Luggage Of The Gods
(1983)
Director: David
Kendall
Cast: Mark Stolzenberg, Gabriel Barre, Gwen Ellison
I've said it before on this web site, and I'll say it
again: I'm glad to be alive both here and now. I'm glad to be living in
a country where there's a lot of freedom, even if the country I live in
makes it more expensive to order DVDs from other countries since the
inept DVD distributors of my country often don't bother to get them in
the first place (and there's the extra inconvenience of certain
Hollywood studios with DVD archive collections refusing to ship their
DVDs to my country.) I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I was
suddenly transported to an earlier time in my country and found myself
stuck there. Every time I do so, I conclude I would not find myself in
a very happy state, since I would be missing stuff like TV and the
Internet. Still, things could be worse for me - I could not only find
myself transported to an earlier time, I could also find myself
transported to an earlier place. You see, I may be strong and powerful
when it comes to movie knowledge and reviewing movies, but when it
comes to most other things, I am pretty much a wimp. Let's say that I
was transported to a communist country in the early part of the
twentieth century. True, there would be all that free medical care for
all my medical needs, but I suspect that it wouldn't be high quality
medical care when compared to that from the western countries. But
other things would be even worse than that. Because of my
non-courageous personality, I would be able to be easily bulled by the
communist authorities, and I would find myself placed in situation
after situation for what they would consider best for the system, not
for what would be considered best for me.
And with my luck, no matter how much I tried to be a
good member of the people, I would probably eventually find myself
shipped to a gulag for supposedly breaking the rules. As bad as all
that would be, however, it would still be a better choice than some
other famous points of history I could find myself in. One such era
that makes me shudder when I think of it would be the age of the
knight. True, all the vaccinations that I have had all the year would
probably make me immune to diseases of the ere like the black plague,
but I would probably be branded a witch when I revealed my vast
scientific knowledge. And if I lost my glasses, I would be helpless.
How about the Egyptian era? Well, I would hate having to all the time
position myself so that people facing me would see the side of my face.
And if I lost my glasses, I would be helpless. The age of the Incas and
Aztecs? I would probably find myself on top of a pyramid and having my
heart ripped out of my body to provide the gods a human sacrifice. And
if I lost my glasses, I would be helpless. (By the way, I have wondered
a lot over the years just what people in eras like those did without
glasses, especially seeing - heh - that a large amount of any
population needs them. Does anyone know?) But the era I am really glad
not to be in is the caveman era. Finding myself dressed in ragged furs
and wandering around the cold European continent, I would be asking
myself why the caveman didn't stay where they evolved to in Africa,
where it was warm and covered with plenty of food.
Other facts about living in the era of the caveman, such
as battling bears in order to take possession of their cold caves, as
well as there being no movies makes me feel fortunate to live where I
am. Though I am especially glad that I didn't end up in the caveman
era, at the same time I realize that with a little
applied knowledge and a little bit of luck, I could find myself branded
a king by the inhabitants of the era. Think about it for a little bit.
When you see depictions of cavemen in books, TV shows, and movies, you
typically see them as pretty naive by today's standards. Although I
don't have a time machine to confirm this, I have a pretty strong
feeling that this depiction is pretty close to what was the truth. With
plenty of simple-minded caveman at my feet, and the fact that I happen
to have a pretty high I.Q., I can only imagine the things I would teach
these caveman that, as a result, would make them think I was some kind
of a god. For example, I could teach them that when you have some kind
of wound on your body, you should clean it before you wrap it up with
some kind of bandage. I could also teach them the basics of farming, so
that they would have a lot more food at their disposal and have to
spend less time hunting and gathering. And if I could take stuff from
the twenty-first century with me to use, all the better. I can only
imagine how amazed cavemen would be with stuff like flashlights and
lighters... though I wonder if I would be branded as some kind of
caveman witch. That's why I say I would need a little bit of luck, as
well as my knowledge, to succeed.
