Dear Leaders and a Volcano

Eternal President Kim Il-sung (1912-∞) and Dear Leader Kim Jong Il (1941-2011). In the background Tianchi or "Lake of Heavenly Peace", a crater lake inside the volcano Baitoushan or Paektusan ("white headed mountain"). Tianchi Lake has a diameter of more than three kilometres and is 373 meter deep. The volcanic complex is more than 2 million years old, however the caldera formed only during a large eruption about 965 A.D. Since then at least 3 to 5 eruptions of small to moderate size occurred, the last in 1703. 

Curiously the lake is not only the mythical birthplace of Dear Leader but hosts also a Lake Monster.

Bibliography:

SCHMINCKE, H.-U. (2004): Volcanism. Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg: 324

At the Mountains of Madness

December 14, was the 100 years anniversary of the first expedition to reach the geographic South Pole in the middle of the continent of Antarctica. Until then only segments of the coasts were known and partially mapped.  

Fig.1. The dog Chris inspecting a grammophone during the Scott Expedition in Antarctica  (photo by Herbert George Ponting, 1911).

It is no wonder that such an unknown land influenced the imagination of many writers and later film directors. 

"At the Mountains of Madness" is a science-fiction/horror story by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), written in February/March 1931 and originally published in three parts in the February, March and April 1936 issues of the pulp-magazine "Astounding Stories" (also one of the first pulp- and horror fiction magazines ever to be published).
The story is written in a first-person perspective by geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University, which led a geological expedition to Antarctica in "1930".
The expedition discovers first strange fossils, eons of years older then all other signs of life on our planet, and finally a mountain range, much higher and darker then ever imagined. But after a carefully investigation along the borders of the mountains and the discovery of even more strange fossils, contact get lost with a part of the team and the narrator makes his way to discover what happened at the Mountains of Madness.
Lovecraft incorporates in his story many scientific observations made at the time, especially the discovery of fossils. Little was known about the geology of Antarctica; rock exposures comprise only 1-3% of the land area and are limited to isolated coastal regions and to the peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains, crossed for the first time by the Ernest Shackleton-expedition in 1908. Only in 1928-1930 the Richard Evelyn Byrd-expedition collected the first fossils.
Still today sites with fossils are rare spots; from Antarctica we know some dinosaur species, synapsid species, a plesiosaur, Eocene mammals and a terror bird - however plant remains are by far the most common fossils and especially these plants proofed that Antarctica was once a tropical paradise.
Lovecraft describes the fictional discovery of a cave that acted as sediment trap for millions of years:

"Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year."

Also other authors located a tropical Lost World near the Antarctic continent. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) published in 1918 the first part of a science-fiction book in the "Blue Book Magazine": "The Land That Time Forgot". Here a primordial world populated by tropical forests and of course dinosaurs is located on the island of Caprona, a land mass near Antarctica, first reported by the (fictitious) Italian explorer Caproni in 1721. The tale inspired two movies: "The Land That Time Forgot"(1975) and "The People That Time Forgot"(1977).

Fig.3. Cover art for first combined edition (1924) of The Land That Time Forgot.

Si-C

In the science-fiction/monster movie "Monolith-Monster" (1957) fragments of a meteorite are discovered in the desert of California. The strange mineral from outer space starts to grow to gigantic crystals when it comes into contact to water and a heavy rainfall is occurring in the mountains where the fragments are scattered around (the movie is also worth to watch for the geo-babble as noted by Jessica Ball in her Geological Frigthfest review on Magma cum Laude; and you can see here for yourself).  The idea of growing minerals was later adapted in the computer game "Command & Conquer: Tiberium", where an extraterrestrial meteorite brings the unknown mineral Tiberium to earth, that grows by extracting nutrients from all other life-forms.
Every single fragment of these crystals can grow, similar to real crystals; however they are not considered life-forms as they lack the ability to actively self-replicate or even evolve.

 
On earth the dominant life-forms are based on the element carbon (C) - excluding the case of the presumed arsenic bacteria -  but already early science-fiction writers speculated on alternative forms of life, based on other elements like silicon, nitrogen, phosphorus, boron and even metals like titanium, aluminium, magnesium and iron.

