When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), written and directed by Val Guest.

A tribe of cavemen has a curious fixation on their blonde women: they must be sacrificed to the sun. When one victim escapes to find a life with a more tolerant tribe, her former folk spare no effort to hunt her down and get her back into the program.

If you've seen Hammer's One Million Years B.C. (1966) then this is more of the same from that studio. With the passage of a few short years the leather bikinis are smaller and tighter and the boobs jiggle more. To be fair, the men don't have that much coverage either. We have brief but actual nudity.

Instead of Raquel Welch we have Playboy Playmate of the Year Victoria Vetri (aka Angela Dorian), who director Guest described as a "nitwit". In 2011 she went to prison for "attempted voluntary manslaughter".

The dinosaurs are actually perfunctory this time with more time spent in neolithic soap opera. Ray Harryhausen was not involved but the stop motion effects look like his work, and we have iguana monsters and a little puppetry. Like the earlier film the exteriors are Canary Island locations.

They invented a small universal language for the cave folk, the most useful term being "akita!" which seems to mean just about anything.

Now and then everyone stops to watch something strange in the sky, which I think must be the formation of the moon. We have tidal waves and an eclipse at the end.

SF writer J.G. Ballard gets a "treatment by" credit.

The other Hammer "Cave Girl" films are Prehistoric Women (1967) and Creatures the World Forgot (1971).

Available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive.