Anime Pulse

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Given that we’re attempting our best at keeping this from being a strictly genre based show, we mixed it up with a Neanderthal tale. The Clan of the Cave Bear was released in nineteen eighty as the wave of cocaine prepared to engulf Hollywood. Fueled in no small part by the novel’s success, they made an adaptation of it.

Being as the story centers upon an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl being adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals, who would best be cast? Probably someone with a good dramatic background. Oh, no one like that is available? Just grab the lady who played the mermaid in Splash and hand me that razorblade, willya?

The movie is so hilariously bad, Weltall could probably watch it for fun. Condensing the plot is excusable in almost all cases with adaptations. What the filmmakers do though it crunch this down so far that anyone who hadn’t read beforehand will likely be confused at what in the hell is going on.

The novel takes the film to the mat and pins if for a solid count. There is one thing the movie has that is missing from the book. Darryl Hannah in half assed kabuki makeup. It also lost at the Oscars, nominated for makeup, to The Fly. We couldn’t figure out if they decided that the SNL caveman makeup or Hannah’s face paint was Academy worthy.

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As we first tackled something more lighthearted involving a museum in New York, it only seemed fitting that we go a bit morbid. In this episode we discuss Relic, adapted as The Relic.

Unlike our last show, the books starts off with a couple of kids getting lost in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Their end comes about not at the hands of a quick witted security guard who hasn’t been lobotomized but at the crushing jaws of a monster. The film changes this by moving to Chicago, forgivable, and having the two kids escape death, unforgivable.

We pity the movie on so many levels as they tried desperately to make an interesting horror movie. It’s full of practical effects, a monster that’s fairly memorable and kept hidden for much of the running time, and the characters weren’t pared down to badly. Where it suffers is the random and pointless diversions. The prime example being the lucky bullet carried by the detective and bestowed upon Margo.

While this ultimately spells another win for the novel, the movie remains entertaining enough. Fans of cheesy monster flicks will enjoy and laugh at the poorly aging CG along with the clunky dialogue.

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Ah, the follies of youth. Fighting with siblings, complaining about chores and running away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Wait, one of these things might be unlike the other and just doesn’t belong. Someone get one of those damned muppets in here to figure it out because I want answers and I want them yesterday.

This episode focuses on the novel “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” which was adapted into the, thankfully, succinctly titled “The Hideaways”. The book features a pair of siblings that decide to run away from home because they’re tired and want an adventure. The film adaptation features a couple of whiny brats who run away because someone pissed in their cereal.

If this were a modern day Pulitzer winner, the characters would have no names and they would learn very rough lessons at the hands of herpes ridden, chapped hobo hands in an alley. Instead, we’re treated to children surviving in New York on pocket change and hiding from security guards who were hired because they bring their own blinders to the job.

The novel is easily classified as superior and not just for the trimmings which must occur. It’s almost solely on the shoulders of the director who casts Ingrid Bergman as the dowager. Being as she was older but not nearly old enough to play the character, they slammed her face into spirit gum and then a latex mask of her own face. She’s also wearing the same wig Christopher Walken would don in Batman Returns and giving Don King future inspiration for a haircut.