In 1891 the German astrophysicist Julius Schreiner was one of the first to propose silicon (Si) life-forms, the  idea was taken seriously by British chemist Emerson Reynolds who speculated about the habitats that such a creature could be inhabit.
Later H.G. Wells wrote

"One is startled towards fantastic imaginings by such a suggestion: visions of silicon-aluminium organisms - why not silicon-aluminium men at once? - wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur, let us say, by the shores of a sea of liquid iron some thousand degrees or so above the temperature of a blast furnace."

Silicon was chosen because its similarities to carbon - it is common in the universe and it can form log and stable polymers, it also reacts with hydrogen (forming the instable gas silane) and oxygen (forming stable silicones) to form stable molecules. Oxidation is used by terrestrial life forms to gain energy and the waste product is the gas carbon dioxide. A silicon creature would however produce a solid mineral composed of silicon dioxide. According to some authors the respiratory system of a silicon life-form therefore must produces sand or even bricks.
The idea became popular in the short story "A Martian Odyssey", published in 1934 by Stanley Weisbaum (1902-1935):

"Those bricks were its waste matter... We're carbon, and our waste is carbon dioxide, and this thing is silicon, and its waste is silicon dioxide-silica. But silica is a solid, hence the bricks. And it builds itself in, and when it is covered, it moves over to a fresh place to start over."

Aliens as silicon life-forms became very popular in TV-productions and movies also after the Monolith-Monster. The "Island of Terror" (1966) is inhabited by artificial "silicates" life-form that feed on calcium of human bones.

As a matter of fact the very incarnation of the extraterrestrial xenomorph -H.R. Giger´s "Alien" - possesses a shell of Si-compounds to protect it from environmental factors. This resistant shell is also very useful to contain the acid blood of the creature.

In the TV series "Star Trek" the crew discovers a silicon-based life-form during mining activities on the planet Janus VI (episode "Devil in the Dark"), however this creature is less hostile than other xenomorphs:

Spock: "Life as we know it, is universally based on some combination of carbon compounds. But what if life exists based on other element. For instance silicon."

In "Star Trek: The Next Generation" some episodes feature living crystals or the dangerous "Crystalline Entity".
In the X-file episode "Firewalker" a mushroom like parasitic life-form (however terrestrial in origin and the result of a parallel evolution process) produces as waste simple sand (that fills the lungs of its host). The parasite is discovered as spores coming from inside an active volcano start spreading. It is interesting to note that geneticist Haldane, J. B. S. proposed that silicon life-forms could survive inside a planet feeding on partially molten rocks.

Despite these promising visions, the structure of silicates is limited mostly on long chains or sheets (minerals). Silicon doesn't form complex molecules, like enzymes in carbon based life forms, and it would be difficult to achieve a metabolism with such a simple chemistry.

Bibliography:

REYNOLDS, J.E. (1893): Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Nature 48(477)
WELLS, H.G. (1894): Another Basis for Life. Saturday Review: 676

It Came From the Ice!

“I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.”
"At the Mountains of Madness" (1931/1936) by H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

One of the most classic monster of movies is without doubt the "mummy", mostly of Egyptian origin and with human shape (despite the fact that thousands of Egyptian mummies of various animals are known). Still today we are fascinated by the effort put into the preservation of a body, the ultimate victory above decay, corruption and finally death himself.
But there are not only artificial mummies, nature offers various methods to create "natural mummies". Corpses can be preserved in bog deposits - to acid for decomposing organism -  or tar pits - to poorly oxygenated - or permafrost - to cold for an effective decomposition of organic matter.

Natural mummies discovered in permafrost of ice age mammals offers a broad spectrum for research: taxonomic relations and dispersal history can be studied trough the ancient DNA, the structure of soft tissue can be observed in detail, paleo diet can be inferred by the gut contents and faeces, on some carcasses the circumstances of death can be observed - some animals show injuries, pathological deformations or tissue changes and parasites.
In the Siberian permafrost the best preserved specimens are those of mammoths, especially young and small individuals like the 40.000 years old mammoth calfs "Dima" (discovered in 1977) and "Lyuba" (2007); one of the oldest specimens is the 50.000 years old male "Khroma" (2009). 