As you probably guessed by now, Luggage Of The Gods
is a movie that concerns a primitive caveman tribe being exposed to
items coming out of the modern twentieth century. Some of you are
probably thinking that this early '80s movie was made to cash in on the
success of The
Gods Must Be Crazy. Actually, Luggage Of The Gods
was made before The
Gods Must Be Crazy hit U.S. shores, so I'll give the movie some
slack
there. And that's the nicest thing I can say about Luggage Of The Gods,
which goes wrong in just about every other way you can think of. Let's
start with the premise, which concerns a band of cavemen living deep in
the wilderness. Okay, so far that's fine. However, soon we learn that
these cavemen are not just living in the United States, but in the
present United States, not the past. Maybe I could swallow the fact
that a primitive tribe could live undetected in this modern age and
country for so long - the movie The Last Of The Dogmen
did this premise fairly successfully - but wouldn't the primitive
people of this movie be, like in Dogmen, Native American
instead of Caucasian? Yes, like the filmmakers of movies like Encino
Man and Eegah!
thought, these filmmakers' knowledge of history is poor enough
for them to think there were once Caucasian cavemen in North America.
Even when the first Caucasians (the Vikings) came to North America
hundreds of years ago, they were more technologically advanced than
their European cavemen ancestors. Enough of that - let's get back to
the movie.
Anyway, these primitive cavemen are regularly spooked by jet airliners
that pass overhead. One day, due to a pressurization problem in the
luggage compartment, one passing airliner dumps its luggage during its
flight, and the luggage lands near the cavemen. The rest of the movie
mainly concerns the cavemen's reaction to all the things they find with
the luggage, though there is also a subplot about two shifty men from
the modern
outside world traveling to the luggage dump to retrieve some valuable
forged paintings that were lost in the jet airliner's luggage dump.
I guess it's possible that a funny and engaging movie
could be made out that premise, but you'd never know it by how it's
done here. Luggage
Of The Gods
is so bad, I was sorely tempted to introduce a ratings system for this
web site so I could get some pleasure out of stamping this movie with
a "zero stars" rating. One of the things that greatly annoyed me about
this movie was the characters - rather than the fact that there are no
real characters in the movie. No protagonists who make us care about
their situations, and no bad guys with real menace or background. The
bad guys are essentially an afterthought. In fact, they could easily
have been written out the script with no real consequence to the rest
of the movie. And while almost all the movie involves the cavemen
characters, none of them really stand out from each other. Except for a
couple of times in the movie when they sing the 1960s pop hit "Build Me
Up Buttercup" that they learned from working a ghettoblaster found in
the luggage, they all speak one or two word sentences. Granted, these
are primitive people, but if they are advanced enough to make and throw
spears at rabbits (the movie makes it clear they are fierce rabbit
hunters, ha ha), and draw pictures on rocks, wouldn't they have a
reasonable amount of words in their vocabulary? It doesn't help that
they are not speaking in English, but in caveman language, so we are
never quite sure what they are supposed to be saying to each other. So
there are a lot of questions like why the two cavemen get banished from
their tribe, or the resolution of the love triangle the two cavemen get
with one of the tribe's cavewomen. The only thing I got out of these
worthless characters is some amusement from the fact one of them
resembled a bearded David Hess (The Last House On The
Left.)
These aren't characters - they are just essentially
props used to mine the other kind of props of the movie (the various
pieces of luggage scattered in the area) to try and get laughs.
Clueless movie
characters trying to take control of something that is unknown to them
can be funny, but a lot of that humor comes from the personality of the
characters, getting frustrated or confused for example. But better
written characters probably couldn't have mined much comic gold with
the way writer/director David Kendall handles things. Most viewers will
probably forgive that many of the things dropped out of this movie's
airliner (like a wheelbarrow, a barbeque, cupcakes, or an inflatable
raft stored in a large wooden crate) would unlikely be in a real
airliner's luggage compartment. But even more forgiving viewers will be
shocked by the movie's lack of imagination with placing the primitive
with the advanced. Two of the cavemen come across an alarm clock, for
example, that eventually rings in their hands. What do they do? They
beat the alarm clock with a stick until it stops. Oh, hilarious. As for
the other cavemen, when they (eventually) lose their fear and examine
the luggage, they do nothing
funny with it. In fact, they seem to know what everything is used for.
This is supposed to be a comedy, but there's no sense of anyone in
front of or behind the camera trying. Maybe it's because of the whole
low-rent feeling of the entire enterprise. The movie gives new meaning
to the term "cheap and shoddy", looking like it was shot on 8mm and
silently (with dialogue dubbed later), and in public parks within city
limits. Sitting through this debacle, I wondered what the people in
front of and behind the camera were thinking as they were making this
movie. Most likely they were planning to not include this movie on
their resume, not wanting to show other filmmakers they woud be
bringing bad luggage in from another and failed movie relationship.
Check
for availability on Amazon (VHS)
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Check
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See also: Big Man On Campus,
The High Crusade, Missing Link
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