The Lost Tribe (2010) – After an anthropological team makes the discovery of some “missing link” bones on a Southeast Asian island, a boatload of twentysomethings crashes on that same island and discovers that a tribe of carnivorous ape-men is alive, well, and nasty.
This movie has two notable elements (“notable” does not mean “good”):
- The ape-men have a lot in common with the Predator: They take trophies from their kills, they like to wear dreadlocks and animal skull masks that elongate their faces, and they see in the infrared, which lets Final Girl coat herself in an accidentally discovered berry juice and become invisible. Yup.
- Half of the plot is that “the Church” (never named, but obviously meant to be Catholic) sends out an assassin (Lance Henriksen!) because the discovery of a “missing link” might erode faith — so the whole research team has to die. Um… Maybe the screenwriter would have benefited from googling “Jesuit anthropologist,” or maybe simply knowing anything at all about Catholics before using them as a hackneyed boogeyman.
The 12 Dates of Christmas (2011) – A New York career girl who wants to get her recent ex back and who’s been set up on a blind date by her father’s new wife suddenly finds herself straight-up dropped into Groundhog Day, but with more romance. Along the way, she heals things with her ex, gains an appreciation of her elderly neighbor, comes to accept her stepmother, helps a poor schlub waiting for another blind date, pushes a geek into making the marriage proposal he really wants to, and helps an orphaned teen keep his puppy (I swear I’m not making that up).
Oh, and falls in love with the blind date over the course of several dates that she has and he doesn’t.
I just hope that, if I’m ever caught in a time loop, I do better at not letting things slip that I’m not supposed to know.
Hans Christian Andersen (1952) – This has been a favorite since my childhood. When I threw it on for New Year’s Eve (I am such a party animal), the disclaimer at the beginning interested me — Hollywood has always played loose with the facts on any sort of biographical feature, so the fact that this one goes out of its way to admit up front that this was not a faithful biopic got me interested enough to look up Andersen on Wikipedia and…
Wow. Apparently Andersen wasn’t a cobbler, he started in the theater when he was fourteen, he came to fairy tales only after he was well-established with novels and travelogues…
So apparently there are exactly three facts informing the movie:
- Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense (which is the third largest city in Denmark, not some little one-cobbler village).
- He wrote stuff, including fairy tales.
- He bore a passable resemblance to Danny Kaye.
So in terms of historical accuracy, Hans Christian Andersen is even less trustworthy than the movie that says that Vlad Tepes was an actual vampire, or the Jackie Chan flick that places Abraham Lincoln in World War II.
(Still a great movie.)
Abandoned movies:
The Lake (2022) – It looks great for a Thai-made monster flick, but I refuse to believe that the godawful dubbing is wholly responsible for the fragmented plot.
The Phantom Planet (1961) – A bizarre non-planetish “planet” is the setting for a standard “lost world” adventure, where a heroic astronaut is the focus of feminine attentions from the two female heirs of the supreme leader. Too bad that no one involved had even a thimbleful of charisma.
My understanding is that the actual Hans Christian Anderson was depressive and more than a little creepy. If you’re trying to make a happy movie about the guy, it’s probably best to stick to the facts that “There was a Danish guy named Hans Christian Anderson. He lived,” and not try to get into any irrelevant details.
True. But hey, at least he stalks a ballerina in the movie!