Weirdhouse Cinema: Adam and Eve (1983)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
And on today's episode of Weird House Cinema, we're discussing
what I think I have to now rank as my
second favorite Bible movie of all time. So I'm gonna
put it right behind the Last Temptation of Christ. But
I'm even gonna put it ahead of that one where
Vincent Price lashes Chuck Heston with a bull whip. This one,
I think is a solid number two.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Wait, you just remember Vincent Price is in the Ten Commandments?

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Really? Yeah? Yeah, he's like and it's been a long time,
but I believe he plays an Egyptian slave driver of
some sort. And so there's a scene where he's whipping
Yeah is it one omega man whipping another omega man
in at least one sequence?

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Wow? Okay, sorry, I just had to pause to look
this up because I couldn't be sure. But you'll Brinner's
in that he plays the Pharaoh. I haven't seen this
movie since I was a kid.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yeah, yeah, Vincent Price is not the main antagonist, but
he is he's one of the supporting I think Egyptian
villains in the piece.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Yeah, but the ten Commandment is not what we're talking
about today. We're talking about a totally different biblical epic,
that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Nineteen eighty three's Adam and Eve the First Love Story
aka Adam and Eve Versus Cannibals or the Cannibals. And
despite what that second title suggests, this film is not
a mindless mashup of early eighties Italian schlock and biblical narrative.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
It's not.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
I mean, it is at times totally, but at the
same time there are strong and perhaps dominant vibes of
a film attempting to tell an artful and even tasteful
rendition of the story of Adam and Eve, but then
also engaging in this impulse to tell an exciting, entertaining
and titillating adventure story that is very tempted to become

(02:01):
an Italian exploitation film of one genre or another, but
for the most part, shows restraint in that area.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Most of the story is not anything from the Bible,
but it's kind of based on a biblical starting point,
I guess. So it's like the bones of the story
are mutated Bible bones, and then the flesh of the
story is I would say, one part sort of emotional
softcore erotica, and the other part is just exploitation cannibal movie.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yes, but without going to the extremes you would you
would expect in an Italian cannibal movies of this time. Yes,
I think it's very clearly that this was in some
ways a passion project, now a passion project with the
asses and passion or dollar signs to be clear. So
I'm not saying it's completely removed from the financial exercise

(02:57):
of filmmaking at the time, but I think there is
passion in the finished product. Obviously made on a limited
budget with a fair amount of stock and other or
otherwise borrowed or stolen footage, but the editing is solid,
I thought. I think the performances are engaging, the writing
is at least always interesting, like it's not just boring.

(03:17):
The locations are amazing, yes, and and I'm to understand
these are these are all locations in Italy and Spain.
It's with the exception of any thing that is possibly
stock footage thrown in there as well.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
Oh okay, I didn't realize that some of the places
looked to me like they were definitely in the United States,
Like there were parts that looked like they were US
national parks.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, well, it's certainly those scenes where you know, where
we don't have that our main characters interacting with those environments.
But but yeah, I think all the all the and
there are a number of breathtaking scenes where you know
we're very much on location. I'm to understand those are
Italian and Spanish locations, you know.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
As far as Passion Project with dollar signs for the
essays goes, I was thinking that this might have some
similar logic behind it to what we see with Roger
Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. It's like, already in the
public domain, got a built in audience in that case
from schools, and people are probably reading something, you know,
The Raven in schools. So if we make a movie

(04:16):
adaptation that's at least called The Raven, whatever that actually
means plot wise, we've got some like built in audience
there here. I don't know how much take up they
were going to get from like showing this movie in
Sunday schools. I would imagine probably not much, but they
might trick some people into it.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I mean, you know, there were films shown in kind
of like church sanctioned or church environment, certainly in Italy
at the time, and maybe there's the idea that you're
exporting this to various other markets, maybe they could at
least accidentally show it in a Sunday school environment.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
I'm not sure that would be hilarious. I've actually got
something to connect to this in just a minute here.
But I wonder if were like religious schools where somebody
didn't know what they were getting into and they rented
a copy of this to show in Bible class.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
It's maybe not the worst thing you could show, that's true.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah, they could have brought in like one Picero Simon's
pieces or something like that, but I don't know. It's
also probably not the best.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah. Yeah, so this again, this film is a lot
of fun. I originally watched this a number of years
ago on a disc of unknown origin and really didn't
expect it to ever get a proper official release, And
then over the past year, Seven Films released a blu
ray that features a four K scan from the original

(05:41):
camera negative. So it looks amazing. It's never looked this
good so much. Like when I first watched it, there
was a lot to admire in it, but I wouldn't
able to really admire like the location so much. And
this disc also features a short interview with the films editor.
This is Gianfranco. I'm Akuci, and I'm going to refer

(06:02):
back to some of the things that he shared about
the making of the film. It's a short making up
feature and he doesn't have a whole lot to say
specifically about this production, but it is if you want
to hear like an old hand talking about like what
he refers to as the golden age of Italian cinema,
and like how you would get stock footage back in
the day, and sort of like the scrappy nature of

(06:24):
editing at times. It's pretty fun.

Speaker 3 (06:27):
A significant amount of this movie is composed of stock footage,
and I think that's funny because some of the stock
footage is so grainy and does not look good at all.
Whereas the original location shots in this movie, whatever else
you want to say about the movie, the plot, the
concept as a whole, the original landscape location shots are beautiful.

(06:49):
They are truly gorgeous.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, and this is something that Emacouchie talks about this
is not going to come as a surprise to anyone
who watches the sorts of films that we watch in
weird house cinema, and that is that stock footage, especially
in this at this in this time, rarely matched up
with the film quality that you were actually working with.
So there would be there's an obvious difference between your

(07:11):
stock footage and your your actual footage. And he points out, like,
you know, you end up trying to disguise it and
you know, dirty it up or clean it up and
so forth and make it match, but it almost never does.
It's almost always an exercise and failure. But it's you know,
it's how you stitch together a film. It's like the
difference between having a Frankenstein's monster that can walk across

(07:34):
the room and one that would you know, just be
incapable of crawling.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
So one of the things that Amakuchi explains is that
the film was something something of a passion project for
producer in Zodoria, and again passion with dollar signs. He's
very much like looking to make money off of this
and other productions. But you know, he kind of was like,
I got this idea and you know, I, you know,
I just really want to see this through. And and
so he would up calling Amacucci up for editing help

(08:02):
when he couldn't figure out something on his own. And
he says that he basically worked on Adam and Eve
as kind of a favor for a friend, and he
characterizes the film as something that was put together pieces
at a time, often in a ramshackle and budget strapped way.
But again, I think you do see the passion there,
even if at the same time it seems to be

(08:23):
cashing in on multiple Italian cinematic trends and tropes at
the same time.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
Okay, that's a good thing to get into. Let's talk
about a few of the different elements that are coming
together here, both in a from a creative standpoint, like
the elements that are going into the filmmaking itself, and
then also I think maybe market oriented slip streams that
may be trying to ride on.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
All right, I think first and foremost, this is absolutely
inspired by nineteen eighties A Blue Lagoon, and it is
absolutely a Blue Lagoon inspired survival romance. We get a
good looking couple, put them out there on a on
a desert island and then they're having to like figure
it out while also figuring out their relationship, so that

(09:10):
that's very much in play here in a major way.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
Wasn't one of the alternate titles of this movie something
like Blue Paradise It had the word blue in it.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, like a lot of films of this time period
that are, you know, clearly exported into markets all around
the world. It has like a dozen different titles, some
more accurate than others, and some like you know, Adam
and Eve versus the Cannibals, very much like going after
a particular market of like Italian horror and exploitation. When again,

(09:40):
it dips its toes maybe I would say dips up
to the knee in that genre, but doesn't go full
cannibal a hog here. Also, this film is definitely a
prehistoric adventure film. This, of course, is a long standing
cinematic trope, and it had recently resurfaced in a mainstream
way with eighty one's Quest for Fire.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
What was the sort of comedy adventure caveman movie that
had Ringo in it?

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Oh, yeah, that one was. I forget the year on
that one, and I also forget the title, but that
one is also very much. I think that came before
this as well. But we're also this film comes before
Clan of the Cave Bear, if I remember correctly. But
you know, it's like prehistoric adventure films. They're always coming back.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
You know.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
We haven't had one, I guess in a few years,
but we'll get another one, for sure.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
I think there was a big one with Raquel Welch.
I don't remember if that's the same one as the
Ringo one or a different one.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
This a different one, and we'll refer back to that
one because this movie actually borrows a special effects frame
from that picture. Nice, Okay, this is we've been referring to.
This movie is absolutely a cannibal movie. You know. Obviously
this was big an Italian b cinema at the time,
and so we get a little cannibal action.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
I've seen some of these eighties Italian cannibal movies. These
I think are about as gross as filmmaking gets. It's
stuff that I don't know. I watched some weird stuff,
but that a lot of these movies even really just
make me feel unhappy, like there it went some dark places.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, Like you look at films like nineteen eighties Cannibal Holocaust,
and you know, these these are films where it's like
tallow cannibalism films in there, like almost their purest sense,
but it's it's too pure, you don't you want to
cut that with something. So I much prefer what was
the cannibal film we watched with John Saxon that was
filmed Indicated Georgia.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
Cannibal Apocalypse.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Cannibal Apocalypse like that one. I like that one a
lot because it's it's not just a people go into
the jungle and get eaten by cannibal's film. It's like
it's a few other different genres mashed together. And then
also John Saxon saying like, Okay, I'm not gonna I'm
not gonna do this scene. I'm not gonna do that.
So there's like some star induced restraint in that picture,
you know.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
So there are some people I know who defend the
artistic credentials of Cannable Holocaust, and they say the movie
is actually making the point that like the real savages
are like the American filmmakers you know, who come down
there and they like exploit the situation and exploit people
and actually commit some of the worst acts in the movie.

