The Stone Age Warriors

The Stone Age Warriors is a telling illustration of the era when Hong Kong cinema was at its absolute peak. Where else than in an industry that enjoys immeasurable power and, thanks to its popularity at home and abroad, has a guaranteed supply of funding, would it be possible for a talented novice director to be given responsibility for a project shot almost entirely in foreign locations? Thanks to strong foreign demand for local action productions, that absolutely could happen in Hong Kong in the late eighties and early nineties. At that time, after all, foreign locations were not solely the domain of top-tier productions with major stars, but also of outright B- and C-movies. Proof of this comes in the form of The Stone Age Warriors, which offers a pure, though unfortunately less successful example of Hong Kong B-movies of the aforementioned era conceived based on the principles of the cinema of attractions. To expect a sophisticated or even an ordinary formulaic screenplay from a Hong Kong B-movie is of course nonsense, but this film’s narrative pretexts for chaining together attractions establish a new level of sloppiness even for the Hong Kong practice of brainstorming sessions over the screenplay. Whereas elsewhere the plot motifs that have been raised eventually circle back and are somehow resolved, nothing of the sort happens here. Not only do we not learn in the opening sequence where the scientist and his retinue are going or for what purpose before the natives attack them, but no one troubles themselves with the other motifs either. Everything is thus merely a pretext for incorporating more attractions. Unfortunately, this time the attractions don’t comprise so many action scenes, for which the viewer has to wait nearly until the end, but shots of the aforementioned foreign locations, which are interspersed with insipid humorous sequences based on the hick concept of “one of ours in a foreign land” or, more specifically in this case,  “a spoiled urban lady in the wilderness”. The result is a mish-mash of scenes that borrow elements from Romancing the Stone, Armour of God and vaguely even from Predator, but if viewers expect more from the film than just shots of African natives and sequences involving running to and fro in the rain forest, they will be disappointed. The Stone Age Warriors is now rather a memento of the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema and a noteworthy curiosity for enthusiasts who are interested in the background of the director of Police Story 3. (01.12.2013)