The carcass of Khroma, partially eaten by modern scavengers, was discovered in July 2009 by a local hunter on the banks of the river Khroma. A preliminary study showed that in the carcass fossil germs were preserved, most probably anthracis, which can cause anthrax and black lung disease.  To prevent any possible contamination of involved researchers it was decided to sterilize the specimen. The still frozen carcass was therefore bombarded with a massive dose of Gamma-rays in a laboratory in Grenoble. 
Bacteria can theoretically survive long periods when frozen. In 2007 an international research team announced the discovery of 500.000 years old bacteria with intact and active DNA-sequence in samples of permafrost.

The scenario of a still living pathogen or parasite inside a frozen and preserved body of an ice age mammal is also the main storyline of a TV-horror-production of 2009, named appropriately "The Thaw" (strangely the title for the German release is the exact opposite - "Frozen"). In a remote region of the Canadian tundra a carcass of mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius?) is discovered in a melting glacier. 
(P.S. prehistoric monsters entrapped in ice have a long tradition - see for example "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" in 1953, "Godzilla" in 1954 and "Dinosaurus!" in 1960)

This is a common misconception, the natural mummies discovered until now were preserved all in permafrost soil, which contains local ice lenses of secondary genesis. This ice maybe plays an important role in the desiccation and preservation of the carcass, as moisture migrates from the body to the ice.
Anyway - the warming of the Canadian Arctic due anthropogenic climate change not only releases dead mammoths from the melting underground, but also a deadly and living pathogen - a parasite in from of an arthropod (a - bug - as noobs call it) that needs body heat. To survive inside its host the parasite weakens the immune system (as some real parasites do) - this behaviour would finally cause the death of the host, if the flesh-eating bugs (arthropods) didn't also multiply so fast that they eat their victim from inside.

The movie uses a environmental cause (the disease is released due the warming of the planet caused by our actions) as premise, most of it is however clearly inspired (or copied) from the movie "The Thing" (1982), even if there the parasite - first hiding and then exactly copying its host-  is an alien lifeform.




The Thaw doesn't really explain the origin of the parasite, but it seems almost certain that it is of terrestrial origin and also so deadly that it caused the extinction of the entire Pleistocene megafauna. The idea of an unidentified hyperdisease killing animals was proposed in 1997 after the first epidemics of Ebola in 1976-1979 and 1994-1996. Main vector of the presumed pathogen was Homo sapiens, infecting mammoths and other large mammals during his travels around Siberia and North America. In 2006 a research on the pathological malformations of bones from American Mastodon (Mammut americanum) and bison bones suggested that the animals suffered from an infection of tuberculosis. A relatively large number of geographically and temporal separated individuals showed those malformations.
A recent example how dangerous pathogens can be for an isolated population was observed on the Christmas Islands in the Indian Ocean. In 1899 human colonization and introduced black rats (Rattus rattus) brought a unicellular parasitic protist (Trypanosoma) onto the islands. The endemic rat species (Rattus macleari) was not immune against the introduced parasite and the population suffered a rapid decline - in 1904 the species was considered extinct. However this is an example on a very confined space, involving a single species - it remains unclear how a single pathogen could wipe out so many species in such a short time on almost the entire planet.

Last but not least: a strange movie combines somehow The Thing with mammoths. In the TV-horror "Mammoth" (2006) an alien lifeform assimilates a partially frozen woolly mammoth exposed in a museum. The mammoth-alien-zombie goes on a rampage - killing people by adsorbing their life energy... until stopped by the Men in Black...