(12:15):
I've actually never seen that movie in full, but it
is notorious. It's also notorious though, just as perhaps questionable
ethics in filmmaking, Like there's a lot of I think
genuine animal cruelty involved in making it and that kind
of thing.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Yeah, so I'm in no hurry to watching it full myself.
I accidentally watched the first ten minutes of it or
so thinking it was a different cannibal movie, and I'm like, oh, wait,
this is the one I signed up for. Yeah, let's see. Also,
Adam and Eve is definitely a disaster movie in some ways.
You know, this is another big This was a big
deal in the seventies in the early eighties. So we
get volcanoes erupting and floods and so forth. You know,

(12:53):
we get some of that special effects footage. And also
it is a romantic comedy about a bickering couple. There's
no small amount of this. They do not stop arguing.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
The arguing goes on and on, and when you think
you're past the arguing portion of the movie, it comes back.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah. But you know, I think for the most part
it works to sort of pad things out and keep
things It kind of keeps the tone from getting too
dark at times. I don't know, it mostly work, even
though like they're bickering is also very cliche the things
that they're fighting about. But I guess that's also the
way they were trying to make the characters more relatable
to a modern audience, because how how are we going

(13:33):
to relate to Adam and Eve otherwise? Right, like mythic
sort of like pre human culture individuals, the First Man
and Woman.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
One of the things that I noticed more on my
second viewing was how much the movie is also like
one of those aliens learning how to be human movies.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, and as we've discussed before, I think of these
as dull people movies. Yeah, sometimes, and it can be
a careful balance because if you don't want your characters
to necessarily come off as full blown doll people, because
then it's just goofy and you're like they just come
off like like dummies, you know. This film, I think,

(14:14):
for the most part, does a good job of sort
of creating this like naive, curious, developing human nature in
these two, Like they never come off like, well, there
is that one scene where it's unsure if Adam is
playing with the surface of the water, or he just
doesn't know what it is. There are a few scenes
like Peekaboo in the pond surface. Yeah, yeah, so I

(14:36):
don't know. At times, maybe it gets a little silly,
but for the most part, I feel like they handle
it well here. But I would argue that, yeah, the
survival romance vibe is the predominant one, and when we
do veer into Itallo zombie cannibal gut munching, it certainly
takes a momentary back seat to the gore. But I

(14:57):
think the romance vibe is the Those are the main
t train tracks were on here.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, I'd agree with that. Now, earlier you said we
were talking about some second places. You were saying that
this is now your second place favorite Bible movie. After
I almost said the Passion of the Christ, but the
Last Temptation of Christ the good one. But I was
thinking about how so now Adam and Eve the first

(15:23):
love story. There is no question at all it takes
the crown for the weirdest Bible movie I have ever seen.
But I was trying to think, what was the weirdest
Bible movie I had ever seen before this? Like what
is now in second place? And I was thinking for
a bit and I remembered one. Unless I'm forgetting something

(15:47):
that's even weirder, I think the second place position has
got to be occupied by the nineteen ninety nine made
for TV Noah's Arc movie starring John Voight and Mary
Steve Virgin, in which the Arc is attacked by pirates. Robert, Yes,
I have not seen this now. The pirates are led

(16:07):
by f Murray Abraham. He's got an eyepatch. I haven't
seen it since middle school. I would really like to
watch it again. It's probably not very good, but I
found the full thing on YouTube and I just pulled
it up and like got at the very opening, there's
some fake Biblical script where text appears on screen that says,
for dramatic effect, we have taken poetic license with some

(16:32):
of the events of the Mighty Epic of Noah and
the flood. So yeah, there's a lot of just filling
in random stuff in the story that of course is
not in the Bible, which you've got to do really
if you make a Bible movie, because when you go
into the text of the Bible, most of the narratives
are quite scanty on detail, you know, you've got to
fill them in somehow with extra narrative. We talked about

(16:54):
this actually in our Last Temptation of Christ episode, like,
you can't just directly make the text of the Bible
into a movie because there's not enough detail in there
to fill out a narrative.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Really, yeah, and why not pirates? Really? I mean yeah,
the only guy with a boat, they had to have
been a boat full of pirates.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Sure, yeah, so so pirates. I think they're also you know,
they encounter multiple people on the water. From what I recalled,
the funny thing about this is I so I was
in I don't know, probably seventh or eighth grade, and
I was shown this movie in a Bible class.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
So obviously I think the you know, the conservative theology
of the Bible teacher I was learning from at the
time probably would not have approved of the stuff added
into the story here. But you also got to take
into consideration laziness.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, sometimes you've got to show a movie in Clint.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
You got to put a movie on, yeah, even if
it's got pirates in it.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
And so this is a great cast though, I mean, yeah,
oscar winning talent. I just looked it up. Carroll is
in it.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
She is, Yeah, I don't remember what she does in it.
I do remember. It's one of those movies that really
emphasizes the the the lasciviousness of the dancing of the pagans.
So yeah, that kind of thing. And also it's the
look of the movie once we get into the after

(18:22):
the flood begins section when they're on the boat and
the pirates are attacking, it's a very water world. It
feels influenced by Kevin Costner.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, just these stills that I'm looking at of f
Marray Abraham Pirate King, he's Dennis Hopper and yeah, yeah, yeah,
strong Dennis Hopper vive here. So sorry, that's a tangent,
but we may have to come back to the naw
Ark movie at some point. Downside is that I think
it's like two and a half hours. I don't know
if we want to watch something that long. Yeah, it's
always We've encountered that issue before with some of these

(18:54):
movies where it's like, I really want to watch this,
but that's that's a big commitment. Sometimes we have to
pull back and like, let's pull up Corman, nice solid
hour plus.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
Of movie, sixty five minute creature feature. Yeah, got to
love it. Now, another thing I wanted to talk about
at the beginning here. I had to make sure about
this because I was doubting my own reaction from first viewing,
but on second viewing I confirmed it. For a Bible movie,
there is very little God in this film. In fact,

(19:26):
almost none. God is mentioned by the narrator at the
very beginning when he says things like God created the
heavens and the earth. After that, there is almost nothing
about God in Adam and Eve. We never see God.
We don't get the scene where he's walking in the
garden as described in Genesis. He's walking in the garden

(19:46):
and finds them, you know, having covered up their nakedness
and asks what have you done? So we never see him,
we never hear his voice, and even when characters seem
to refer to God's acts or commandments, it's indirect and
put in like the passive voice or you know, God

(20:07):
as a subject is taken out of the sentence. So,
for example, Adam says that Eve is forbidden from eating
the fruit of the tree, but he doesn't say by whom.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. These these commandments are just sort
of like like Adam knows it. It's like a gut feeling.
He's like, this is forbidden or this is the way
it is. And I guess we're sort of left to
imagine that this is in some way God speaking through
Adam's knowledge of the world. But yeah, yeah, we don't
actually hear the booming voice of God when it's time

(20:40):
for our characters to be cast out of Eden. We
don't see an angel with a flaming sword. I'm assuming
George Eastman and or Helgi Dena were both busy on
other projects and they couldn't go in either direction, and
so they're just like, no angels.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
Then, just wind just in pterosaurs.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yes. I should note that this is, of course not
our first Adam and Eve film on Weird House Cinema.
We previously discussed the nineteen seventy experimental check film Fruit
of Paradise, rather different film. I believe you described it
as a biblical surrealist comedy drama.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah, that's a more loosely narrative kind of surreal art film.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Yeah. We also did an episode on the stupendous nineteen
eighty musical The Apple, which is also an Adam and
Eve's story of sorts, So technically our third Adam and
Eve film.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
Hey Hey, hey, Bim's on the way.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
And yeah, there of course this is a subgenre unto itself.
There have been numerous Adam and Eve film projects of
varying quality, varying artistic intents, you know, from obvious comedies
to other things. And you know, it's not uncommon to
see like a see these films as like a thinly
veiled religious excuse to shoot a movie view about a

(22:00):
couple of naked people. There's a nineteen sixty nine Mexican adaptation,
The Cinematic Sin of Adam and Eve that had Jorge
Rivero in it of Conquest fame. I'm actually wearing my
Conquest shirt today and beauty, Yeah, thank you, and yeah
memory serves like this was one that was like controversial

(22:21):
when it came out, like has a little more skin
than was allowed in Mexican cinema at the time. But
it's a Bible story, so they were you know, there's
this there's at least this attempt to get away with
more just because you are presenting this biblical story at
least to some extent.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
It's educational, sacred even.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah, the papal Seal of Approval is on this film
on biblically accurate. So yeah, my elevator pitch for this movie,
I'm just going it's like Adam and Eve out of
Eden and into the Wasteland.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
It's like Adam and Eve Hunter from the Future.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yes, yes, that's a good one.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
I think I did text you about this, So the
first time I watched it, I was like, man, I
just did not expect so much your DNA in this.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Yeah, and there, as we'll discuss, there's actual music from
your in this myth So that assessment was correct.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
Joe that. Yeah, Unfortunately the music they use is not
the amazing Your Hunter from the Future theme with the
lyrics yours world. You know, there is a man from future,
a man of mystery.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
This movie, though, much like Your Hunter from the Future,
has a theme song with lyrics that plays multiple times
in the film. It's called My First Love and it's
you know, I Oh, okay. I was gonna say, I
don't want to be mean, but it's it's no Your
Hunter from the Future thing.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
It's it's sappy. Uh, It's I'm not gonna say it's
necessarily catchy. I'm not gonna I haven't been humming it
or anything, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
I liked it.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
I liked it when they played it.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
It's like very it's very plodding romantic song of the time.
You can in too my life.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, she kind of has We'll get back to the
credits on this, but the singer here has kind of
like almost Carly Simon vibe, I think, you know, yeah,
so that's what kind of what kind of kind of
comes off as. All right, if you would like to
go watch Adam and Eve from nineteen eighty three, you can.
You can absolutely view it. The Severn disc is absolutely

(24:24):
the way to go. Joe, you have you have this
disc and I rendered my copy from Atlanta's own video drone.
Let me punk show it the right way up. Yeah,
they don't actually look like that in the film. They
look mostly like that, But yeah, this is a great release.
They were excited to tell me when they got it in.
They're like, hey, we're getting that weird Adam and Eve
movie you like, And they have a new Severn disc

(24:45):
of it, so you may be able to stream it somewhere.
But I can't vouch for the quality. This is a
movie that I think the locations really pop, especially in
high quality. Yeah it might so, yeah, just check the stream.
I don't know, you get it it watching it is
good qualities, you can get it. But that severing disc
is absolutely the best way to go, especially for physical media.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Yeah. I would emphasize again that it is shocking given
how like ugly and clunky looking some parts of the
movie are. How beautiful other parts are, Like the landscapes
really are incredible.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Absolutely, all right, let's talk about the people behind this film.
So the credited director, whether he's credited as John Wilder, which,
as we've discussed a lot of times, they would do
this and like have an American, you know, foreign sounding

(25:40):
name like John Wilder as an attempt to help market
it and you know where people would be like, oh,
this must be an American film, you know, or something
to that effect. So credited as John Wilder. But the
director Andy Heing else has a story credit on this
is Luigi Russo, who lived nineteen thirty one through twenty
twenty one, the allion writer and director whose other directorial

(26:02):
credits seemed to lean a bit more into just pure
knockoff territory with eighty two's Blue Island, which is an
overt Blue Lagoon knockoff seventy seven's Beauty and the Beast,
which I've seen described as a de camera in ripoff
that also attempts to cash in on the prestige slash
controversy of nineteen seventy five's The Beast by casting one

(26:25):
of its stars Elizabeth Hummel, and his other directed features
are a mix of sex comedies dramas. There's also the
nineteen eighty nine Shallo film Dangerous Woman, which itself may
be a ripoff of fifty five's Diabolical Women, and as
a writer, he'd earlier worked on a handful of de
camera in films, and then seventy two's Death Falls Lightly.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
I don't think I've seen another Russo movie.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
I don't think I have either. Now this is this
to me, this is the most well known one, and
I think probably the one that's most worth checking out.
But let's see also the producer on this in Soodri
as I mentioned already thirty six through twenty nineteen is
listed as an uncredited director on IMDb, and I think

(27:15):
some of the other data bases he was also an
uncredited co director on Blue Island. As a producer let's
say his credits include sixty nine is the Year of
the Cannibals, seventy one Short Night of Glass Dolls, seventy
two's A Noose Is Waiting for You, Trinity. That is
obviously a spaghetti Western title, as Kloskinski in it. There's

(27:37):
seventy fours Beyond the Door, which I understand is an
exorcist Rosemary's Baby knockoff. Do you know this one?

