Tag Archives: movie archaeology

Pop Culture Paleontology (Now with more T. rex)

paleontologychicken Last month, Husband took a day off and we spent some quality time together.

(With our Tivo, Overlord II).

A series of Florida swamp adventures slowed down my posting schedule, but here at last is what I wrote about the rest of Pop Culture Paleontology Day (low rent edition).

I’m hoping the suspense didn’t kill you after I posted about our warmup flick, lake Placid 3, and then left you hanging when we moved on to 4 truly special dinosaur creature-features: Raptor Island, Pterodactyl, Rise of the Dinosaurs, and Triassic Attack.

(They were special because they were the 4 dinosaur-themed movies we had on our Tivo).

There are spoilers here, but if you’re reading this you probably don’t care.

Before we get to the movies, I wanted to comment on the real-life big news about the Smithsonian getting long-term lone of a super-swank T. rex.

“Tyrannosaurus rex gets long-term lease at Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum.”

That the [Army] Corps had a T. rex to lend was news to many of its senior leaders. “They didn’t know we had a dinosaur,” said Sonny Trimble, who oversees curation and management of archaeological collections for the Corps. People transfer, he said. Many retired. So “the chief engineer doesn’t wake up in the morning saying, ‘How’s our dinosaur doing?’”

I’ve been telling you for years that the dinosaur-human supersoldier project is a secret, so of course they didn’t want us to know they own dinosaurs.

I don’t think that counts as a digression because it’s about dinosaurs. And the military.

raptorisland

First up, Raptor Island (2004).

This movie is a classic, in that it was made in 2004 when SyFy was still SciFi.

The movie opens with a plane crash in the distant, grainy, faux-film effects past. Who was on the plane? What was on the plane? Why are you asking stupid questions like that?

The movie jumps ahead 40 years later, to Lorenzo Lamas and his CIA agent lady-friend and his team of Navy Seals hunting a terrorist in a jungle full of vicious dinosaurs.

Lorenzo Lamas, bitches!

As an aside, the raptors in all these movies were slappers, not clappers. See also: Brian Switek: Doing the T. rex Stretch at the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking Blog.

Wait! What the hell? While I was looking up that last link, Lorenzo Lamas – Navy Seal, hair gel aficionado, and now, apparently, a dinosaur expert – informed his CIA lady friend that a plane carrying radioactive waste (or maybe weapons-grade plutonium, it’s not clear) mutated the regular animals that lived on this otherwise benign island in the South China Sea. Into dinosaurs! In only 40 years!

Of course it did!

After that brilliant exposition there was some nonsense with some explosives, a volcano erupted, some other military shit happened, and then the movie ended.

On to Pterodactyl (2005), which stars dinosaurs, a volcano, and Coolio.

pterodactyl

Paleontology Professor/heartthrob Michael Lovecraft (Cameron Daddo) and his motley band of grad students pile into a jeep and head off into a forest in Turkey because an earthquake has opened a fissure in a dormant volcano and they plan to look inside! Little do they know, because they ignored the warning at the beginning of the movie, Coolio and his Special Forces team are hunting terrorists in this same forest.

The same forest! What are the odds!?!

Pterodactyl is nothing like Raptor Island.

In Raptor Island some terrorists and some terrorist-hunting military dudes all ran around in the forest (and occasionally in some caves), and they battled dinosaurs, and there was a huge nest of baby dinosaurs, and then a volcano erupted.

In Pterodactyl, some dinosaurs fly around and some terrorists and some terrorist-hunting military dudes run around in the forest (and, occasionally in some cave-like locations), and they battle dinosaurs, and there’s a huge nest of baby pterodactyles. It’s totally different than Raptor Island because in Pterodactyl the volcano erupts before any of the other stuff.

We thought that maybe if we were lucky, some raptors might show up and eat all of the characters.

(We weren’t that lucky).

(During parts of Rise of the Dinosaurs, and definitely through the whole middle section of Triassic Attack, we hoped that some raptors might show up and eat us).

At this point in the festivities we took a break so Husband could make chicken curry for dinner because pop culture paleontology day demands consumption of birds.

(It was hilarious at the time).

After dinner, it was on to…

Rise of the Dinosaurs (aka Jurassic Attack 2010), in which a plane crashed in the jungle and then some military dudes hunt terrorists and battle dinosaurs.

Only kidding!

They’re hunting rebels.

Hey! The military dudes just came upon a nest of dino eggs!