Bibliography:

JOHNSON, S.S. et al. (2007): Ancient bacteria show evidence of DNA repair. PNAS Vol. 104 (36): 14401-14405
ROTHSCHILD, B.M. & LAUB, R. (2006): Hyperdisease in the late Pleistocene: validation of an early 20th century hypothesis. Naturwissenschaften 93:557-564
WYATT, K.B.; CAMPOS, P.F.; GILBERT, M.T.P.; KOLOKOTRONIS, S.-O.; HYNES, W.H., et al. (2008): Historical Mammal Extinction on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean) Correlates with Introduced Infectious Disease. PLoS ONE 3(11): 1-9

November 17, 1918: The Ghost of Slumber Mountain

"The Ghost of Slumber Mountain" is an 11 minutes long movie written and directed by special effects pioneer Willis O´Brien and released November 17, 1918. It features the - at the time - pioneering technology of "stop motion animation" with five models of dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts. The main scene of this movie is also one of the most classic images of monster movies - a fierce battle between Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus. Unfortunately the producer Herbert M. Dawley, decided to re-cut the original movie from 30 minutes to less than 11 minutes, most of this material is today lost (however there exists a restored version with 19 minutes). Parts of the footage were reused in the movies "Along the Moonbeam Trail" (1920, a movie were dinosaurs live on the moon) and the documentary "Mystery of Life" (1931).

Cowboys, Dinosaurs and Eohippus: The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

"The Valley of Gwangi" (1969) is considered one of the most important productions in the history of the genre of prehistoric movies and one of the best works of special effects artist Ray Harryhausen.

The story of Gwangi is based on a script written by the former teacher of Harryhausen, special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien, but only several years after the first drafts the producer Charles H. Schneer decided to adapt it into a very peculiar movie.
Harryhausen was hired for the special effects and the animation of the monsters featuring in the movie. He finished the animations of his creatures on 7, October 1968, after more than 400 individual shots in stop-motion technology - the highest number used for a movie at the time.



Fig.1. Ray Harryhausen is best known for his stop-motion creatures featured in various movies and genre: adventure, science-fiction, fantasy and in a certain manner even science. Between 1938 and 1940 Harryhausen worked on his first preliminary project called "Evolution".

Until January 1969 the proposed title for the film was "The Valley Where Time Stood Still", but to the production company (Warner) this seemed to long and complicated, and it was changed, not without bitter protests to "The Valley of Gwangi".
The movie was releases almost at the end of the golden age of monster movies in the sixties and seventies, the general public had lost interest in the genre and it was therefore hoped that the particular storyline of the movie would attract again fans of monster-, but also adventure-, catastrophe- and western- movies.

Apart the stunning special effects, the film is notable that it mixes parts of the classic western genre with parts and elements of the classic film about dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.
The film is set in rural Mexico (and was filmed in Spain) of the early 19th century. In the middle of the desert Professor Bromley (I wonder if the name is a tribute to Dr. Robert Broom) discovers a sensational fossil: a slab with human footprints along the trackway of a three-digit horse of the extinct genus Eohippus.
Later the local circus receives a strange animal: a small horse with three digits on every leg, named El Diablo. In an attempt to discover the valley from which the horse came the palaeontologist first kidnaps and then follows the animal to the entrance of the forbidden valley. Here they meet the most terrible predator - Gwangi himself, a terrible Tyrannosaurus ... Allosaurus, animals that Harryhausen, as he himself admits, confused when he created the doll for the movie.

Five million years of terror: Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

In many science-fiction films the adversary or monster is inspired by prehistoric creatures, dinosaurs are the most popular, but sometimes also mammals and their "derivatives" play a role. The classic monster movie has a quite predictable storyline: men enter and find a place not intended to be explored, awaken so the monster, the scientist explains what it is (even to those who are watching the film) and in the end the hero and we discover how to kill it ...
The animal, and especially a "primitive" creature, is used in movies as a powerful symbol for our subconscious emotions and irrational behaviour, it represents the most primitive instincts of survival - nourishment and sexual reproduction - that are in modern men controlled (maybe even suppressed) by rationality and society.

"Quatermass and the Pit" was in origin a black and white science-fiction/horror TV-serial broadcasted in 1958 and 1959. The story based on a script by Nigel Kneale was later adapted by the British Hammer Film Productions (a company notoriously known for its B-movies) to a movie with same title (1967). Curiously in the U.S. the film was released under the title "Five Million Years to Earth" and in Germany "Das grüne Blut der Dämonen" ("The green blood of the demons", probably influenced by one autopsy scene).
The movie story follows on a first glance only loosely the classic monster story and uses an intriguing variation of the monster as symbol of primitive behaviour.