Speaker 3 (27:43):
I have watched this one. Yeah, that one is tremendously weird.
We may come back to that on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Okay, so producer on that, also a producer on seventy
seven s Tentacles. This one has John Houston, Shelley Winters,
Bo Hopkins, and Henry Fonda.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Don't know it?

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Yeah, I think it's come up just because the connections
kind of pop. Seventy eight, I think so. Yeah, like
Jaws with Tentacles. Okay, seventy eight's Cave of Sharks with
Janet Agrin and Arthur Kennedy, and then Enzog Castellari's The
Shark Hunter in seventy nine and just many more.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
Speaking of weird songs, earlier, you recognize the name Janet
Agrin from She's in City of the Living Dead, she
was the right hands of steel and she sang the
song teddy Bear, Teddy Bear.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, we should start referring to as Janet teddy Bear
agrin for sure. Okay, so with the film this all
over the place, you better believe they are even more
writers involved. I do not know their specific tasks, like
who had relationship content and who had cannibal content. I
guess you can sort of guess in some cases, but
at any rate, let's see. We got Gazella Lungo dates unknown,

(28:52):
story but also set decorator. She also has a story
credit on The Shark Hunter, but otherwise worked in costumes
art in production to We also have Dominico Raffelli also
dates unknown, one of the writers on eighty nine's A
Moire in Corso, which won some awards. We also have
Eugenio Benito dates unknown as well. Also worked on the

(29:15):
screenplay for eighty four's A Man Called Rage and acted
had a small role I think in eighty two's Bacterion,
which I haven't seen, but that one has also enjoyed
a recent re release some blu ray and is I
think being re examined by folks. Is it about a
bacterium or it's something I don't want to miss represented here,

(29:36):
but I think it's it has some sort of body horror,
zombie or zombie adjacent qualities to it. But again I
haven't actually seen it myself.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Oh but hey, we should mention that we're revisiting some
of the cast from last week's weird house movie nineteen
ninety The Bronx Warriors, directed by Enzo g Castellari. The
star of that movie was an Italian bodybuilder turned actor
named Mark Gregory, playing in that film a man called trash,

(30:04):
but in this he's playing a man called Adam, which
translates to man. There you go, a man called man.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
That's right, Yes, second Mark Gregory film in a row.
They lived sixty four through twenty thirteen. I'm not going
to rehash everything we discussed about him last week in
our episode on eighty two's Bronx Warriors, other than to
say that, yeah, he was a pretty big name in
Italian cinema and at least in sort of the action
and post apocalyptic subgenres from eighty two through eighty nine

(30:32):
before abruptly leaving the business. In that extra on the
Blu Ray, Amakuci points out that Gregory really had all
the elements for a successful star at the time. You know,
he had the looks. Yeah. He points out that he
knew how to move in front of the camera, which
I think is something that probably is lost on us
non filmmakers. But I get the impression this means that

(30:53):
filmmakers like working with him because like he would listen
to them and like would hit his mark and so forth,
like like he was just maybe easy to work with
in like a physical manner. Yeah, And furthermore, he said
that he was just he was also just a very
reserved and very nice guy, like almost too nice. He said,
this alone was notable in a business that generally just

(31:15):
has so many aggressive personalities in it. There's a lot
of you know, people like trying to to really you know,
succeed and move on to the next thing. And then
Mark Gregory by all counts was the guy that you know,
he was plucked out of a gym, like literally and
like sort of launched into this career. And you know,
maybe that has something to do with his eventual leaving
of it as well. But as far as his performance

(31:37):
in Adam and Eve goes, you know, I think he's
good in this. You know, obviously, first and foremost in
any Adam and Eve movie, your two main stars, they
need to look good standing naked behind a bush or
wearing a loincloth, and obviously he does that, but he
also feels believable. I think it's this naive character who's
not fully a dull person, who can be both incredibly

(32:01):
empathetic at times but also incredibly selfish and in a
largely believable sort of mix. Like I for the most
part bot that. Yeah, this it makes sense that this young,
not fully like activated human is sort of ping ponging
between these emotional states. Yeah, we also get plenty of
scenes where there's no dialogue and far from what I

(32:24):
generally expect from a lot of the sort of pluck
from the gym sort of actors. I felt like I
could see the gears turning in his performance. You know,
there's like there's at least a fair amount of nuance there. So,
you know, all things considered, I feel like he's pretty
great in this.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
I think personally, I think i'd moderate a little bit
from that assessment to the mean. But also he but yeah,
he like he hits his pose as good and he
He has a lot of shots in the movie where
he's just supposed to like look epic and he this
is the first man ever, though that's questionable once you
actually get into the plot of the movie. But this

(33:01):
is the first man. And so he'll be like standing
on top of a hill against the sunset as like
a silhouette or looking out over you know, the greatest
canyon and that's ever been in the earth, with his
hair blowing in the wind, and he's you know, he's great.
He's great for that.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, he has a kind of lupine quality I feel
in this, you know, like we've discussed before, a very
long limbed god.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
So yeah, he yeah, different, different sort of body compared
to like Jorge Rivera, so different, different, different physicality.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
Less bulky than Rivero. He's Mark Gregory. His arms are
surprisingly long. Sometimes when you see him reach out, he's
almost I don almost say he's like the guy in
Mutant Hunt who reaches all the way up the wall
for the machete. But you know, you see where I'm going.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah, yeah, all right, So that's our Adam and then
our Eve is played by Andrea Goldman age unknown for
this actress and this is her only row. Some databases
confuse her with another more recent actress with the same name,
but as far as I can tell, little to nothing
is known about the actress playing Eve in this film,
and it's just it's one and done. So I would

(34:13):
say everything I said about Mark Gregory's performance pretty much
applies to Goldman as well, except I'd argue that she's
even better and gets to explore a broader range of
emotional states. As far as I can tell, there's no
way of knowing how she ended up doing this movie,
why she didn't do any other movies in this era,
because I can very much imagine her killing it in
a variety of Italian B movie roles, be it you

(34:36):
screaming as a zombie approaches, or you know, screaming as
someone stabs her with a knife, but also of roles
that maybe don't involve screaming. But yeah, yeah, I thought
she was great here.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
You're right that the script gives Eve as a character
a greater range of emotions to display in the story
than Adam gets, though I guess it's also just that
in Mark Gregory's performance, he is a little bit more reserved,
like he's playing it a little bit closer, and she's
getting to act out more fully, and you know she

(35:09):
I would have some critiques of the way this character
is written, but she she does pretty well with what
she's got and and plays well between the you know,
the more serious scenes and then the scenes that get
into kind of dumpty dump romantic comedy squabbling kind of things.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah. Yeah, So I say, all things considered, these are
these are two fine performances, especially when some of the
factors you consider are like in one case, first and
only film. In the other case with Mark Gregory, like
thinks is what his second film, So they're very green.
They're playing characters that are more like mythic cardboard cutouts
that have been ultimately rather lightly developed, Like they're not

(35:51):
even like fully formed characters that we would otherwise have
a lot to relate to. But you know, you know,
these factors considered, I feel like they do a pretty
good job, all right. There are a number of other
characters in this film, various cave people that they encounter.

(36:11):
Most of these characters have no names, so I'm not
gonna mention everyone. Some of them are Italian actors who
pop up in other genre films. The only other character
that almost has a name. I think he's referenced as
bear Killer in the databases, but is just a nameless
green hunk in this movie, like it has green paint
on his skin. He's played by Angelle Alcazar, who lived

(36:34):
nineteen fifty five through twenty thirteen. He plays mild spoiler
for the film. He plays Eve's rebound fling and he's
a member of the tribe of the green skin Paint.
Spanish actor who credits go back to seventy eight and
he enjoyed a pretty long career. His other credits include
Pedro Almodovar's nineteen eighty two film Labyrinth of Passion, which

(36:55):
also featured Helga Line, and then ninety fives Nobody will
speak with Us when We're dead. So in this middle movie, though,
to be clear, more of your traditional loincloth role and performance.
But you know, he does a good job with it.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
I guess he doesn't speak any lines that are intelligible
in the film. I mean he does speak in a
in what the movie just calls like primitive language, and
the do.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
You have the subtitles? Ye speaking in privately did not
translate and barking and caveman that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
But Adam and Eve speak to him in English, in
the English dub at least, I guess in Italian. They
speak to him in Italian and he understands them, but
he doesn't speak back.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
But they are the children of Eden, so maybe there's
something to that. We'll come back to that question.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
They have universal translator there you go.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, yeah, where they speak the language of Eden. Maybe
and just like these people inherently understand it, I don't know.
This is all pre babble, so we don't know, all right,
So those are the only cast members are going to
mention briefly. Behind the scenes. We mentioned Gianfranco i'm acuci earlier.
The editor again interviewed on the Severn disk active from

(38:02):
seventy three through two thousand and eight, and his many
credits include numerous connections to Enzog Castellari films, including seventy
four Street Law, seventy six is Koma, seventy eight's The
Inglorious Bastards, both of the Bronx movies of which he
was pretty proud, like in that interview he's like, go
go watch Bronx Warriors. He's like, it's fun and you know,

(38:24):
we made that on a pretty low budget and it
looks pretty good, and you know I'd agree with that.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yeah, you know, the.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
Editing is tight, it's great. It was the eighty one's
The Last Shark, the New Barbarians from eighty three, eighty nine,
Sinbat of the Seven Seas, and just a whole bunch
of other pictures attiging pictures from this time period, and
then the music. So the music is credited to a
pair of composers. They're brothers. There's Guido Deangelus and Marizzio DeAngelis,

(38:54):
the former born nineteen forty four of the latter born
nineteen forty seven, both still out there, still working as
of this recording. They're both closely aligned with Mzog Castellari,
having worked on Street Law, Koma, Shark Hunter, The Last Shark,
and Their other scores include seventy threes, Torso, eighty three

(39:14):
is a Blade in the Dark, seventy eight, Slave of
the Cannibal God, eighty three is twenty eighteen After the
Fall of New York, nineteen eighties, Alien two on Earth,
eighty three's Raiders of Atlantis, and eighty threes You're the
Hunter from the Future.