Hey! That was Corin Nemec, co-star of House of Bones

Now they’re battling dinosaurs!

After some “dramatic” action and they escape in a helicopter. Like you do.

As they fly back to civilization, having forgotten that in the beginning of the movie the central conflict was that they were all infected with a bio-weapon that meant they would have to be killed or something and could never go back to civilization, two of the characters have this exchange:


“How do we explain all this?”
“We don’t!”

Fine. Whatever. The movie is over? I’ll take it.

triassicattackLast, but not least: Triassic Attack, which stars Kristy Mitchell, star of Lake Placid 3. When I saw that I was sure that this was meant to be!

(Or, at that point, I’d reached the optimum blood-alcohol to achieve some sort of b-movie equanimity. Who can say, really?)

Triassic Attack has the annoying elements of Movie Archaeology combined with the annoying elements of Pop Culture Paleontology.

When we watched Lake Placid 3 this morning, I was confused because I remembered it as a bit of spoof of Eureka, starring Colin Ferguson.

It wasn’t.

That’s because I was confusing it with Triassic Attack, which is a bit of a spoof of Eureka, directed by Colin Ferguson.

This movie is aggravating on many levels. It confuses archaeology (humans and artifacts) with paleontology (dinosaurs).

In brief: the Chief leading the American Indian repatriation protest at the paleontology museum does a ceremony to re-animate the dinosaur skeletons and your brain rolls over and fakes a coma for 90 minutes and it’s best to just go with it.

Oh, here, let’s just make this super-easy:


[embedded video: Triassic Attack trailer]

If you’re a super-nerd, you might enjoy this Pterodactyl trivia. It’s the kind of thing we cared about before we watched 5 of these movies in one day and broke something in our insides.

I’ll just quote wikipedia because it’s all I can muster at this point:

Many of the characters are named after famous science-fiction and fantasy writers – Burroughs (Edgar Rice Burroughs), Clarke (Sir Arthur C. Clarke), Donaldson (Steven Donaldson), Heinlein (Robert A. Heinlein), Herbert (Frank Herbert), Lem (Stanislaw Lem), Lovecraft (H.P. Lovecraft), Serling (Rod Serling), Yolen (Jane Yolen) and Zelazny (Roger Zelazny).

As I finish editing this draft (6 weeks later), we’re watching Swamp Shark, which includes dramatic dialogue like, “If it breathes, it can be killed!”

Now that’s some quality writing. The acting is even better.

Clearly we don’t ever seem to learn our lesson.

Bike Couriers, Stonehenge Apocalypse & Archaeology in the Movies

Are bike messengers still a thing in the United States? Not as in, do they still exist – of course they still exist! (How else would people get weed delivered to their office in the middle of the day?)

Let me start over: I’m sure there are still courier services – What I’m wonder is if the number of bike couriers have decreased.

With the exception of Premium Rush, they’ve almost vanished from pop culture. When was the last time the “hip friend” character on a TV show was a bike courier?

If someone made a Dark Angel reboot, would the main characters still be messengers?

I started thinking about Dark Angel because it’s indirectly connected to Stonehenge Apocalypse because Supernatural‘s Jensen Ackles was in the 2nd season of Dark Angel and then a few years later landed a lead role on Supernatural, which, in the 4th season, added Misha Collins to the cast as one of the best characters ever and Misha Collins is, of course, the star of Stonehenge Apocalypse, which we’re currently watching.

So, Stonehenge Apocalypse. Not only have we seen it before, we’re re-watching it. On purpose. For pretty much no reason at all.

It’s got Misha Collins AND disaster movie physics AND adventure movie archaeology AND Stonehenge AND an apocalypse, all wrapped up in one big tortilla of terrible.

Goddamned movie archaeologists. Always doing their archaeology stuff with ancient powerful relics, trying to facilitate the apocalypse or raise an ancient god or get even more super-rich.

Luckily, movie physicists and movie astrophysicists are always standing by to save the day by preventing the power-mad, well-funded movie archaeologists from destroying the world.

There are very important run-time and narrative reasons that there’s not a lot of realism when it comes to the depiction of fieldwork, but it makes me laugh to think about a movie really with a realtime scene where a bunch of cinematic archaeologists spend 30 minutes arguing over where the the cheapest happy hour in town is and then spend the next 7 hours of storytime drinking beer and arguing about stable isotope analysis and critical theory and heritage management politics and how whoever takes the job managing Stonehenge is out of their ever-loving mind. Next, they’d spend the next 6 months of the story grant-writing and and working poor-to-moderately paying Cultural Resource Management jobs to make some cash.