During construction works in London bones and skulls were uncovered, the anthropologist Dr. Roney discovers the fossils are of a particular breed of primate, much older than all the genera previously known to science.
Meanwhile the archaeological survey is interrupted by what appears to be the discovery of an unknown bomb-rocket of World War II, strangely embedded in the same geological strata as the fossils. The army is informed and General Breen seeks the aid of rocket scientist professor Quatermass. He will soon discover the terrible truth: the supposed rocket is an alien spacecraft. The hypothesis presented by the scientists: 5 millions of years ago a superior race of Martian insects tried to create a race of slaves from primitive monkeys, bursting the evolution of mankind. But before the aliens succeeded in their plan they annihilated themselves in a terrible eugenic war in a distant past.
In fact the reconstruction, based on the fossils and modelled in an extraordinary short time interval by Dr. Roney, shows a giant monkey with a big head, the classic missing link between man and animal (even Piltdown man is mentioned in the technobabble of some scenes of the TV-serial) in accordance to the classic "ladder of evolution" of man. The reconstruction with a large brain resembles also a bit to much modern humans, according to the real fossil record five million years the genus Australopithecus would be a more realistic approach, a bipedal primate with not to unusual characteristics in cranial volume.

In contrast to a classic monster movie in Quatermass and the Pit the discovered fossils remain however dead - there is no physical reanimation and a rampage of classic ape-men trough London. But the discovery of the ancient spaceship has started by telepathic influence also a self-destruction program in the genes of the descendants of the first ape-men - We are the monsters! By following the most primitive instinct and survival of the strongest humans begin to kill each other, like the Martian million years ago.
The movie also cites and shows in form of the war that destroyed the aliens the dangers of a worldwide nuclear threat and armament - a common topic in monster movies of the sixties and seventies. Interesting the decision to gave the Martian the aspect of locusts (but the comparison of the sorcerer of Les Trois Frères is farfetched), maybe to represent the human behaviour of colonizing and overexploiting new land ?

Quatermass and the Pit is not the classic monster movie of the sixties. The first half builds up suspense and then it develops from a science-fiction story to a ghost-horror movie, even with the classic demonic possession scene. The Martian technology is capable to control human minds, taking from us our personality transforming us in a single mob - also the attacks comes from the most unsuspected side, the common people on the street.
It's surely one of the better and more serious Hammer films.
The idea that life on earth, especially the rise of man, can be explained by the intervention of aliens is still used in science fiction today (a recent example is the film "Mission to Mars" in 2000) - ironically that some authors copied this idea even for their pseudo-serious books about Paleoseti in recent years.

Prehistoric Monster Movie: The Mighty Gorga (1969)

The original movie King Kong is one of the most successful film released 77 years ago on March 2, 1933. It had a profound impact on the film industry, it is almost impossible to name all the movies inspired by King Kong, including many who have simply made copy and paste of the plot or the monster - a giant primate - with results that range from respectable to delusional and pathetic.

"The Mighty Gorga", produced in 1969 by David L. Hewitt, must be included in the last category.

The story of the film is a simple rip-off of the original:
In search of an attraction for his circus, a young explorer decides to lead an expedition into the unexplored regions of the Congo, to follow rumours about a giant creature hidden in the forest. Here they discover an isolated plateau, where dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, including Gorga, survived and are adored by the natives like gods.

The producers do not even try denying that they copied from the original, but what makes this film mentionable is his high "trash" factor - the special effects must be seen to be believed - simple sock puppets moved before a projection of the real footage movie. Hewitt even "borrowed "some scenes from other films, like "Goliath and the Dragon" (1960).

15 September, 1914: Gertie the wonderfully trained Dinosaurus

September 15. 1914, the short movie Gertie the Dinosaur, the first dinosaur to appear in a movie, was notified for copyright.

Gertie the dinosaur, also Gertie the trained dinosaur, is a movie with a animated segment by the American cartoonist Winsor McCay and produced in 1914.