Speaker 3 (39:31):
One of my favorite leather diaper Barbarian movies. It's got
oh what's his name? I'm blanking on his name. He
was in The Howling too, he was in Space Mutiny.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
Red Brown, Red Brown.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
Red Brown is the Conan in You're the Hunter from
the Future. He's a guy in a loin cloth who fights,
you know, he fights dinosaurs and then in the ND
has to fight Darth Vader.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
I've seen this film before, but I feel like I've
forgotten a lot of it. We should, we should come
back to it. So, yeah, not only did they do
the music on Your Near's Me Again, there's music from
Your in this movie. Like they they reuse some of it.
And these brothers are still composing and they're also producers
now I believe they They sort of started producing films
in nineteen eighty eight with the fame knockoff Dance Academy.

(40:20):
So I love all of the music in Adam and Eve.
Just a synth treat from beginning to end and again.
It also features that riveting romantic single My First Love,
My First Love, performed by Tanya Soulmik and written by
the Deangelist Brothers with Susan Duncan. Smith also credited again,
kind of a Carly Simon vibe. I guess you maybe

(40:42):
described this as light disco, like it's not pumping disco,
but it's like a disco era Electrono love anthem, and
it was released as a single. You can look it
up on discogs. And you know, there's also another one,
a Woman Without Love, which I don't think is in
the picture, but it might have been made for this
movie and they just didn't use it. I can't tell

(41:04):
oh Man or separately and just got cobbled in. I'm
not sure how these things came together, but I believe
Tanya Selmik is still out there. I think she went
understood this. She was very young at the time, and
I think she went on to study world and folk
music and essentially had like one or two additional musical
careers after this, this the pop career.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
All right, Rob, are you ready to talk about the plot.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Yeah, let's let's do it.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
And in warning, we're gonna spoil what happens in the
Garden of Eden story, including all of the terrosaur encounters.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
It's it's like Jurassic Park. You're watching it and you're
just like, I hope this goes on forever and nothing
goes bad, and then it does, of course, because that's
how you get the movie. But yeah, this this movie
is a treat right from the start, at least for me,
because we just get cosmic stock footage like Nebula and stuff,
and then we have some soothing synth music on top

(42:09):
of it.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Yeah, you get grainy ad space footage and music from
the Hearts of Space.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, lovely, I'm already on board. But it had me
thinking like, we're okay, we're in Genesis at this point,
maybe even pre Genesis. So our pre credits considered pre
creation within the context of this film.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
Coming back to our recent topic on the show about
creation narratives that have a what the world was like
before the creation happened. Yeah, there's sort of some of
that going on here. There's kind of a metadata of
the universe in the credits. You could even think, yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
Yeah, so is this the state of affairs before the creation?
All this the cosmic stock footage is cosmic stock footage
what existed before you know, God, I guess pushes things
into the next gear.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
Makes the Garden of Eden golf course to go. Yeah,
so before there's any narration before there's before we see
like the creation of land and sea and plants and
animals and all that there is. We just see like
swirling fire in space and synth music. So that does
feel like an interesting it's the chaos. It's the I'm

(43:19):
afraid I'm gonna pronounce this wrong though, like tohu at
bohu or whatever it is in Genesis the Welter and Waste.
By the way, I think you were looking at the
same disc as me, so I guess we both got
the same title sequence. But I was looking online and
I realized there are multiple versions of the title frame.

(43:40):
Like my version was English text and it said Adam
and Eve of the First Love Story. But I think
there are versions of this movie where the title just
says Adam and Eve, and then of course they're the
ones that are in Italian as well. Yeah, anyway, there
is So there's all this stock footage used in the
pre creation sequence. We get explosions in the earth. Looks

(44:02):
like it's like throwing up these big plumes of soil
and dust into the air. And I wonder if this
is footage of detonations from mining or maybe a volcanic eruption,
because we definitely. We see something later that is unmistakably
a volcanic eruption, but it's more like a flowing molten lava.
So there's like red molten lava frothing and splattering everywhere,

(44:23):
turning into a river, and we follow the lava as
it goes down and mingles with sea water, and there
are ocean waves crashing into the coast where the lava
is pouring in, and you get these big columns of
steam and then suddenly we're somewhere else. I really liked
this shot actually, where we cut to like a red world,
a place that feels like it's kind of covered and

(44:45):
surrounded with just a red light shining down on sand.
And then the same sand is like something is uncovered
and the sand is revealed to be outside. The red
light disappears, and the sky opens up and then it's
blue and filled with clouds and it starts to rain
on the sand.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah, something's cooking. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
We get steam rising from the earth, and then a
spotlight falls on this single lonely tree seedling. It's the
only one in the ground. But then there are suddenly more.
There are plants are multiplying, and then we cut to
fully grown forests, like a mountains covered with forest with
fluffy clouds beyond. And then the narrator. Narrator comes in

(45:28):
and says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and
the earth. So so far, nothing too out of the
ordinary as far as envisioning the Biblical creation goes. We've
probably seen it like this in other movies and sequences,
just kind of cosmic stuff. And then you know, maybe
like the earth moving and then plants coming up out
of the ground. But then we zoom in on a

(45:50):
little patch of dirt and the dirt starts throbbing. There
is something throbbing under the dirt. It's a big pulsing mass.
We realized that is covered in some kind of pink membrane.
And what's about to happen here is we are going
to watch Adam, the first Man, basically hatch out of

(46:14):
a juicy elastic gore egg.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
Yes, yeah, kind of like a meat cocoon or like
a necro embryonic sack. Is just like pulsing underneath the
ground becomes increasingly exposed and you know, without an egg
tooth or you know, an egg beak or anything. Our
first man, Adam is going to have to like muscle

(46:38):
his way out of this raw meat cocoon that he's.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
In, poking his fingers through the meat the meat mask.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, and it's this is so weird. I'd forgotten about
this scene. It's so weird. And it's especially in high
quality where you can really see all of the gut meat,
like it feels like it feels like something out of
a like a Leuciofolci movie.

Speaker 3 (47:01):
You know.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
It's like that level of like gross and visceral and
kind of perfect for this movie since it does sort
of exist at the convergence points of different Italian BT
cinema subgenres.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
So it's like he's peeling himself out of a giant
beef kidney, but also all the fiber material on it.
It's like the beef kidney is partially composed of spiderwebs
and cotton candy.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Yeah, and as memory memory serves it, it doesn't quite
work like this in the Bible. But you know, you
have to make some choices of how you're going to
depict things, so why not.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
There were several parts where, while I was making notes
on the movie, something that the closed captions on my
disc said something was really funny there, And I just
had to make a note here. The closed caption said
parentheses dirt rustling, and then so the narrator says, and
then God created man. Okay, so the camera, Oh this

(48:01):
is funny. The camera lingers on Adam's butt as he
is sliding out of the meat egg. It's like, check
out Adam's butt. This is the first man's butt.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, with like obvious yeah, like raw meat from the
butcher shot clinging to him because so.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
Later we see him fully emerged. He's naked, he's jacked muscles,
he's standing as a silhouette against the sun. And the
narrator announces, he says Adam, and it's like, oh, it's Adam.
I was wondering who that was gonna be. Yeah, I
was feeling like they were going to play his entrance music.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
And then another note I had to make about the
shot where he's standing up on the hill with the
sun in the background. Looks almost exactly like a shot
in Albert Pune's Nemesis that we talked about.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Yeah, it's a really good shot. Great, Yeah, great use
of location and natural lighting here, So Golden Hour.

Speaker 3 (48:53):
Yeah, Adam walks around smiling, at things, and there are
as we've been saying, some beautiful location shots here. I
think this is a waterfall somewhere in Italy, and so
they are like these beautiful cliffs and he stands at
the base of this waterfall with these terraced pools underneath it,
just smiling at things like wow, that's cool. And we

(49:14):
see some shots of the Garden of Eden. So there
are doves running around on grass that is trimmed so
close it looks like a putting green. Yeah, like God
is really keeping up with the lawn care. Also, there
is a lion prowling around. It's just wandering the golf
course and the lion very much is looking around like Okay,
where am I supposed to go next?

Speaker 2 (49:35):
I mean, cats are not great actors, so this is
pretty good for a cat of any size.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yeah, there's also there are multiple big cats here. There's
a jaguar in the tree and Adam pets it. Well,
it just looks kind of slightly annoyed.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
Yeah, yeah, fully naked. He's petting this big cat. There
are multiple scenes here where humans are in close brought
naked humans are in close proximity to big cats and
it's it's a little terrifying.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
I was wondering, how did they shoot this? What was
going on here? Is this like a declawed, defanged jaguar
or did they Was it shot full authorisine or what?

Speaker 2 (50:12):
I don't know, but yeah, there are some several interactions
with big cats and apparently nobody is mauled, so I
guess it went okay.

Speaker 3 (50:23):
Yeah. There are also a lot of birds. We see
plenty of macaws, you know, brightly colored tropical.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Birds, hornbills. Yeah, there's some beautiful birds here.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
There's a scene of Adam marveling at his own reflection
in the pond. He's kind of playing peekaboo with it,
as we said earlier, and then he falls in the water.
Fortunately he does know how to swim. And then the
narrator finally comes in again and says, but man wandered
the earth alone, So he's alone. And we see Mark
Gregory sitting naked on a beach, staring out at the waves,

(50:55):
and he's obviously sad because he's lonely. But he starts
with his hand. He startsqu wheezing sand in his fingers,
and then he gets a brilliant idea to make a
sand woman, so he starts like shaping. It's making a
sand castle basically, but in the shape of a woman's body.
Interesting questions one could introduce here, like how did he

(51:18):
know how to make a female human body which he
has never seen?

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Yeah, I mean, I guess some choices might seem like
a no brainer, but it's hard to imagine that he'd
get the inside parts right as well.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
Yeah, here's where the heart goes. Yeah, he's never seen
inside his thorax, Like what does he?

Speaker 2 (51:34):
But I get I guess, you know, if we're leaning
into what we discussed earlier, the idea that it's like
God's will seems to be exerted through Adam's impulses, then
I guess it makes sense like this is God working
through Adam. God knows what a woman should look like,
and that's why that's how he's able to get the
nose just right.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
I've shaping the nose. That part's cute.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
Yeah, yeah, we've all I don't know about this hall,
but I know I've definitely tried to make sand people
in the sand before sculpt him, and the nose is
always so hard, Like even if you have great sand texture,
that nose is going to be a little bit crumbly,
so I'm glad that he was able to stick the
landing on this one.

