Two hundred thousand years ago, a somewhat more smarter than the average caveperson named Bok runs afoul of not one, but two warring tribes. One group are a bunch of murderous dickweeds, and the other are a bunch of murderous dickweeds who also eat the brains of their foes. There’s some romance between Bok and a prehistoric volleyball player and she gives birth to his baby in a bizarre ritual. There are some wolves who magically turn into German shepherds before they attack and a bear with a muzzle on that wants to cuddle with these nerds. The cavemen also witness the sun going down for the first time and shit themselves in terror (not literally). The whole movie is pretty cool.

I have a very distinct memory of watching Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire (1981) on cable with my parents when I was 7 or 8 years old. I remember thinking, “Damn yo, I’m just a child right now but I can’t wait to see the Italian rip-off of this when I’m a grown-up and stupid old man!” Finally, I get to see what every child of the 1980s was dreaming of. You can blame it on my very specific taste in what I want from cinema (or heck, just blame the filmmakers), but Master of the World (1983) is one of the most annoying things I’ve sat through in a long time. Everything that made Quest for Fire a compelling film -that I don’t even like, to be honest- just isn’t present here. The cast are doing their best, but I find it impossible to care when every single time the grunting, screaming, or wailing starts, I just turn the volume down further and further.

My biggest concern was for the animal actors in this movie; would they be abused? Other than some rough wrestling with a couple of German shepherds and a bear that was obviously annoyed with these actors, my fears of animal cruelty were mostly unfounded. When the bear got the upper hand and pushed one of the dudes down and pounced on him, my wife actually cheered. That was great. On the plus side, Alberto Baldan Bembo’s score is great. At the risk of missing all that great dialogue, I wish that there was an extra on the Blu-ray to listen to the isolated music score while the movie played. For real though, I never question the crazy shit that Vinegar Syndrome has been putting out over the years, and I’m not going to here. But I really wonder who was waiting on Master of the World to drop on Blu-ray (other than my childhood self)?

Writer/director Alberto Cavallone made 17 other films (that sound more interesting than Master of the World) but it really makes me wonder why a filmmaker would make something as unrealistic as this. None of these characters ever go to work or put gas in their cars. I’m sorry to nitpick but that’s not accurate. All right, I’ll stop joking around now. I suspect that I’m being unfair to this film, and for real, somebody out there is going to love this schlocky, aggravating, overly serious, gory, and stock footage-infused madness. Just keep it far away from me. Maybe in another two hundred thousand years, I’ll check it out again.

As usual, Vinegar Syndrome does an excellent job releasing this 4K scan, so Master of the World looks and sounds (oog oog grr ook ook) fantastic. The only time the picture suffers is when the stock footage kicks in. There are two interviews on the disc, one with assistant director Stefano Pomilia, and another with Davide Pulici, Cavallone’s biographer. Both interviews are more interesting to me than the film they’re supposed to be a bonus for. Pulici especially has a lot to say about Cavallone and paints a very interesting portrait of the complicated man in the director’s chair. You have to hear about the film Cavallone wanted to make about caveman sperm and a pair of lesbian anthropologists. And no, I’m not making that up. There’s also a trailer for the Master of the World.