This is another of those 80’s flicks that I’ve long been familiar with, without knowing anything about it. In fact, in my mind, I always got this one confused with 1986’s Daryl Hannah-starring The Clan of the Cave Bear (which I also have not seen…yet), which also centres on the trials and tribulations of a primitive people and their rudimentary civilizations.
As seems to be the way these days, this one was (again) found at my local thrift store, the DVD still sealed, going for a whopping $5.99CAD. A little sliver of nostalgic curiosity poked at me and I figured – why the hell not.
So, on yet another stormy-as-hell Friday night, as another in a series of sopping-wet atmospheric rivers pissed all over Vancouver Island, drenching my humble abode, I fixed up a vodka / soda, took a solid haul off some rolled sativa, tucked the dog-girls in and got to watching this strange cinematic oddity.
Quest for Fire takes place 80 000 years ago, in the Paleolithic Age, when Homo Sapiens were just starting to emerge into the ancient eco-system, with the recent discovery of fire pushing them forward as a society on the rise, scattered over the vast landscapes that loom with an almost primordial emptiness. We focus on one clan, for whom the ongoing fire is central to their survival and way of life. When a group of Neanderthals violently attacks, the tribe’s precious flame is lost during their escape. 3 of the surviving men then set out, embarking on a harrowing mission to find a new source of fire and to return with it, bringing survival and hope as well.
*A pen and pad emerged, a remote was raised, and a PLAY button was pushed*
Scribbles poured forth…
-Ron Perlman as a caveman = perfect casting. Yep, this was an early acting job for ‘Hellboy’ himself, Ron Muthafuckin Perlman, in his first feature film role. This dude just looks like a caveman (I say with the utmost respect), with the large heavy features that define him physically, features that he has long made the most of, bringing us some cool-ass genre characters over a long damn career, taking this one’s 1981 release date into account. Here he plays ‘Amouka’, a tough but dim tribe member who makes up one third of the small party embarking on the quest.
-Oh shit! That dog / wolf actually caught fire! During an early scene depicting a canine attack, some flaming debris hit one in the side and the fur actually catches on fire. There is no doubt, that dog on set was accidentally set aflame. The shot is quick as and as the fire catches the fur, the dog bolts offscreen, undoubtedly toward some handler who would’ve had that animal extinguished and out of harms way in seconds. At least…that’s what I hope, as a devoted, life-long fan of doggos.
-Wait…no guards? The wood and bone gourd that the tribe uses to keep their fires going looks like it’s just sitting off on its own, waiting for some shit to go down…which it does.
-No subs? All made up language? Ok then. Bold. It was around this point that I realized that this flick was not going to be like others, in that there are no subtitles, no dubbing, no using accented English as a stand-in…you get nothing, but the made-up Primitive Man language of grunts and sounds, with the occasional guttural word tossed in. It’s left to us, the audience, to interpret what is being communicated back and forth between the characters, which is a bold choice that puts a LOT of trust in the patience and the intelligence of the audience, trust we NEVER see movies apply anymore.
-Cro-Magnon vs Neanderthal? Apparently, I was wrong on this, when another group of noticeably different-looking cavemen emerge from the wilderness in a violent raid attempt, I guessed. It would seem that the main characters are actually early man, Homo Sapiens, as we are today, while the other creatures depicted were treacherous Neanderthal scum.
-Ok, appropriately brutal. They’re taking it seriously. This, I had actually been hoping for. I wanted to see this material treated with a brutal, realistic edge…and it turned out to be exactly that.
-Wolf attack – also brutal. French director Jean-Jacques Annaud doesn’t hold back any time blood-letting is called for, and the early canine attack is a prime example.
-Actors must’ve felt ridiculous. This is one of those projects that would’ve required total dedication on the parts of everyone involved to pull off credibly and not turn it into a farce, even by accident. On their faces, many of the performances, when seen from outside of the edges of the frame, would be absolutely clownish and embarrassing, all the hooting and hollering in some fake language, all dirty and dressed up in rough, fur clothes, often in harsh and cold-looking locations. But pieced together in the final edit, it works well within the confines of the world depicted.
-The location shooting must’ve sucked! Looks fuckin cold! This flick was filmed here in my beloved home country of Canada, in Scotland, and in Kenya, and all the locations helped pull me into the wide-open primitive world the main characters inhabit, with nicely-realized tactile atmospheres unique to each coming through loud and clear. That being said, and knowing how certain parts of Canada can be during less…how we say…hospitable times of year, some sequences looked downright uncomfortable. However, given the over-all grit admirably slathered into the $12 million production (It made over $20 million back), this was, in all likelihood, by design.