Speaker 3 (52:11):
Yeah. So anyway, he makes the sand woman, but then
it starts raining and you can feel Adam's pain here.
He is really sad, and this part I was feeling
for him. I was like, oh no, this it's going
to come down. It's going to ruin his companion. So
he before this, it shows him like lying next to
the woman. I think he's like feeling, you know, comforted

(52:32):
by the presence of this other body he has made
in the sand. And so he goes to kind of
cover the sandwoman up with his own body to prevent
it being washed away by the rains. But somehow the
sand woman in the ground has incubated a real live
woman inside. So the outer sand washes off and here
is Eve. This is Andrea Goldman, so like washes away

(52:55):
parts from her skin a little bit at a time,
and then you can see her face coming out. And
then it starts playing that theme song. You know, it
starts with you came into My Life And there are
a lot of lyrics here because it just seems like
this song loops like forever.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Yeah, so it feels like it goes on so long,
and we'll hear it again, and we'll hear instrumental versions
of it, and you know, they got they got a
lot out of this track.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
But Adams lifts Eve up out of the ground and
you can kind of see that, Andrey Goldman has got
like some sand in her mouth and in her eyes.
She's kind of wincing and puckering, like she's getting ready
to spit the sand out. But Adam carries her away
into the sunrise, and the song keeps playing on this
loop while we see them getting to know each other.

(53:43):
They're running around on the beach and smiling at each other,
swimming in the water. Did you notice that multiple shots
in this movie there are multiple times where both of
our two leads seem to have like scrapes and little
wounds on their butts, Like, oh, what is that about?
But then right after this, I saw the scene where

(54:04):
they're like sitting naked on these sharp river rocks, and
I was like, oh, I bet they they're just while
they're shooting this, they're kind of getting their their butt
scraped up.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Yeah, yeah, I think the wages of high definition restoration here,
because yeah, like Eve's backside in particular, is clearly scraped
up in one of these sequences. And yes, so yeah,
and you recognize these some of these scrapes like sort
of like the nature like, oh those are those? Are
you know, sharp rocks in the water scrapes right there? Yeah.

(54:33):
So the later we see that in Arcadio Ego.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Yeah. So later they're in the garden, we see flamingos
that just roll up and they're squawking all over the place.
And Adam and Eves they spend all day playing in
the waterfall, discussing which fruit they are and are not
allowed to eat. You know, it's it's idyllic.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Yeah, yeah, some big fruit around here, to be clear too, Apples.
When we see the apple, the apples are gigantic.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
Yeah. They don't look like red delicious, much to my relief.
I don't know what kind there. Yeah, I think I've
said on the show that's like the only apple I
don't like. I don't know. They look like they're sort
of lighter colored, big and plump.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. We just don't have
the side of apple anymore because this is Eden, I guess. So.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
Oh oh, and there's the scene where Mark Gregory is
like getting physical with what seems to be a cheetah cub.
It's like very little and cute and he's just wrestling it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
Yeah, also a little terrifying. But again I don't think
anybody was hurt, so I guess it's all right people
or cats as far as I know, So I guess
it's fine. But you know, all this is, you know,
we're in eat and everything seems to be good. Everybody
seems happy. It's time for a little temptation to enter
the picture.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
Yeah, yep, we got to meet a snake. So eventually
Eve Mosey's on over to the apple tree. Snake comes
out of the tree. It's not animated or anything. This
is live footage of a real snake. I don't think
it is stock footage. I think they must have had
a snake on set.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
I think so because the quality is so good. Yeah,
it makes me think this is one of the like,
if we're filming at a zoos slash botanical garden, they
had a snake and that's what they're using now.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
It also happens to be a quite ragged looking snake,
which is an interesting choice.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Yeah, like that, it's clearly mid mold or mid slouch,
you know, losing this outer layer of skin, which I
ended up quite quite liking. I think maybe this is
an accidental detail, but you know, it kind of implies
physical growth, transformation, even the shedding of one skin for another,
which of course is what is kind of happening here
with humanity in this myth, and this tail, like this

(56:46):
previous stage of existence is about to radically change and
a new one will take a hold.

Speaker 3 (56:51):
The snake always whispers when it talks, so it whispers.
Eve Eve tastes the sweetest fruit in all the garden.
It's an apple, Eat it, eat it. And so Eve
reaches for the apple at the serpent's suggestion, but before
she can pluck it from the tree, Adam appears and
he like blocks her hand. He says, no, it's forbidden here.

(57:13):
This flower smells much sweeter, and she's like, I don't
want a flower. I'm hungry. And then he says, then
you can eat this fruit, and he picks a different fruit.
I think it's a plum. So she takes the safety
fruit and she eats it reluctantly. But then from across
the yard, the serpent is still whispering at her. It's saying, Eve,
the apple is sweeter because it's forbidden, kind of turning

(57:34):
subtext into text there.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Yeah, yeah, but being very clear about it, like maybe
she didn't need it spelled out for it, Like what
does she know about subtext at this point?

Speaker 3 (57:46):
So Adam says, don't listen to him, come on, So
they go, and the snake is whispering the whole time
like Eve, don't go, you know, eat the fruit. And
then we get a bedtime scene where Eve falls asleep
on dryly in this blue filtered day for night shot,
and then Adam comes and throws more dry leaves on
top of her, and we watch a lion come and

(58:10):
snuggle with them at night.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
So, oh, this is a cool scene because it's creeping
up on him and the music's kind of implying that
something might be happening here. But then it just lays down,
has a nap with him. Because this is Eden, like,
you know, there's no predation, right.

Speaker 3 (58:25):
Yeah, it's perfect Garden of Eden. It's perfect. There's no
no need for anything to prey on anything else. So
I guess this is a this is a vegetarian lion.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yeah, So the next.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
Morning before Adam wakes up, Eve gets up by herself.
She wanders around in the grass and then she stares
at stock footage of lions mating in the savannah and
she kind of shakes her head like, what is this nonsense? Yeah,
And then later the serpent tempts Eve again. This is

(58:58):
while Adam is busy sitting naked on a really rough
looking rock, and Eve says to the snake, if it's forbidden,
why are you always telling me to eat it?

Speaker 2 (59:08):
Now?

Speaker 3 (59:09):
She's about to eat the fruit again, but Adam intervenes
once again, and this leads to an argument, and I
feel like this sets the tone for many arguments that
will follow in the movie. So Adam comes in and
he's like, don't eat that fruit, and Eve says, I'm
just looking. It can't be forbidden just to look. Is
it forbidden just to look? And Adam says no. So

(59:31):
Eve keeps looking at it, but it's almost like a
I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. Like she's
looking at it so close she's basically got her mouth
on it. And then the snake whispers to her that
if she eats the fruit, her life will change, and
Adam's like, come on, let's go somewhere else. But Eve
says where to have another bath, to watch another sunset?

(59:53):
And then and Adam asks, you know, well, what is
it you would like to do? And Eve is like,
what else is there? Everything stays the same, It never changes.
I feel the need to do something, something exciting, don't you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
This is an interesting wrinkled introduced into the story, this
idea that yeah, Eden is paradise, but there's something missing.
It's there's something boring, and that's part of the temptation
of the fruit. It's like like it's, you know, the
problem of utopia. It's too perfect, Like where's the risk?
Where's the danger? And to be clear, I think at

(01:00:29):
this point we're to understand doing it has not been
invented yet, so there's no there's no sex in this
world aside from what the lions are doing, which Eve
saw and we all saw through the stock footage, But
that's reserved for the animals and it doesn't seem to
be part of the created human existence.

Speaker 3 (01:00:47):
The other thing I wasn't sure about here was whether
this is suppose this reaction is supposed to be something
particular to Eve as a character for some reason, though
I don't know where her individual character is sticks come from,
or where atoms come from, because like they're the first
people or to something about their situation, or whether it's

(01:01:07):
sort of supposed to be like a sexist commentary on like, oh,
women are never satisfied.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
Yeah, you get into like the sort of the gender
politics of the story of Adam and Eve, right, And
of course the story has obviously long been used to
blame Eve for everything, like you know that the fall
of man should be laid at her feet and all.
And then of course this is often subverted and re examined,

(01:01:36):
so there's like a rich tradition of just looking at
it from whole different angles where this film ultimately falls
either on purposely and accidentally. I guess it's ultimately kind
of left to interpretation as well, not to say that
it's you know, it's not heavy handed in moments with it,
but I guess there's still at least a little wiggle
room for interpretation.

Speaker 3 (01:01:57):
Well, whether it's supposed to be a sexist generalization or not,
at least in their particular situation. What's going on is
Adam is happy with the life they have, but Eve
is not satisfied, And I feel.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
As a viewer, I'm inclined to side with Eve here,
you know, because I'm buying that there's something lacking here,
that maybe it's a little boring that Adam seems to
you know, he doesn't want anything to change, And it
makes sense that she's not completely satisfied, as well as
these other questions like well, why is this fruit even
here if we're not allowed to eat it? Like what

(01:02:29):
is this weird setup?

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
And why am I having tempted to eat something that
is forbidden to me? I'm just gonna have a bite
of that apple and see what happens. That seems to
be what everything is being set up to happen for me,
Like this seems to be what I should do. Why not?

Speaker 3 (01:02:45):
Isn't it good to have knowledge of good and evil?

Speaker 2 (01:02:47):
Shouldn't you?

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Shouldn't you understand that lest we become wise? Do we
not want to become wise?

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
So, anyway, she's not satisfied. She grabs the apple, she
runs away with it. She takes a bite first, and
she's making devil eyes at Adam while she bites the apple.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Yeah, and sherotically charged apple eating. Yes, And I want
to again mention, this is a huge apple. I feel
like it might have been a little sexier with a
smaller apple, because they really having to get in there
to get those bites.

Speaker 3 (01:03:15):
She's getting a chunk out of it. Yeah, and she
says it's only an apple, and then she gives it
to him. He has some too, And yes, it is
clearly a magically charged apple. Of course, in the biblical
narrative it is you know that it is from the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And there
are plenty of other details we should add in the

(01:03:37):
biblical narrative that are left out of the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
Like in.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
The biblical narrative, Adam and Eve are told that if
they eat the fruit of the tree, they will die,
and the snake tells them, you will not die if
you eat it, you know, And so there's other stuff.
This is emphasizing rather the erotic qualities of the fruit
of the tree, because the apple leads to immediate sex.
They eat it and they're like, oh, okay, I know

(01:04:03):
what's up.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
And then we cut away and we're pretty much in
the aftermath of this act, and that's when it begins
to become clear that oh, something, something bad. Has happened.
This might have.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
Whoops, we send yeah, we.

Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
Get the the the idea. This might they might have
violated the user agreement for the Earthly Paradise and they
might have to.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
Leave warranty voided. Yeah, so dark clouds gather, thundercracks and
a mighty storm descends on the land, driving Adam and
Eve out of the garden. There's like howling wind and
missed at one point it seems like something is grabbing
Eve by the feet and pulling her into the bushes
like a monster, But I think it's just the wind.

(01:04:46):
Volcano erupts like fire. Fireworks are coming out of a
big piece of.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
Rock, possibly from another movie. I didn't double I didn't
check on that one, but this might be from another film.

Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
They add in a scene where Adam and Eve run
down a tunnel from a boulder, like in Raiders of
the Lost Ark, which had just come out two years before,
So I think this is an obvious take from that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Yeah, and this is definitely a special effect that they
did for this film, and it's yeah, the boulders stop motion,
so it's you know, it's kind of cute there, you know,
obviously it's a chroma key effect sort of a thing,
you know, green screen type effect with them like running
in front of something, but it's pretty fun. I liked it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:24):
Afterwards, they travel through a cave and then emerge from
the cave into a bleak but beautiful landscape. They're up
on like a bare mountaintop looking down over these rocky
valleys of red clay earth, and then suddenly, out of nowhere,
Eves starts saying, don't look at me. This theme actually
is in the Bible, where after they eat the fruit
of the tree, they they realize their nakedness and they

(01:05:48):
become ashamed. Though the timing is backwards in the Bible,
it happens before they leave the garden. They eat the fruit,
they realize they're naked, they cover themselves with leaves, and
then when when God finds them later, as God is
walking in the garden, he's like, why are you doing that? Uh? Oh,
that's you know, to tip off. So next time we

(01:06:16):
see Adam and Eve, they're wearing loin cloths, and I
think these have to win the award for the most
uncomfortable looking loin cloths I've ever seen in a film.
Just look incredibly rough looking, woody, spiny plant matter stuck
in their butts. It does not look fun to wear.

Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
Yeah, yeah, literally their first working prototype of clothing, which
they had to invent in the field, based on nothing
other than like, what can we use to just cover
up our nakedness? It's like if you tried to build
a bikini out of just the items you buy at
pet coat to go in a lizard tank. That's pretty
much what's going on here.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
Yeah, just you know, like thorns and Manila rope. Like
there's more arguing, arguing about the weather, about where they
should go next, about whether they should eat more fruit
or not. There's a great part it was like, well,
we're hungry, we got to find some fruit. I don't
think we should eat any more fruit. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
Yeah yeah, He's like fruit got us into this. Done
with fruit.

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
They also have an argument about whether they are already dead.
Eve is like, aren't we already dead? And Adam's like,
this isn't what death is. Eve at one point says,
why is the heat gone? Adam says, the sun's cold
because of you. It will never get hot again. He's
blaming her, blaming her a bed. Eve thinks that eventually

(01:07:38):
their punishment will be over and then they will get
to go back into the garden and next time they'll
be good, and they won't they won't mess it up.

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
That's kind of what happens, but over over the course
of a very long time.

Speaker 3 (01:07:52):
Right, they stop, and so they walk through many landscapes
again like beautiful locations here, it's great desert valleys and vistas.
They stop and they drink some stagnant looking water out
of a marsh. They find some eggs in a nest,
and then this leads into the terosaur attack.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
Yeah, we get this amazing effect sequence here where first
we see the terrasaar, this prehistoric winged reptile flapping its
wings atop a roost. And this is actually a Ray
Harry House in effect that's lifted right out of nineteen
sixty six is one million years BC. This film starred
Raquel Welch and John Richardson. So they just they borrowed this,

(01:08:33):
but probably they probably didn't pay for it, the editor
points out. And then we cut from this to this
grotesque puppet that feels like it just flew out of
Jurassic Hell. This is the thing that our heroes are
going to actually wrestle with brutally murder and then eat
the flesh off Adam.

Speaker 3 (01:08:51):
Yeah. So Adam is like bashing it and twisting its neck.
And then just as he's like ripping this squelching purse
of guts open, uh, he says, but are you sure
we can eat flesh or no way? Eve says that Eve,
while Adam is like ripping into it, Eve's like, can
we eat flesh? And Adam says, the animals eat dead things,

(01:09:12):
so they're just going to gobble those guts.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
Okay, I guess that's how it worked in Eden where
we had the animals were eating things that died already.
I don't know, but but yeah, I love this secret.
They're they're tearing it up, they're butchering this, this dead pterodactyl.
And then Eve holds this bloody pterodactyl wingshred up over
her crude loincloth like she's trying it on in front
of a department store mirror. And the next shot, our

(01:09:38):
biblical power couple have invented the the pterodactyl bikini, like
they have. They're all decked out in wing flesh.

Speaker 3 (01:09:46):
It's beautiful. Yeah, so they the Eve is looking at it,
she rips up the wing flesh, and she gets the
ideas like, oh, we could replace these rough, you know,
thorn bikinis with with pterosaur l bikinis. So that's what
they moved on to. Yeah. So after this, the movie
shifts abruptly into caveman mode, in which Adam and Eve

(01:10:11):
will continue to have strife of their own, but they
will just repeatedly encounter other groups of prehistoric humans using
stone age technologies. Where did these other humans come from
in creation not addressed in the film.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
Yeah, I mean we might infer that they were a
separate creation, that they existed before the creation of Adam
and Eve, which raises a number of questions. But yeah,
they seem to have ventured out of Eden and are
encountering already established prehistoric groups of people, some of which
seem like, you know, essentially modern human beings much like themselves,

(01:10:48):
and others are clearly meant to be hominid species that
are you know, close relatives of humanity.

Speaker 3 (01:10:54):
Yeah, I think are the Are the Cannibals supposed to
be Neanderthals or something?

Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
I guess though, Yeah, again highly fictionalized, but yeah, I'm
gonna give a brief breakdown here of the tribes of
Adam and Eve. So, first of all, we of course
have Adam and Eve, our two person tribe of new
human beings, created directly and immaculately by God, and in
their natural state, they were of course beautiful, shameless, deathless,
and with an innate power over nature, particularly otherwise fearsome

(01:11:21):
animals like lions. And this last power is we'll see,
seems to stick with them even after expulsion after their
expulsion from Eden.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):
Well only up to a point though, because later the
animals battle with them.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
Yeah, I know, clearly they didn't work on the pterodactyls,
so there are limits to their powers. Okay, so that's
one group. Then we also have the trogs, the Troglodetes,
and this is a tribe of bestial but intelligence sex
positiveminids that live in fear of predator predatory carnivores. And

(01:11:54):
there's a certain amount of intended comedy with these guys.
These guys are very much sort of like b mood
v cavemen.

Speaker 3 (01:12:01):
Yeah, pulling silly faces for the camera. And these guys
all have haircuts that look like Davy Crockett hats.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
Yeah, a lot of extra hair glued to their bodies
as well and glued their face. So that's one group.
We're also going to later encounter the Greens, tribe of
omnivorous Homo sapiens that ritually cover themselves with green clay
and they are masters of stick, vine and rock based
martial arts. We see them out training with their sticks.

Speaker 3 (01:12:28):
Yeah, so green body paint. They live in a forested area,
green body paint, and sticks. They're all about sticks. They're
always doing stuff with sticks.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
And then there are the cannibals, and this is a hostile,
warlike tribe of hominids who seem to greatly enhance their
diet through cannibalistic raids on the Greens and presumably the
trogs as well. Just frightening in appearance, like truly scary,
with like some you know, makeup prosthetics to give them
that enhanced brow and everything. Total italo zombie cannibal gut munchers.

(01:13:00):
These guys. Yeah, but we'll see them in a bit.
They haven't been introduced yet, but this seems to be
like the basic prehistoric caveman world that Adam and Eve
have ventured out into, you know, with no expectations They're like,
they're about to meet the other people.

Speaker 3 (01:13:15):
They I think they didn't know there were any other people, right,
but they Yeah. They go out walking and Eve sees
a trog that I like looking at them from behind
a rock, and she tells Adam. He keeps dismissing her.
He's like, no, you only saw an animal. Come on,
let's wander further into this ravine. And eventually they get
trapped down there and the trogs come out surround them,

(01:13:36):
and then we cut to them later being carried hanging
from poles like Han and Leah after the capture by
the Ewoks, and I love how they continue bickering while
dangling from the stakes though it's fun. The argument transforms
into professions of love, where Adam says, I love you.
I would die for you or live with you forever,

(01:13:59):
and Eve says forever? And who would be the boss?
Adam says, how could you ask such a question?

Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
Me?

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
Of course?

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Who's the boss? One of the one of the great
questions humanity was asking even at this early stage.

Speaker 3 (01:14:11):
It's the boss and me, of course.

Speaker 2 (01:14:14):
But again, this is a good example of where I
liked the silliness of the dialogue. Here because it did
sort of undercut the tension of the film, you know,
because it seems like, and you could be horribly wrong
in this expectation, but it seems like if they're having
this silly interaction, it's probably not going to be too
horrific in the next scene, Like, they're probably not going
to be butchered and eton.

Speaker 3 (01:14:36):
Yeah, So they're taken back to the caves where this
whole society lives. There's a lot of like checking out
Adam's groin and poking at Eve. Adam really at one
point really abandons Eve here. She's freaking out. She's like,
make them stop messing with me, and he's like, calm down.
They're just trying to figure out what we're made of.

Speaker 2 (01:14:54):
Yeah, I'm afraid. I'm afraid the cannibals later will be
looking to do that too. Yeah, they want to. They
want to get all in there and figure out what
how this gut connects to this gut.

Speaker 3 (01:15:03):
So eventually a tiger comes along and then all of
the Troglodites run away in fear. They hide in the caves.
But Adam and Eve have no fear of tigers. They
used to, you know, they used to snuggle them all
the time in the garden, and.

Speaker 2 (01:15:14):
The Tiger's like, hey, okay, there enough.

Speaker 3 (01:15:17):
Yeah, And I think this kind of makes the troglodites
regard Adam and Eve as like gods of some kind.
They're afraid of them now, so Adam and Eve go
on their way.

Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
I have to say, like this whole section with the
prehistoric humans, it's it's pretty fun world building, Like, I mean,
there's the world they build, and then all the just
this the thoughts that it raises, Like what there's off
the top of my head. I don't know the answer
to this, but I wonder if other authors have explored
this idea, like like cast Adam and Eve out of

(01:15:46):
the garden into this into some sort of you know,
clan in the cave bear like environment, and you see
what happens build it up. I don't know. I think
there's a lot of possibility here.

