Master of the World (unrelated to the
novel by
Jules Verne) is a 1983 Italian
Exploitation Film directed by Alberto Cavallone and set 200,000 years ago. It follows a conflict between prehistoric tribes fighting over a bear head that represents their god. The hero, Bog, is the only human in the setting capable of spoken language while the rest of the characters communicate in grunts and gestures, making the film somewhat hard to follow.
Tropes:
- Art Shift: The film is liberally spliced with stock nature footage that is noticeably much grainier than the rest of the film.
- Babies Ever After: The film ends with Bog dedicating his newborn son to his god.
- Bears Are Bad News: Bears are feared and worshiped by the human tribes.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The primitive humans regularly fight and kill each other over a severed bear head and eat the brains of their enemies.
- Cannibal Film: Definitely features a lot of cannibalism but Pleistocene Europe is an unconventional setting for the genre.
- Conlang: Bog speaks one.
- Death of a Child: Several children die onscreen from illness and enemy raids.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: A brutish prehistoric world where cannibalism is widely practiced, even by the more sympathetic characters.
- Do You Want to Copulate?: Bog takes a liking to a woman and starts feeling her up by the fire. She responds by presenting to him and he mounts her.
- Exploitation Film: Released at the tail end of the exploitation film golden age and there are a lot of lingering shots of nauseating gore.
- Fanservice Cover: One DVD cover prominently features a sexually presenting woman
drawn from the above mentioned scene. - Handsome Heroic Caveman: Bog is a handsome protagonist though not especially heroic by modern standards.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Alas, poor neanderthal woman.
- No Name Given: Bog is the only character who is given a name.
- Misplaced Wildlife: Some of the animals shown would be more at home in Asia or North America than in Pleistocene Europe.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: There are two women who appear to have feelings for Bog. Only one (possibly) makes it to the end.
- The Not-Love Interest: The female neanderthal who heals Bog initially seems to be set up as a love interest. She's cuter than the others and she appears to have feelings for him. He ends up meeting and mating with another woman though.
- Off with His Head!: There are several instances of decapitation. With a Paleolithic hand axe. It's about as messy as it sounds.
- Screaming Birth: Bog's mate has a rather nasty one while tied between two stakes.
- Sexy Discretion Shot: An interesting example where Bog mounts a woman and the film cuts to footage of two herons mating.
- Uncertain Doom: It's rather ambiguous whether or not Bog's mate dies in childbirth at the end.