-Their teeth make my gums ache. More attention to detail. Yeah, primitive dentistry was primitive.
-Too much naked caveman ass! Seriously!
-Love the wide-angle cinematography. Great locations. I can see how Ridley Scott (Alien)could list this as being one of his favorites, which he allegedly does, as the telephoto, wide-angle presentation is very much in keeping with that genius’ long-established ‘polished grit / Big Screen documentary’ visual style.
-Holy shit! Sabretooth! You better run. They do a good job faking some classic prehistoric animals and one of the first is a pair of hunting Sabretooth tigers…and however they faked the extended fangs on the real-life Big Cats they used…good job. It was immediately clear what they were supposed to be and I believed it when they chased the three leads up into a small tree, leading to an increasingly desperate stand-off.
–Just left, huh. Convenient. This felt like a touch of lazy writing. When you can’t figure out how to get our ‘heroes’ out of the tree and around the stalking cats…just have said cat simply vanish one night. Corner = cut.
-Score unnecessarily in-you-face. More silence would’ve been better. There are a couple sequences that do NOT benefit from the score by composer Phillippe Sarde, which comes at you like an overly brassy audio assault, distracting from the potential deeper drama of the scenes as they play out. A wooden flute motif is also used for key scenes and those I thought worked well, but the over-cooked attempts at a sort of grandiose orchestral whimsy had the opposite effect, coming across as needlessly theatrical, given the grounded nature of the narrative and production design. And more often than not, simply using ambient sounds and strategic uses of silence go a long way to build tension and pull the audience into the ‘world’ and the narrative conflict.
-Gotta have some cannibalism! Ya just gotta! However, the way Ron Perlman’s cave-dude figures it out is pretty gross and unsettling. More of that whole ‘not holding back’ thing. Granted, we’re thankfully not talking ‘sordid 1970’s Italian Cannibal movie’ disgusting, but what we get is just enough to get the ‘horror’ across.
-Dude bit his dick! WTF?! Cave dudes fight dirty and yes, our main guy, ‘Naoh’ (Everett McGill) literally has his assailant chomp down on his junk, and not in some George Michael-in-a-bath-house kinda way either. It’s an attack, teeth and jaw muscle, and ‘Naoh’ does react accordingly, frantically crushing the offender’s skull with a large rock.
-Was that a prehistoric BJ? *shudders* A lot happens involving ‘Naoh’s cock, amusingly enough, and it was apparently left intact and functional after homeboy’s non-gay penis-in-mouth attack, given what then transpires. In this case, a girl from a different tribe, ‘Ika’ (Rae Dawn Chong), whom they rescued at the last minute from the gang of cannibals they ran afoul of, and who had decided to tag along with the 3 cave-dudes in a state of perpetual nudity, comes up to him in the night, singing some creepy little song, and proceeds to slip her way under his blanket to start polishing his undoubtedly filthy knob. As someone who greatly values personal hygiene, especially where the opposite sex is concerned, the idea of boning at almost any other time in recorded history gives me the fucking willies, not to mention the filthy, disease-ridden days of early man (and women)!
-Woolly mammoths! Good job. More overbearing score. Another classic critter shows up and while it’s obvious that it’s trained elephants in elaborate Woolly mammoth costumes, I bought it. Too bad someone let Sarde keep composing!
-Rape is bad, Ron Perlman!! ‘Ika’ makes the mistake of trying to curl up to sleep near the fire, and clearly too close to Ron, as in rather short order, he starts making a forceful go at her. But luckily ‘Naoh’ swoops in to the rescue, proving that even cavemen can chivalrous and respectful, protecting her…
-Oh wait…other dude wanted to go first. Never mind. …before going ahead and raping her right there himself, as a pissed-off caveman ‘Hellboy’ sits pouting off to the side. Those cave dudes…SO silly!
-Buddy falls in love after just ONE rape session?! Pfft! Lightweight. Yeah, all acting like a spurned, moody teenager when ‘Ika’, for SOME reason, opts to GTFO, taking off into the wilderness.
-Halts the quest? Pathetic. Reminded me of being an idiot teenager and not knowing how to navigate the realities of adolescent ‘dating’; all lusty, lovelorn and stupid, letting those pesky, high-charged sex hormones lead you to very questionable decisions, like this ‘Naoh’ fool putting the entire quest to…you know…SAVE THEIR FUCKING PEOPLE on hold to chase a prime piece of tail across the wasteland.
