Luggage of the Gods!

My mother keeps a cassette of this film as a general threat to any film loving person who annoys her. Everything about it stinks.

As such it is a true classic.

Who gave it 10/10? Were you inadvertently watching a good film and accidentally voted for this one?

Everyone involved in the movie making process should be forced to watch at least a small section of this film. It should be an indelible stain on the minds on all that hold film sacred and be revered as the tide mark of the cinematically dire.

The writer/director of "Luggage of the Gods", David Kendall invented a caveman language that we the viewers learn as we watch the movie. It is a very clever use of language or nonlanguage and cinema as a visual medium. Adolfas Mekas shows this film in his courses at Bard College regularly.

I caught this movie once when it first came out, it was billed at the drive-ins with Karate Kid - yes Karate Kid. I split my gut and you will too if you play along. The film was shot in Van Cortland Park of NYC on a really, really low budget. Yes, Neanderthals in VC Park. Since I had no expectations of the movie - no one would have since there were virtually no reviews of this ultra-low-distribution film, everything in the film was unexpected. The risk is in the buildup for this movie - saying too much and building too high expectations will kill the effect of its humor. It was released very near the date that The Gods Must be Crazy was released, as a coincidence, and neither was shot with big budgets and both were entertaining.

So, very doubtful you were looking for this film directly and happened upon it by chance.

This movie was obviously inspired by "The Gods Must be Crazy". The general concept is the same: A primitive but stable society is thrown into chaos when it encounters a modern artifact. In this film, though, the primitives are living in the wilds of North America and what sets things off is luggage jettisoned from an airliner.

This is not a big-budget movie. There are no big stars, car chases, explosions or shootouts. There's only one optical effect in the entire film.

On the other hand, "Luggage of the Gods!" is a good movie. The acting, for the most part, is excellent. Lots of good laughs, mostly in the form of sight gags.

Overall a good but severely underrated movie.

My review was written in June 1983 after a screening at Bombay Cinema in Midtown Manhattan.

"Luggage of the Gods" is a mild indie comedy filmed in New York last year by tyro filmmakers that recalls Carl Gottlieb's 1980 "Caveman". Producer Jeff Folmsbee and helmer David Kendall have gotten technical value from a tiny budget, but the wryly-titled opus lacks the punch of invention needed to escape the "specialized U. S. indie" ghetto and find more commercial markets.

Story premise recalls Ismail Merchant-James Ivory's 1972 "Savages" and Jamie Uys's recent international hit "The Gods Must Be Crazy" in limning the impact of modern civilization and its products upon an untouched tribe of primitives. Yuk (Mark Stolzenberg) is a cave painting artis exiled from his tribe (living unchanged from prehistoric time somewhere in North America) for violating a taboo by looking up at the jet planes that periodically fly overhead.

With his sidekick Tull (Gabriel Barre), Yuk rummages through and puts to use a treasure trove of luggage jettisoned from a plane. A lame subplot has two crooks looking for a crate of rare paintings (dropped from the plane) and fighting with the tribe until defeated by Yuk and Tull.

Slowly-paced picture lags between gags, most of which are repetitive variations of the basic feeling-superior reaction of watching a savage misuse or ingeniously invent a new use for a familiar modern object. Writer-director Kendall fails to develop his material beyond the level of an elongated blackout sketch. One missed opportunity occurs when Yuk finds a one-hand miniature 8mm film projector. Instead of developing the cultural shock (commonly observed among primitives who have never seen a movie before) of the incident, Kendall has Yuk immediately assimilate the artificial image of a silent G-rated (not stag) film and introduce "the kiss" to his tribe.

Funniest motif, when the tribe takes the 1960s pop song "Build Me Up, Buttercup" (heard on a radio found in the luggage) as its chant, is little more than a variation on the discovery of polyrhythms around the campfire that was the highpoint of "Caveman". Without the money to compete with major productions, tyro filmmakers should concentrate on creating a novel alternative to mainstream fare, rather than a small-scale version of it.

Leads Stolzenberg, Barre and heroine Gwen Ellison are physically expressive in roles utilizing a made-up, simple language; some extraneous English narration is voiced-over to bookend the film. Cengiz Yaltkaya's marimba playing and his background musical score are the dominant contrast during much of the heroes' uneventful trek through New York parks.