What, you never saw the movie?
Yea, the whole point of the scene was to show that the AS killed quickly (and possibly painfully) as all the blood in your body clotted in 6 seconds, from the lungs out. It was a chilling scene, to see the poor little guy die right in front of us, the audience. It was very realistic, and, despite all the turkey sandwiches I may have eaten in my life, I was glad to learn that the monkey was not killed for a scene.
Now the fact that, in the story, the scientists killed them, that does bother me some, even though I can’t see any other way around it. Maybe that the whole purpose of Wildfire was to get new biological weapons is clouding my judgement. (And that if the self-destruct went off, all the people that worked on the agricultural test station front would have been killed as well.) Killing monkeys for a cancer cure? Maybe. Killing them to develop new weapons? Not so much.
Or, in the words of my people, “Cite?”
Since Bashprompt has only made two posts, and only on this one subject, it would appear that they did a drive-by on the board.
Hey, at least they didn’t blow up an ox.
That would be abominable.
Bad jokes work no matter the decade.
We were warned not to make puns, yeti continues to push the line on these things. Squatch your problem, Bryan Ekers?
And then noble.
I wasn’t sure if Beowulf was making some kind of statement about blood PH factor…which is actually related to carbon dioxide toxicity.
So many bad jokes…so little time.
No kidding. I owned a pet rat whose grandfather was a stuntrat in the Indiana Jones movie.
Reminds me – I have to go check the mousetraps in the basement.
To bashprompt:
Thank you for your honest and insightful post. I agree.
It’s an old thread. but the topic of animals mistreated in films deserves more discussion.
I don’t know when the “No Animals Were Harmed” tag started showing up in credits. Coincidentally, I just watched Heaven’s Gate (from 1980) yesterday, and though I didn’t notice any horses being “blown up”, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were injuries to some of them, and because that film was notorious for huge cost overruns and a lot of other reasons, if there was a public outcry attached to that production I suspect the industry would take notice if for no other reason than a public relations boost was called for.
I think the scandal goes back to the silent film era, when spectacles like the first Ben Hur, shot in Italy, were made with little regard for the well-being of animals that were just a line item on a production’s budget. Details of the callous treatment of horses might leak out, and there was some pushback, but how that changed filming practices is hard to say - more likely it made producers pay attention to controlling on-set information that might damage their investment than actually changing how things were run. They could always put out a press release about how “stunt horses”, trained to take a spill, were used (but having seen some pretty violent spills in old Westerns, I’d imagine there were injuries).
Going back to my youth, I recall films like “The Emigrants” (1971), which showed an ox slaughtered and eviscerated (the character was caught in a snowstorm and crawled inside the animal’s stomach to keep warm, something that may well have happened in real life, but watching it recreated in a film was shocking to me in the extreme). This was an era when films from outside the Hollywood studio system were gaining notice for more realistic treatments of the harsher realities of life, and if that meant the old way of doing things, where you showed John Wayne fire his gun in a downward direction at a horse that’s not onscreen was considered somehow sheltering the audience from the truth, the new generation of (largely European) filmmakers of the 60s and 70s was having none of it.
But ultimately the paradox of showing real animal killings in films which are touted as not flinching from unpleasant facts, except that what you’re watching has been staged for the camera and is only “real” because it was written into the story, has been rejected by audiences and likely won’t be revived in this historical moment.
if I remember correctly wasnt there a big controversy in the original neverending story film the director killed a horse for a scene? And bob barkers animal group was the ones responsible for the more serious “no animals were harmed thing” because of it
The American Humane Society lays claim for awarding the “No Animals Were Harmed” ®
I like when it’s inverted, as in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 end credits-
The “no animals were harmed” disclaimer in the closing credits starts off as “I am Groot,” then changes to “No raccoons or tree creatures were harmed during the making of this feature. The same cannot be said for handlers of said raccoons and tree creatures.”
Still fuming over what very much looked like the mistreatment of a cat in Leolo.
I have seen nothing to corroborate the notion that the horse actor who played Artax, who had a death scene in the swamp, actually died during the production. Quite the contrary.
There have been allegations of animal mistreatment in the Japanese film that later became the American film The Adventures of Milo and Otis, though. Very sad to me, because I enjoyed that film as a kid.
Getting back to rats, in Food of the Gods, from about 1:15 to the very end, (after Ida Lupino does one of her Oscar-worthy turns, getting nibbled on to death in the jugular by a large mutant rat), it looks like there might be the odd bit of, well, odd-looking rodent aquatics?
.
Well, I’m not going to name any more titles, clearly films exist that cross the line. Let’s just say that there is a public awareness of a problem that once was not widely acknowledged, and any producer that crosses that line nowadays is likely to lose favor in the industry.