-This flick is very mucky. More of that mucky realism. Every frame feels dirty somehow.
-Dude banged half the village! ‘Naoh’ finds himself kidnapped by ‘Ika’s people, who then proceed to gift him, while still caged, all the eligible, child-bearing age women in their whole group for him to creampie the shit out of, to boost the numbers with fresh blood, so to speak.
-When in doubt…knock em out. A good bonk to the head can solve most problems, especially where people sounding alarms and such are concerned.
-For legal purposes, just how old was Rae Dawn Chong here…cuz, damn girl! OK, thank Gawd. I was able to confirm that the continuously nekkid daughter of uber-stoner Tommy Chong was 20 when she pranced around for most of her screentime in nothing but body paint. I don’t know now old the character’s supposed to be (don’t really want to, too much potential ‘ick’), but the sex / rape scenes are pretty much to the point, you KNOW what they’re showing you. Just had to be sure…for legal (and moral) purposes.
-Where there’s a cub…there’s a mom. You’re fucked, dude. As someone who lives in an area known for its bear / cougar hazards, in our case being the presence of a stocked population of Black bears who call The Island home, it becomes second nature to understand that you never, and I mean NEVER, get between a mother bear and her cubs. You ever need to see what a pissed-off 400 lb forest carnivore with very little fear can do, put yourself into that situation and you’ll find out right quick…just like the poor cave-man bastard who gets himself shredded up but good when he stumbles upon what looks like a lost bear-cub in a cave.
-The ADR is funny. Too much echo. This was actually distracting a few times, as you could PLAINLY tell that what we being said onscreen was NOT what was being said that day on-set, instead inserted later through Automated Dialogue Replacement, or ‘looping’. It doesn’t even sound like the grunts and guttural word-sounds were even recorded in a proper studio, more like in some high-school equipment locker or gas-station bathroom, with a weird, closed-in reverberation that clearly clashed with the wide exterior locations being depicted. Reminded me of the echo we’d hear whenever we’d unload a sea-can at one of my previous places of employment.
-Get it to land, morons! Oh…too late. I seriously wondered if it was going to literally end on a gag involving the retrieved fire, the entire point behind their perilous quest, being accidentally dropped in the river that they choose to cross while holding it triumphantly aloft (friggin simpletons), in an Encino Man-style ‘whoopsie daisy’ physical comedy moment…almost exactly how it was extinguished in the first fuckin place.
But naw, says I.
They COULDN’T possibly be THAT obvious and cheap…and then the fire fell into the river.
Again.
Luckily for them, the flick wasn’t over and the moment wasn’t treated as a ‘wink-at-the-audience’ joke, with key lessons learned and growth experienced along their journey coming back into play and providing them with the means to create fire on their own, at any time…instead of jealously guarding and depending on one solitary vulnerable fire source, that much attention is spent on simply keeping going and is always in a state of danger.
As ‘they’ say, it’s the journey…not the destination…that makes it worth it.
-France / Canada, huh? Somehow, this didn’t surprise me, with these two countries claiming creation of this interesting, highly-esoteric piece of cinema.
-Fascinating cinematic experiment. Bold and ballsy. Kinda sums it up right there.
This really was a fascinating cinematic experiment that could’ve only been attempted when it was attempted, back in those heady, pioneering days of the late 70’s / early 80’s, when studios weren’t completely adverse to, now and again, taking a chance on an out-of-the-box concept like this – a $12 million production about dirty cavemen searching for fire in a primitive and brutal landscape during which not one word of understandable English will be presented. That would NEVER get green-lit today, so on that note alone, I’m glad Quest for Fire exists.
Simply by merit of how unique this flick is, I can recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in something just a little different from years gone by, something that is well-crafted, strangely-well acted, seemingly well-researched and apparently well-regarded. The cast and crew, some of whom would go on to make successful names for themselves in later years, all commit to the material, giving a harsh, tangible essence to what is a harsh, tangible story, told simply with an unflinching eye on what seemed like well-researched attempts realism and gravitas.
If I HAVE to dredge up the Negatives, as previously mentioned, some of the annoyingly bombastic score could’ve been toned down (or straight-up muted), plus the odd moments of wonky ADR’d dialogue that stand out, and there are a couple key moments of undeniable plot-friendly convenience, but by and large, there was easily more going for Quest for Fire than against.
This was an ugly, dirty, intriguing story of ‘the primal human spirit fighting against the perilous odds the unforgiving world throws at it’ told beautifully, with balls and brains right where they should be.
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