Then they’d resume apocalypse facilitation in earnest in the Fall because that sounds way more fun than cleaning, labeling, cataloging, and analyzing artifacts in the lab. Plus, that’s the kind of work you leave for the grad students.

That would be significantly less dramatic and exciting than the “quest to find an ancient Egyptian temple in Maine and turn Stonehenge into an apocalyptic death ray” storyline we just saw in Stonehenge Apocalypse.

Incidentally, FWIW, the Cycle Messenger World Championships continue to happen. Plus, everyone carries messenger bags now and wears skinny jeans, so although it seems like bike messengers are less visible, bike messenger culture has its tentacles deep in fashion and is here to stay. For now, anyway.

There should be a kickstarter, but for dares

No, actually, there shouldn’t.

There absolutely should not exist such a thing.

But if such a thing did exist, it would be fantastic to be able to raise pledges to do things like watch the double=feature I saw on HBO’s schedule on May 3rd: Glitter and Wrath of the Titans.

Glitter.

And Wrath of the Titans.

They aren’t exactly a double feature, they’re just on back to back.

Technically, there’s something on between them so they aren’t exactly back to back. But that’s still close proximity.

Too close.

Have you seen those movies? Sweet Cheezits.

But now, I must return to my final exam week study-break viewing: Prometheus, which seems to require a minor amount of paying attention, if only because it looks cool.

BloodMonkey

BloodMonkey

Speaking of apes, which we weren’t, it’s Friday night, which means it’s finally time to watch BloodMonkey. I know we promised to watch it as a double feature with Flying Monkeys, but we lied.

This movie is so Not Good we hadn’t even gotten through the title sequence before a cocktail party broke out here in the living room.

So, BloodMonkey. A bunch of sociocultural anthropology graduate students go into the jungles of Thailand. Little do they know, BloodMonkeys live in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The students traipse into the jungle to work with megalomaniacal anthropologist Conrad Hamilton, played by Fidel Castro as played by F. Murray Abraham.

Sociocultural anthropologists who cavort about in the jungle collecting new species of wildlife?

Hint: this is not what sociocultural anthropologists do.

Technically, primatologists do something sort of vaguely not really kind of like what these people might possibly be doing, if gigantic bloodsucking gorillas actually existed and biological anthropologists or primatologists or biologists or zoologists were still chasing the idea of a missing link and those researchers got enough funding to randomly fly dozens of inexperienced grad students halfway across the world just so…well, it’s not really clear why they were chosen to fly to Southeast Asia.

Wait…I know…

This large group of inexperienced grad students were flown half-way around the world to die, bloody.

Yes, it all makes more sense to me now.

Clearly, I’m sober and it’s impairing my SyFy craptacular film judgment.

Hey! While I wasn’t paying attention the grad students developed some knowledge of anatomy and physiology, sort ot, but I think that’s just so when BloodMonkey shows up they’ll know what’s killing them.

Real primatologists would be able to tell that this thing that’s killing them all isn’t a BloodMonkey at all. It’s a BloodApe. BloodApe doesn’t have the same zing, does it?

What I really want to do here is move the “tags” from the footer of each post up into the byline, just below the “categories” list, but I can’t do that while BloodMonkey leeches away my IQ, so instead I’m just cleaning up the header and some of the navigation elements over there in the far-right column. This place is a mess. I’m a terrible blogger.

We’re also eating frozen custard. Banana pudding, in honor of BloodMonkey. Not really. We’re eating banana pudding frozen custard because that was the flavor of the day at the Dairy Godmother so I got some this afternoon and stashed it in the freezer for later because it’s awesome.

BloodyMonkey? Not awesome.

Wait, what just happened? Um, I guess that’s the end of the movie. I think it’s best to just let it rest in peace. BloodMonkey was bad, but it’s wasn’t Bad. And that’s too bad, because that means it was just boring when it wasn’t annoying us with it’s representations of anthropology, primatology, and with the way it besmirched the good name of BloodApes.

We should have made this a double feature with Congo but I think Husband is smart enough not to let that happen. Watching Congo late on a Friday night runs the risk we’ll be running around the house chanting, “Amy Good Gorilla” all weekend.

That’s a terrible quality clip, but it’s midnight and my brain has just been broken by BloodMonkey and the custard is wearing off and it’s the best I could do after almost 20 seconds of youtube searching.