Spectacularly Bad Movie

On the flight home, I saw a couple movies (because I couldn't sleep), one of them so bad it was almost good. Remember that Frank Zappa song about monster movies where you can see someone pushing the monster across the set with a piece of plywood? Yeah, that bad.

In this movie, a white cave man with bad dreadlocks sort kills a mammoth, up on some frozen north. Okay, I can be down with that. He set a spear and the mammoth basically ran into it, and got deaded. Okay, so getting a little less convinced, but better than the original plan which was to net the mammoth somehow.

That night, the "camp" gets raided by a bunch of men on horseback, who take many of the people, including the one twoo love of our hero. So he follows the horseback crowd with a couple of his best pals. (The sound was sort of bad, so I never did catch names if there were any. Fortunately, the sound for Horton Hears a Who was significantly better.)

He follows the horseback guys for several days, amazingly without visibly carrying any food or really stopping to forage. Neat that. And they go from the mountainous, snowy country to a hilly near desert, where, lo and behold, he runs into a sabre-tooth tiger looking giant cat. And helps it escape a trap. So it takes a good sniff at him and goes away, sort of like that old story about the lion and the mouse and the thorn in the lion's paw?

Then our hero and his intrepid pals run into a group of black men carrying spears, and threatening them. Fortunately, the sabre-tooth tiger jumps into the scene, and almost everyone backs away in terror, except our hero, who gets nothing worse than a faceful of sabre-tooth breath (think about that a moment; you know how bad your cat's breath is? Imagine a really huge one that eats something other than dried Friskies.). The sabre-tooth leaves without taking a single bite, and that convinces the tribe of black men to decide to go with our hero and his intrepid pals to follow the horseback guys who have, coincidentally, also stolen people from the black group. Fortunately, the black folks know where they're headed.

Where they're headed is, apparently, Giza, as in the Great Pyramids at Giza, because they're going to sell the people they've captured into slavery to help build the pyramids and sphinx. And so we get to see the pyramids and sphinx being built, complete with the help of mastodons (which must be just a little warm in the heavy fur coats in the warmth of Egypt, but hey, who am I to say?)

(So, yeah, we went from the snowy mountains of a place with white folks--Europe?--to a semi-desert place with black folks--central Africa--to Egypt, all without crossing a big body of water, and all in a few days walk. They must walk faster than I do! AND, it was economically feasible to transport slaves across these distances, rather than really completely enslaving more local populations.)

Our hero, we learn, has been missing his father for a long time because his father left the tribe. That's important later, so don't forget.

The hero, his intrepid pals, and the black spearmen guys then decide on a plan to let the mastodons loose, spook them, and watch the fun as they run over the bad guys, all in an effort to free the slaves. They're successful, it seems, but the Egyptian slavemaster guy knows our hero is after his twoo love, and holds her hostage. But our hero won't give in, and (I forget quite how), somehow grabs her, kills the bad guy, but not before his twoo love gets shot with an arrow and killed. He kills the "god/king?" with incredibly, scarily long fingernails and all the slaves go free. (So somehow, now we know why the sphinx looks unfinished/broken! It wasn't Napolean's army doing target practice, it was prehistoric cave guy looking for his twoo love and freeing the slaves! And the pyramids never got finished either! FREEDOM!!)

The movie ends with the leader of the black spearmen guys realizes that he knew the hero's father, and has a present for our hero from dear old dad. The present is a handful of corn. Not "corn" in the old sense of any grain, but corn as in the stuff grown in mass quantities in the midwest. As in stuff native only to the "new world" and not known in the "old world" (or Egypt, even) before the 15th century.

Can I just say, the corn was the final fun, and then I wished I had slept instead of watching it.