McCay was inspired to create Gertie, considered today one the first classic animation figures and the first dinosaur to appear in a movie, in 1912 by a series of drawings depicting prehistoric animals commissioned by the American Historical Association.
However, even in 1905 in the comic adventure of McCay's "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend" a "Brontosaurus" skeleton is shown.
McCay presented the short animation part, consisting of 10.000 single hand drawn photograms, of the trained dinosaur the first time in February 8. 1914 as part of his show in the Palace Theatre of Chicago. The show was a great success, and McCay performed it in various cities of the East of the U.S. Later in the year he had the opportunity to produce a version of the show for the cinema, with added scenes caricaturing the production of the animated part. Finally the 12 minutes long movie of Gertie the Dinosaur was announced and released on November 14. 1914.

Figure from Wikipedia.

A really bad movie: Yor - The Hunter from the Future (1983)

It's Friday, and what better way to pass a rainy evening by watching a good movie (or not?).

Yor: "The blood of your enemies makes you stronger! Drink!"
Pak: "Urgh...I'd rather stay weak!"

YOR - The Hunter from the Future (1983) is a film produced by the Italian company "Daimant Film" under the supervision of the noted B-movie director Antonio Margheriti, and Reb Brown plays the main character called Yor "He's the man!"

Of all the trash films, this masterpiece is surely one of the best of the worst examples, as the film appears in the list of the 100 most terrible movies according to John Wilson, founder of the prestigious "Golden Rapsberry" price.
Here every detail is designed to be trash: the plot is simply stupid, the characters are childish, the costumes are ridiculous, the special effects are pathetic and even the soundtrack (mp3 3.4 MB), contributed by Guido & Maurizio De Angeli, has a trashy charm.

(Warning SPOILER ALERT!) The film begins introducing, as the music suggest, Yor, running through the desert of the Turkish region of Kappadokia. The introduction song can also be regarded as the summary of the entire intellectual content of the movie: Yor is a blond caveman who main occupations are fighting dinosaurs, armed only with a stone axe, and a Dimetrodon (notable the only starring in a movie as I know), killing people and destroying civilizations.
But back to the plot: Yor encounters two other cavemen, the standard caveman Pak and the beautiful Kala, busy hunting a prehistoric pig (with spines attached to it with glue). Suddenly a kind of triceratops attacks, which is promptly killed by Yor, a scene with lots and lots of blood and gore. The combat ends appropriately by Yor drinking the blood of his prey.

Fig.1. No comment.

To thank Yor, Kala and Pak invite him in their village, which is promptly attacked by blue-skinned ape-men trying to kidnap all the women. Yor sets off to find the hideout of the aggressors and after a short encounter with some mummies discovers the cave. The problem now remains how to reach the cave entrance at the top of a cliff. No problem for Yor - with bow and arrow he kills quickly a pterosaur -thing or giant bat (I'm not sure what it should represent), whose carcass is used by Yor to glide into the cave, kicking the guard unconscious, and with the background choir singing "He's the man!" (Seeing is believing mpg 2.5 MB).

Fig.2. Did they even try?

Yor finally enters the cave, kills everyone and everything and returns to a fishing village (after saving his beloved Kala), where he suddenly is told about the secret of a mysterious island in the middle of the sea.
Here the plot changes completely; the peaceful village is suddenly attacked by death -rays. Yor gets onto the island, ruled by a mad dictator with an army of robots that need the genetic material of Yor to procreate. Here he will solve the terrible secret of the resurrected dinosaurs and creatures of the Permian age, and the secret that brought to life the mutant ape-men...

If the plot seems even more confusing and inconsistent as by "Lost", the explanation is simple, the original adventures of Yor were a miniseries of four episodes produced for the Italian television. After the first broadcast the series has been cut into a 90 minute long film for the big screen. There is no considerable difference regarding the plot between the TV version (extremely rare to find on videotape) and the more common movie version - both are illogical, but in the uncensored version the fights between Yor and the prehistoric creatures last longer and there is even more blood and gore!

Conclusion, the film deserves the "fame" that he has won since his "birth" and the end is (Spoiler Warning!) , naturally, trash:

"Yor returns to the primitive tribes on the mainland. He is determined to use his superior knowledge to prevent them making the same mistakes as their forefathers. Will he succeed?"

YOR - The Hunter from the Future (TV Trailer, 1983)

Online Ressources:

Images found on Cool Cinema Trash
The video and music can be also downloaded on BadMovies