Following the worldwide success of One Million Years B.C. (1966), the Racquel Welch/Ray Harryhausen dinosaur adventure, Hammer Films quickly installed “prehistoric cheesecake” as one of their genre specialties. The sets and costumes (fur bikinis, et al) were quickly reused for Slave Girls (aka Prehistoric Women, 1967), which was actually a strange mash-up of the Harryhausen film and another Hammer hit, She (1965), since it involved a modern white explorer in Africa who slips backward in time to the prehistoric past. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) is more of a straightforward sequel to One Million Years B.C. Written and directed by Val Guest, a pivotal player in Hammer’s heritage thanks to his work on The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2 (1957), The Abominable Snowman (1957), and The Camp on Blood Island (1958), among others, the film was also notable because it featured dinosaurs, something Slave Girls was sorely lacking. Harryhausen was busy creating dinos for The Valley of Gwangi (1969), a personal project for the animator since it was initiated by his late mentor, King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth would instead call upon the talents of a young stop-motion artist named Jim Danforth. Danforth had done some work on the seminal fantasy film The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), but this would be the first motion picture in which he supervised all the special effects. His work would receive an Oscar nomination, which is amusing not because he didn’t deserve the recognition, but because the film is such delicious camp.
Victoria Vetri, as Sanna, is exiled from the tribe for the crime of being a blonde.
Playboy model Victoria Vetri plays Sanna (only one letter removed from being the voluptuous incarnation of Marvel Comics’ “Shanna the She-Devil”), who is a beautiful blonde, and punished for it. As the film opens, a number of blonde girls are being ritually sacrificed to the rising sun. Their captors have dark hair, for the most part, though many of them wear fearsome alligator heads. Sanna escapes by diving into the sea, where she’s rescued by the hunky Tara (Robin Hawdon), who’s rowing a raft with a number of other bearded caveman warriors. She returns with him to his tribe, where her blonde hair causes a furor. During a ritualistic dance (the men imitate frogs, squatting and jumping and generally acting like acid freaks), Tara begins to fall for Sanna, and so after he lends the newcomer a prize bone necklace, his jealous girlfriend accuses her of theft before the tribal chief. Sanna escapes into the jungle, where she confronts perils such as a python and a tall phallic plant that nearly consumes her. In the mountains she learns why you should never go to sleep in a giant broken egg; in the morning the returning mother, a colossal dinosaur (sort of a cross between a brontosaurus and an allosaurus), accepts Sanna as one of her newborns. Sanna doesn’t really try to convince the mother otherwise, and soon is teaching one of the other hatchlings how to “sit” like a dog.
Tara (Robin Hawdon) slays a pterodactyl on his quest to find his beloved Sanna.
When Tara is finally reunited with Sanna, he rips off her clothes and they make caveman love; this is followed by a nude swim. Although When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth has been pretty risqué so far – thanks to Vetri’s ultra-skimpy bikini, which can barely restrain her breasts – the sudden introduction of nudity so late in the story is surprising; especially so if you happened to pick up Warner’s 2008 Region 1 “Sci-Fi Double Feature” DVD: the back cover proclaims both films (this and Moon Zero Two) to be rated G. Naturally, this was a mistake; Warner had used a rare and uncut version of the picture. (Lest any parents complain, the DVD was allowed to go quickly out of print.) The nudity is welcome but bizarrely inappropriate, considering that a few scenes earlier, with Vetri playing with a baby dinosaur, the film seemed to suggest that children were its target audience. The reason is that Hammer was in a transitional phase at the dawn of the 1970’s. As skin and sex became more commonplace in cinema, and the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) relaxed their standards for such material, Hammer was quick to push the envelope and give audiences more of what they wanted; this is most evident in the studio’s “Carmilla” cycle of female vampire films: The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire, and Twins of Evil (both 1971) all were sold as much for their sexual content as horror. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was caught between this type of cinema and the more chaste Hammer product of the 60’s. On the one hand, it wanted to duplicate the formula set in One Million Years B.C. On the other hand, it felt increasing pressure for those cavewomen to pop their tops.
Tara (center) commits himself to a tribal ceremony.
There’s another factor which adds to the outrageousness of the film: the nonstop dialogue. For reasons unknown, Val Guest was convinced that audiences wanted to listen to caveman gibberish in extended dialogue sequences just as much as they wanted to see scantily-clad people fighting dinosaurs. He obliges by providing a custom-made vocabulary for his prehistoric characters, rigorously followed in scene after scene. (Though Guest wrote the screenplay, the treatment was by none other than experimental novelist J.G. Ballard.) The actors, particularly Robin Hawdon and Patrick Allen (Chief Kingsor), deliver the lines with nuanced inflection and great intensity; I have no idea why. One imagines that the producer glanced through the script, saw page after page of “Akeeta! Neecro!”, shrugged, and said “get some bikinis and shoot it.” That said, at least one can follow every plot point, not that this is ever a great stumbling-block of caveman movies. After Tara has found Sanna, they confront the angry tribe, and the audience at home should be able to provide their own subtitles by this point. A climax involving a giant tsunami approaching the coastal village is only made more ludicrous when our heroes hurry to get onto a raft and paddle out to sea – directly towards it. This leads to a denouement in which the moon is born in the night sky. That’s right, there was no moon previously. Cavemen watched it come together; it was a really big deal at the time, apparently.
A feast is prepared with a captured plesiosaur, courtesy stop-motion animator Jim Danforth.
Jim Danforth proves himself a worthy successor to the absent Ray Harryhausen; his dinosaur creations are superb, and fully integrated into the sets and Canary Island locations (he would later work with Harryhausen as an assistant on Clash of the Titans). Look, I love this stuff – and here we’re treated to a scene involving a captured plesiosaur that gets loose and stomps on the tribesmen with its fins; a triceratops battle at the edge of a cliff; a remake of the pterodactyl scene of One Million Years B.C., this time with Hawdon carried through the air; and, of course, Sanna’s pet dinosaurs. There’s a nice moment when the mother offers Sanna some food to eat: a giant elk-like carcass is dumped at her feet, and the dino nudges it helpfully with her nose. The subsequent image of the dinosaur obediently following a spear-wielding Victoria Vetri across a rocky plain is memorable, as well. All this delirious pulp is the reason why the film is easily the best of Hammer’s prehistoric cash-ins in the wake of their Harryhausen hit; the more straight-faced Creatures the World Forgot (1971) might be more scientifically accurate – there are no dinosaurs – but it’s also stiff and dreary. The slightly gonzo approach of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth makes the endeavor an unexpected blast.
