One Million Years B.C.

One Million Years B.C. (IMDb, Netflix), released 1966, dir. Don Chaffey.

There's a reason that One Million Years B.C. is more famous for the poster than the movie itself: the movie is not very good.

Of course, it doesn't even approach 100 Million BC, but it's still impessive how much it fails at. Most obvious, of course, is the special effects: the dinosaurs look like toys, except when they are actual animals spliced into the footage of the actors. But the worst thing about the movie is the story. More accurately, it has no story. It's just an episodic series of vignettes about life in caveman times, with people fighting (without speaking!) and getting eaten by dinosaurs. Probably the most consistent thread in the movie is how arbitrary everything is. Characters will break out into fights for no reason at all. The male lead runs away from his cave several times, and we follow him wandering around the desert until he eventually goes back home each time. And when nothing else is going on, a stop-animated dinosaur attacks. Or else a giant iguana. Nothing happens for a reason.

Maybe this is by design. Maybe One Million Years B.C. is a commentary on the meaninglessness of life and the random cruelty of the universe. Maybe its ultimate message is that only through sheer chance are we not plucked from the sky and mauled by pterodactyls.

But somehow I doubt the filmmakers had such philosophical goals with the movie. I think its ultimate purpose, its reason for existence, is to have Raquel Welch run around in a fur bikini. And, to be honest, that suits me just fine.

100 Million BC

Don't be fooled: nothing in the movie looks anywhere near as good as it does in this image.

100 Million BC (IMDb, Netflix), released 2008, dir. Griff Furst (credited as Louie Myman).

I finally got and watched 100 Million BC, the inaugural entry in this pointless series. 100 Million BC is a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie, with everything that implies. The basic storyline goes something like this:

In 1949 a young government scientist sent a bunch of other government scientists, including his own brother, 70 million years into the past, but then wasn't able to bring them back. Sixty years later, he goes back with a ragtag team of Navy SEALs to rescue them. It's been six years in prehistoric time, and most of the original scientists are dead, but the brother is alive, along with a man with a fake hillbilly accent and two hot chicks (well, hot chicks for basic cable at least). Most of the SEALs get eaten, and the survivors go back to the present with the stranded cavemen scientists. But they accidentally bring along a dinosaur!!! It terrorizes Los Angeles, and is finally defeated by means of some convoluted time travel plot twist involving the 1950 version of the young/old scientist and like a tank or something. That's the end, such as it is.

The movie is basically broken into two halves: people go back to 70 million years ago and get eaten, and then a dinosaur comes to 2008 and eats people (and a helicopter—no joke). Both halves use the story as a crutch to have people get eaten by dinosaurs. I assume it's supposed to be scary or dramatic or emotional, but mostly it's just funny. The dinosaurs are bad CGI. Like, really bad. Every scene with dinosaurs comes off more like Roger Rabbit than Jurassic Park. I think my favorite moment was in the Los Angeles portion, where a tyrannosaurus outside Union Station hops into the air a couple of times to try to get at a helicopter. I almost burst out laughing.

I actually had that reaction through most of the movie, come to think of it. It is a really funny comedy, but completely by accident. The acting can charitably be described as "mediocre" but more accurately as "community college theater class". Out of the eight or ten Navy SEALs who were selected for the mission, maybe two at most were believable as military, and they got eaten within twenty minutes of landing in Gondwanaland (which looks, amazingly enough, like a park in Southern California). The time travel plot points didn't make any sense, and the one that came around in the end was a complete deus ex machina. And there were so many little details that completely destroy any sense of illusion the movie hoped to build: Navy SEALs with shaggy, gelled hair; women from 1949 wearing spaghetti-strapped halter tops; a fucking footpath in prehistoric Argentina. It's embarrassing when people put no effort into their work, but as 100 Million BC has shown us it can also be really funny.

(By the way, when I put in the DVD, one of the trailers that played before going to the actual menu was for 2012: Doomsday. An exciting look ahead at reviews yet to come!)

I leave you with this parting thought: the characters traveled back in time 70 million years, repeatedly said things like "70 million years ago", and yet the title of the movie is 100 Million BC. That level of dedication shows throughout the movie. Go watch it.