SUNDAY 13 | On a table under a vast canopy sits a small army of little people dressed in mock animal skins. Among them, notably taller ‘Java men’, sporting glued-on uni-brows that sprout from their foreheads like tarantula legs. One has a lethal-looking spiked wooden club dangling from one hand, a cigarette jabbing at his lips with the other. Bending over to hook a Coke out of the cooler reveals a flash of fake designer boxers. He grins at the camera, lips parting to reveal fake buck teeth. These unlikely dwellers of 21st century rural Cambodia are, along with one or two rather more recognised names such as The Crow star Bai Ling and Christopher Judge (Teal’c in TV’s Stargate SG-1), the hastily assembled cast of Clash Of The Empires. A B-movie shot in Kampot last year, it was due to be called The Age Of The Hobbits before Tolkien’s lawyers waded in. This gloriously camp straight-to-TV ‘mockbuster’ is set 12,000 years ago in Indonesia, where the remains of one of mankind’s possible predecessors – rudely snuffed out since by the cruel processes of evolution – was identified in 2003. Barely a metre tall and even smaller of brain, Homo floresiensis was immediately christened ‘the Hobbit’ by a Tolkien-crazed media. One scientist even suggested naming the species Homo hobbitus. “The idea behind this film,” says Anthony Fankhauser, producer of Hollywood B movies Snakes On A Train and Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus among other tongue-firmly-in-cheek titles, “is just… hobbits. And there’s an immediate recognition of that word. This has nothing to do with the Tolkien universe at all. A pre-hominid little person in Indonesia, nicknamed Flo, that’s the real hobbit. The film is based on what those people would have been like. They’re trying to tie in a little science, but then we have flying kimodo dragons, so it’s not 100%, you know, factual, obviously.” The script is hardly Oscar-winning material: “It’s a pretty clear-cut story. The hobbits’ village is raided by Java men, who also existed in Indonesia at the same time. They steal a bunch of their people and they’re going to sacrifice them to the moon goddess. Lots of people get picked off along the way. Yes, we have some impalement, but the piranhas got changed to giant spiders.”
WHO: Hobbit botherers
WHAT: Clash Of The Empires screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm October 13
WHY: Hobbits!
(Photo: Mariam Arthur)