Speaker 3 (01:15:56):
M So they end up walking in their terosaur bikini
over this dark volcanic landscape with twisted black rocks, and
Adam says that he thinks they need to find the
sea quote because life begins in the sea and we
have to start again. Hmm. Seems like one of those
atomisms here kind of just intuition. Eve offers some counterpoints.

(01:16:20):
She's like, how do we even know what direction the
sea is in? How do we know if we're getting
closer or further away? How do we know if it
even exists? Good question, how do we know if there
is such a thing as the sea?

Speaker 2 (01:16:31):
Yeah, and through all of this, yeah, Adam has this
sort of fool hardy like, yeah, yeah, I'll know it
when I'll see it. I feel like this is the way,
and you know, I guess within the context of the film,
there's this idea that maybe God is speaking through him
and like letting him know where to go. But that's
not expressly stated either, and so you can can certainly
you can certainly side with Eve here. It's like, yeah,

(01:16:53):
this guy doesn't know where he's going. He doesn't know
where that ocean is or what happens when we get there,
Like why is he all the shots? Like, let's listen
to Eve a little bit more here, This should be
a partnership.

Speaker 3 (01:17:04):
But Adam has a counterpoint to that. So they argue
a bit, and Adam Adam riotterts, Hey, remember it's your fault.
We got kicked out of the garden, and Eve says,
I thought you'd forgiven me for that. Adam says, I
have forgiven you, but I'll never forgive myself for being
led by you.

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
Turned it around in the same thing, didn't he. Yeah, yeah,
these two need a couple's therapists, but those don't exist yet.
Those are not going to exist for thousands, about thousands
of years.

Speaker 3 (01:17:32):
That's not a real apology.

Speaker 2 (01:17:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:36):
So eventually Eve climbs a tree here. She won't come
down for some reason, so Adam tells her she's on
her own and they part ways. Big breakup scene. So
middle of the movie, Eve goes out wandering in the
forest and then we're gonna get more cavemane cannibal stuff.
She gets captured by a man covered in green body paint.
He catches her takes her back to his village. These

(01:17:58):
are the green the people with the green paint you
mentioned earlier. They spend a lot of time hitting things
with big sticks, like pounding food items, processing foods, and
then hitting other sticks, like dueling with sticks. There's at
some point here there's kind of a dispute within the
tribe over a dead bird that I didn't understand.

Speaker 2 (01:18:17):
I think our green hunk here bear killer. I think
the idea is he's like, Hey, I've met this this
fancy lady from another tribe, and I really need to
impress her. I need this dead bird, this dead like
golden pheasant or whatever it is. I'm going to run
off with her, like no, we had plans for that pheasant,
so I think because he brings it to her like
as an offering, being like hey, like it's a bouquet

(01:18:40):
of flowers, like, hey, you're special to me. Here's a
dead bird.

Speaker 3 (01:18:45):
It's it's beautiful. Meanwhile, Adam stares at the Grand Canyon
for a long time or whatever this is. If it's
not the Grand Canyon, if it's pretty grand plan, it's huge. Yeah,
and then he just walks around for a long time
by himself, naked, not naked, he's got the leather terosaur
leather bikini at this point, standing on hilltops looking solemn. Eventually,

(01:19:07):
eve Eve starts to kind of like the guy she's
with now at this tribe, so it's not just like
a captive situation. She's like flirting with him. She's like, Oh,
you should wash that green paint off your body. You'd
be much more handsome without it, so he does. Once
he's all washed off, Eve is obviously into him. She's flirting,
and then later that night they have sex next to

(01:19:29):
a waterfall, and Adam happens to arrive the next morning
and find them dozing together on the rocks, and then
he walks away looking sad. So this is Adam's Adam's
first experience of that feeling, I guess. And then there's
a cannibal attack. Finally we're going to get the cannibals
showing up. So the cannibalmen attack the village of the

(01:19:49):
people with the green body paint. These the people with
the body paint, retreat by climbing trees. I thought this
was kind of a cool twist. They climb the trees,
and then it turns out that they're Their body paint
is not just decorative, it's camouflage because they blend into
the leaves and the cannibals can't find them. And then
the people in the trees launch a counter attack, swinging

(01:20:11):
from vines, hitting with sticks. So it is a war
of cannibals versus the green body paint and fighting breaks
out all over. There are some gore sequences here, like cannibals.
The cannibals just start eating defeated villagers while the fight
is still going on. I would think, shouldn't they wait
till the fight's over.

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):
Nope, it's time to rip up in those abdomens and
go right with the guts. So that's when we get
some gut munching.

Speaker 3 (01:20:33):
Here Egal roads jog On.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
Yes, so we do get the sense that like this
is a known interaction that's happening here, Like the green
people have a protocol that they follow and at some
point the cannibals are just going to attack. In the Cannibals,
I would say their tactics are very brutal and you know,
but also not particularly refined. Like again, they just come in,

(01:20:58):
they start killing people, and they're gonna him on the spot. Yeah,
we'll see, they'll take some people away, but their hunger
is too great. They've got a bunch of guts on location.

Speaker 3 (01:21:07):
Like thag, we're still fighting. You know, it's not time
to eat yet, so eat, time to eat guts. There's
a lot of head bashing with rocks.

Speaker 2 (01:21:15):
Also big rocks, too big, like I guess paper mache
rocks or something, and they don't look too bad. But
you can tell that the way people are brandishing them
that like nobody's got that much upper arm strength. Yeah,
these things are bigger than their heads the side of watermelons.

Speaker 3 (01:21:30):
Sometime during the fight, Adam tries to sneak into the village,
but he gets he gets his feet caught in a
snare trap and is left dangling upside down. Eve and
her new boyfriend are captured by the cannibals and thrown
into a pit. I guess they're being stored for a
later meal. And then while the cannibals are distracted kind
of slurping up the flesh of another lady from the pit,

(01:21:52):
Adam appears to rescue Eve and her new boyfriend. And
there's some funny editing and fight choreography in the sequence,
Like Adam appears at the top of the pit, he
throws the body of a dead cannibal down into the well,
so I guess Adam killed him. And then Eve recognizes him.
She's like Adam. They start climbing up the side, and
then we just abruptly cut to the boyfriend stabbing a

(01:22:15):
cannibal with a spear and Adam slowly walking up holding
a huge boulder and smashing the cannibal's head.

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
Yeah, So we're like really tense in the escape sequence here,
and then we just kind of like seem missing. We
cut yeah, two further along in the escape, which you know,
maybe it was a situation where like the footage wasn't
as good or they just wasn't coming together, and they
were just like we got we got tom. Just move
ahead to the next thing.

Speaker 3 (01:22:40):
And this cannibal head bashing is happening in this beautiful
field of wheat against the sunset, and so our trio escapes, Adam,
Eve and Eve's new boyfriend now all traveling together. They
swim down a river clutching a log, and here we're
treated to a lot of shots of hippos and crocodiles
in the river. The hip was moved very gracefully under

(01:23:01):
the water.

Speaker 2 (01:23:02):
Fascinating hippo stock footage. Like this is some stock footage.
You can really enjoy watching the way that they kind of, yeah,
prance along the bottom. Terrifying I'm assuming nile crocodile here.
This reminds me of the bid in the interview with
the editor. He's talking about in the old days, Like
so this would have been like early eighties roam. You

(01:23:22):
want stock footage for a movie, you had to go
down to an actual office and you tell them what
you need and they like show you the footage. We
were talking about this, like they do you see what
it looks like? Did that they projecting it? Or are
you like holding up negatives and looking at it with
a little lens? But what however the case, it's like
you look at it and you're like, yeah, this is
what I would like, and they like give you the
negatives and then you take it back and you cut

(01:23:44):
it in, which I thought was just pretty fascinating. I
never thought about that before.

Speaker 3 (01:23:58):
So at this point, what could be left in the movie.
We've already had cannibals, pterosaurs. What if we get a
bear attack in there? Sure throw it need a bear suit.
So by the riverside, Eve is attacked by a man
in a bear suit. We're not treated to like a
long good look at the costume. It's mostly kind of
close ups of the face and claws and then some

(01:24:18):
fleeting shots of the whole body as it's wrestling with
the humans. And here in this fight, Eve's boyfriend saves
the day. He stabs the bear with his trusty stick.

Speaker 2 (01:24:28):
I have to say I was on my rewatch. I
was expecting the bear to look a lot worse, and
it ended up looking better than I remembered looking. Not
to say it looks amazing, but it looks good enough
that it makes me suspect that there's another movie with
a worse bear suit that I was kind of comparing
it to him. I and if we watched another movie
with a terrible bearsuit, we have watched some bad bear suits. Yeah,

(01:24:51):
that must be that this one is not great, not terrible,
It's okay.

Speaker 3 (01:24:55):
Yeah. So after the fight is over, Eve's boyfri friend
is feeling good. He's like, yeah, I stabbed that bear.
So he goes over to Eve and he starts making
romantic overtures like did you like how I stab that bear?
And Adam is not into this. He yells for this
guy to get away from Eve. They start fighting, and
Eve initially does not intervene or try to stop them.

(01:25:18):
She's just kind of standing there watching, I guess, waiting
to see who wins.

Speaker 2 (01:25:21):
Yeah, let's let this play out, let's tire each other out,
and well, yeah, see how it goes.

Speaker 3 (01:25:26):
Finally, when the new boyfriend gets the upper hand and
is about to smash Adam's head with the rock. Eve
finally calls out. She says no, So it seems like
even after everything, after all the fighting and all that,
she still loves her first boyfriend, Adam. And when this
becomes clear, the other guy takes it pretty well. He
looks kind of sad for a second, then he just

(01:25:48):
jogs away, never to be seen again.

Speaker 2 (01:25:50):
He's like, their killer is a gentleman, and he's like,
the lady has chosen fair enough, I shall go back
into the wild.

Speaker 3 (01:25:58):
Gentlemen out there, take notice, take take take the example
of bear Killer here. You know he respects her decision.
Uh so, uh is it?

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:26:07):
I don't know where he's gonna go though. Is he
gonna go get back in the cannibal pit?

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
I mean I guess he's gonna return to the Green
tribe and just like, hey didn't work out with that
lady from another tribe, and there they're gonna be like, oh, yeah,
we knew that would not work out. A lady that
you gave our fancy pheasant too. Yeah, yeah, not surprised
at all.

Speaker 3 (01:26:24):
Bert. Oh, that's going to be a cold return for
bear Killer. You know, so we're into the final act
of the movie. At this point, Adam and Eve wander
around wearing furs and increasingly cold environments. In a moment
shortly after the previous scene, Eve says to Adam, you're angry,
but I'm happy, very happy because now I know you

(01:26:45):
love me. And Adam's like, uh, you know, what was
the deal with that guy? And Eve swears he's like
pretty much says exactly that. It's like, she's like, he
meant nothing to me, nothing at all. And then the
This is another point where I had to include the
closed caption. It's parentheses. Gentle synth music continues. Ah, that's good,

(01:27:09):
and Adam starts right after this. By the way, Adam
just starts practicing stick based martial arts, which he learned
from you know, Eve's other dude, which seems embarrassing, especially
in this moment.

