, and unauthorised? Well, we know why, because the producers didn't care. It was a fixable mistake that they could have, but didn't, fix. Instead, they said, "Fuck you, audience, we don't care what you think." Well you should care, because I think your movie supersucks. YUCK!

In the MAKING OF SUPERMAN III, while referring to the scene where Superman becomes evil, the announcer tells us, "Even Lana and Ricky are too late to save him. The writers have done their worst." I couldn't agree more.

Preshow Entertainment: MORE THINGS THAT AREN'T HERE ANYMORE

We finished up this documentary from 1996 about lost Los Angeles places. This show is so cool. So much is available on YouTube, so if you can't get your hands on the doc itself, I urge you to Google, Bing or even Lycos the segments. This installment featured stuff like:

Spade Cooley, the fiddle player/band leader whose 1948 television show on KTLA popularized western swing for the masses. Cooley was eventually sent away for killing his wife. A few months before he was due to be paroled, he dropped dead of a heart attack. Okay, so not every story has a happy ending.

The Rex, a gambling ship run by Vegas Casino owner and bootlegger Anthony Cornero. You took a water taxi from Santa Monica a few miles into international waters. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlPoMyQGVDA

Sheriff John, an L.A. kids show staple from 1952 to 1970. Coincidentally, he died between the time we watched this and the time I wrote this up. Which just proves a man can die by the time I finish one of these long-ass write-ups. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teH91xjNZ2o

Corriganville, the movie ranch not 30 minutes away from RMC headquarters. Closed in 1982, this "movie town" was the setting for many TV shows and movies from 1949-1965, as well as hosting weekend shows (for a buck) for tourists and locals. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Tbi3dhFdY

Jungleland, a zoo which housed many Hollywood animals, and closed in 1969. http://www.weirdca.com/location.php?location=197

Posted by Rich at 8:00 PM | Permalink |