The Ghost and the Darkness
Sep. 20th, 2003 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timepiececlockI've been watching my brother's DVD of The Ghost and the Darkness. I watched this film once, the year it came out, and I remember being very impressed by it. Watching it a second time a few years later, I'm still impressed. It's gorey, and has one woman in the entire cast, but none of that is a suprise givne the subject matter, and is in fact necessary. It's a creepy and unsettling film, with excellent cinematography and fine acting, most notably from Michael Douglas in his smaller role, but also Val Kilmer, who turns in one of the more better performances of all the movies I've seen him in.
It's based on a true story about a pair of man-eating lions (named The Ghost and The Darkness by the locals) who spend some months terrorizing and slaughtering a camp of laborers trying to build a bridge in a place called Tsalvo, in Africa. The year is 1898. The British military engineer who is building the bridge (Kilmer), a local leader among the tribesmen who are providing the labor, and a grungy famous hunter (Douglas) do their best to kill the lions and keep the bridge project going. It's a well-written story, and makes me definitely glad I don't have potentially man-eating lions in my backyard.
What's interesting about this true story is that the two lions were an anomoly-- man eaters always hunt alone, not in a pair, and they never kill the amount of men these two accounted for before they were taken down (at least 50, possiblly twice that). When the lions' lair was found they saw the hoarded bones of humans (in piles, picked clean). something lions never, ever have done before.
The two lions are now preserved in a museum somewhere, on display. They still don't know why the lions behaved this way, killing dozens upon dozens for pleasure, not food.
The whole story reminded me of this special I watched on tv once, about tigers and rivers in India. There's these tigers, you see, who will swim out into the water, leap onto a river boat (and I do mean leap), and drag a man over the side and into the water. They have video tapes of it that the special showed. Scary, scary fucking shit.
EDIT: The lions are currently on display in the Field Museum in Chicago. The film was written by William Goldman, who I like. He also wrote Maverik (funniest western ever), Chaplin, Heat, All the President's Men, The Stepford Wives, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and of course, The Princess Bride.
It's based on a true story about a pair of man-eating lions (named The Ghost and The Darkness by the locals) who spend some months terrorizing and slaughtering a camp of laborers trying to build a bridge in a place called Tsalvo, in Africa. The year is 1898. The British military engineer who is building the bridge (Kilmer), a local leader among the tribesmen who are providing the labor, and a grungy famous hunter (Douglas) do their best to kill the lions and keep the bridge project going. It's a well-written story, and makes me definitely glad I don't have potentially man-eating lions in my backyard.
What's interesting about this true story is that the two lions were an anomoly-- man eaters always hunt alone, not in a pair, and they never kill the amount of men these two accounted for before they were taken down (at least 50, possiblly twice that). When the lions' lair was found they saw the hoarded bones of humans (in piles, picked clean). something lions never, ever have done before.
The two lions are now preserved in a museum somewhere, on display. They still don't know why the lions behaved this way, killing dozens upon dozens for pleasure, not food.
The whole story reminded me of this special I watched on tv once, about tigers and rivers in India. There's these tigers, you see, who will swim out into the water, leap onto a river boat (and I do mean leap), and drag a man over the side and into the water. They have video tapes of it that the special showed. Scary, scary fucking shit.
EDIT: The lions are currently on display in the Field Museum in Chicago. The film was written by William Goldman, who I like. He also wrote Maverik (funniest western ever), Chaplin, Heat, All the President's Men, The Stepford Wives, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and of course, The Princess Bride.
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Date: 2003-09-20 04:48 pm (UTC)Yeah that was ht ehospital trap. They didn't make it up at all! Damn smart lions, they really objected to that bridge...I wonder why?