Speaker 2 (01:27:20):
Yeah, but he's like, like, I'm trying to get better.
You saw how that bear killer did with a stick. Yeah,
as good as that Wasn't.

Speaker 3 (01:27:27):
He so strong and handsome or remember him?

Speaker 2 (01:27:31):
See, they should have worked it out. There's could have
been some arrangement. They could have the three of them
come to I think.

Speaker 3 (01:27:35):
Yeah, so Suddenly, after stick practice my first Love, the
song starts playing again and they segue into a tender
love scene.

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
Okay, so there, it's good again. There the relationship back on.

Speaker 3 (01:27:48):
Track, Adam. And even this segment of the movie, they
watch some more nature documentaries, like they stop to look
at cheetahs eating a dead gazelle and they're like, oh,
that's scary. And then Eve at one point says Adam,
I want to be with you, but I want to
be with other people too. You saw how they help
each other, protect each other. So I think she means

(01:28:09):
not romantically, she wants to live within a compage.

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
Yeah. She needs more than just this relationship. She needs
to be a part of a community.

Speaker 3 (01:28:16):
Yeah, Adam says, when I saw you with that other man,
it made me feel bad. Yeah, this is one of
the parts where I was thinking of this movie. It's
really like aliens learning how to be human. He's like,
what was that? What is jealousy? What is that feeling?
And so after this, they go walking around in snow
covered landscapes with cool geological formations, and then they go

(01:28:39):
into a big cedar forest. In this part of the movie,
Eve becomes pregnant. She discloses this to Adam and they
argue about this too. She says, I'm making a baby,
and Adam says, you can't do that. Only the animals
can do that, and then she gets mad at him,
and then he says, what kind of a baby? She says,
a baby like you? He says, how can a baby

(01:29:00):
be like me?

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
Yeah, some new stuff. There's a lot of changes going
on here. Then I would say that in general, like
you were like, what else is there to do in
this movie? True enough, at this point in the movie,
like all the best parts have already happened.

Speaker 3 (01:29:16):
I would say the last fifteen minutes is not the best. Yeah,
it gets kind of it's a little bit of a
slog I mean, there's still some beautiful locations.

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):
The locations are pretty. The locations and the clunky dialogue
or at times kind of clunky dog these are the
main things pulling you along at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:29:32):
So, like, where are they going? I guess they're still
looking for the sea, like Adam said at the beginning.
At one point, they end up crawling through a narrow
tunnel in a cave and this emerges into a wolf
stin and Adam has to fight the wolves. It's a
long fight with these wolves to drive them away so
they can get through. I did not really enjoy this part.
It seemed like it went on forever. At the end,

(01:29:54):
he strangles a wolf with his hands, and fortunately I
was like, oh my god, has he really hurt that dog?
But then we see the dog as like, we can
see it breathing when it's supposed to be dead.

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):
But I was afraid to look too closely. But yeah,
I think it should have been where Wolve's here, or
glacier zombies or anything like.

Speaker 3 (01:30:12):
We've already to go snowmen. Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
It's like to go from like cannibal tribes raiding other
homined civilizations, to go from that to just wolves. It's
a little lackluster. It needed something a little bit more
fantasy oriented.

Speaker 3 (01:30:27):
Here on the other side of the cave, they come
out onto a glacier. We see some yaks tromping around
in the snow. Eve is cold and exhausted. Things seem
kind of dire. Adam builds them an igloo of some kind,
but he goes out looking for food and says he
can't find anything to eat.

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
They have some yaks. They were just like a million yaks.
I guess they're pretty big, pretty big.

Speaker 3 (01:30:47):
So they argue some more. Eve's like, can't you understand
there's no hope in this land? No hope. But then
they kind of switch rolls. At some point, Adam collapses
in the snow, and now Eve is telling him they
have to go on. But Adam has a realization. He says,
I know what's going on. We're already at the sea.
The sea is beneath us, and if we're patient, all

(01:31:09):
of this will melt away.

Speaker 2 (01:31:12):
It's a plan.

Speaker 3 (01:31:13):
Yeah. Eve says, how will but how will we be
able to survive? And Adam says, this is great. Something
will happen.

Speaker 2 (01:31:22):
Something will come along to save the Simpsons children.

Speaker 3 (01:31:25):
Right, Yeah, So he's like you, like you were saying earlier,
He's following his intuitions. It's almost like God is piping
guidance into him, just making it feel like it's coming
from his own thoughts. And it turns out these intuitions
are correct. Wind blows in the ice starts cracking and splitting.
We see a bunch of stock footage again of avalanches

(01:31:45):
pouring down mountain sides and glaciers crashing into the sea.
And then icebergs like icebergs bubbling and shifting in the water.
And at some point it becomes clear they're supposed to
be on an iceberg floating in the ocean.

Speaker 2 (01:31:59):
Now, yeah, yeah, like they are on that. They're they're
on like starship iceberg now just being like it's drifting along. Yeah,
so this is their escape route.

Speaker 3 (01:32:08):
I got kind of interested in this. I'm like, oh,
what's going to happen Now they're on a slowly melting
iceberg as it's floating, floating into the ocean. We're nothing.
Just cut straight to sometime later. They're living on a
beach in a warm looking place. I guess the iceberg
somehow took them there, and they're living near a village
with other people. So we see Adam catching fish and

(01:32:29):
then he trades with the villagers. I think he trades
fish for pomegranates, gourds, and a stick that's on fire.

Speaker 2 (01:32:35):
I love this little sequence because it feels kind of
like they're inventing bartering on the spot, Like atm without words,
Adam's kind of like, all right, if I I'm going
to take this fruit from you, but I'm going to
move this dead fish a little closer to you. We're
still cool, right, We're cool, all right? What if I
was to take another fruit? Still cool? All right? And
then it beds like too many fruits? Yeah, And then

(01:32:57):
he kind of like, then there's the fire stick. It's
it's like, I kind of get the impression. It's like
one free fire stick with every purchase. It's like, as
an afterthought, it's like, you can take the fire with
you and then you can cook food. And he's like,
all right, let's try it out, and they do. They
cook a fish and it seems to be great, a
real game.

Speaker 3 (01:33:14):
Changer, delicious. But then Eve starts going into labor. While
this is happening, Adam reminds her that quote you have
to suffer. Oh thanks a lot, dude. Yeah, yeah, thanks
for the reminder. And then we go into the climax
of the movie, where Eve remembers that, as they said earlier,
life must start again in the sea. So she goes

(01:33:36):
down to the water to give birth. Labor is difficult.
Eve is in great pain, but then Adam comes to
her side to help deliver the baby. Things look kind
of scary for a minute there, but then finally they
lift the prop baby up into the air over their heads,
and My First Love starts playing on a freeze frame
of Adam and Eve in the surf with their beautiful

(01:33:56):
first child, who you might remember from the Bible would
tech be Caine, who will also become the first murderer,
the first murder.

Speaker 2 (01:34:04):
Of non caveman to be clear, caveman, I don't count
for the like the tally I guess in the Bible. Yeah,
that's the only way I can, because I have to
find a way to make these two works work together.

Speaker 3 (01:34:18):
Yeah, yeah, okay, So that's that's the end. That's Adam
and Eve freeze frame on holding the baby up in
the water, My First Love.

Speaker 2 (01:34:28):
That's such a weird film. Uh, incredibly weird. Yeah, I
love it, and I love how like there are aspects
of it where like clearly some level of the original
vision is really coming to fruition here other things seem
like almost an accidental conversions. And I guess it's always
that way with film. You know, there's the things you
plan for and the things that are the accident, and

(01:34:49):
and that's where the good or the bad emerges. And
but but I feel like overall, like, yeah, this this
is such a weird Bible movie. It it plays fast,
loose with the Biblical text, engages in some I think
really interesting world building, Like I want to see other
people explore this motif of Adam and Eve escaping into

(01:35:12):
an almost sword and sorcery world, prehistoric world, like that's
what we needed. We needed some caveman wizards, and we
needed some were wolves and zombies, and I think it
would have been even more amazing. I guess we kind
of get that in Lucio Fulci's Conquest, where we kind
of have a like a prehistoric era bone nun chucks,

(01:35:33):
sword and sandals or you know, sort and fantasy sword
and sorcery kind of a world.

Speaker 3 (01:35:39):
Also has werewolves, also has zombies. Also.

Speaker 2 (01:35:41):
Yeah. Yeah, I guess I'm just saying all more movies
should be like Conquest. That's what I'm looking for. But
this was pretty great in and of itself. So yeah,
big fan of this film, And if you're into this
sort of thing I do, I do highly recommend it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:56):
All Right, next week, you want to do three hours
of NBC John Boyd, Mary Stein, Virgin F Murray Abraham, Pirates.

Speaker 2 (01:36:05):
Noah, I mean I can't say no to F Murray Abraham.
So you know, maybe let's at least consider it for
the future. All right, well, we're gonna go and close
out this episode. But along those lines, I would love
to hear from anyone out there who has thoughts about
this picture. Obviously, but if you have favorite weird religious films,

(01:36:25):
especially you know, Bible films that you would like to
tell us about, please write in. And these can be
films or any other kind of like treatment you know,
TV shows and whatnot. It's something that's like retelling a
Bible story but making some very strange choices or even
questionable choices. Yeah, share those with us. We would love
to hear about them.

Speaker 3 (01:36:44):
I mean, one place in which there's tons of that
kind of media is stuff that's not a direct adaptation
to the Bible, but like in times prophecy movies and
there you get they really go bananas. But yeah, what
I'm interested in specifically is weird adaptations of stories appearing
in the Bible.

Speaker 2 (01:37:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So that'll be fun to discuss on
future listener Mail episodes for sure, and future Weird House
if we you know, because we'll there's a very good
chance we'll come back and do some sort of an
additional Bible related picture. Let's see. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast with core episodes and Tuesdays and Thursdays, but
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and we

(01:37:26):
just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
If you are on letterbox dot com, look us up.
We are a weird house and we have a nice
list of all the movies we've covered over the years,
and sometimes a peek ahead at what comes up next.
You know what Mark Gregory movie are we doing next?
We don't know. There are only so many to choose from.
And then finally, however you get this podcast if you're

(01:37:47):
listening to us, they just make sure that you rate, review,
and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you
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things that help us.

Speaker 3 (01:38:05):
Out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:38:26):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Weirdhouse Cinema: Adam and Eve (1983)