Don Chaffey / UK / 1966 / 100minutes
Available on Dual-Format Blu-Ray/ DVD
What was Studiocanal thinking releasing this humourless clunker? Probably they felt that Ray Harryhausen’s pioneering stop-motion dinosaurs saved it from the rubbish bin of cinema history. But are Studiocanal right?
In the extras the film’s star Raquel ‘tits and teeth’ Welch talks of her interpretation of the role and challenges of a script that has no dialogue other than ‘ug’ (in the main feature a pretentious voice-over sets the scene). Ugh.
Fans of the house of Hammer and Ray Harryhausen can stop reading now.
We’re not so much in the Cretaceous as the Cretinous period. In a fetching buckskin bikini Raquel is in the blonde tribe and falls for John Richardson, who is with the rival brunettes (Bermans & Nathans must have been busy). There’s a glimpse of butt cheek and cleavage (and that’s just the men!) and a host of truly awful back projection that no amount of Blu-Ray wizardry can mask. Raquel and her brunette female rival (Martine Beswick) engage in a bitch fight of near grindhouse proportions. This scene, along with others, was excised from the 1960’s theatrical release.
At one point Raquel spears a fish as if she’s grabbing a handbag in the shopping mall sale, then a Harryhausen dino appears and we are in King Kong country. It really is difficult to find any redeeming features in this movie (although the stark locations work in Lanzarote and Tenerife is nice; and a real turtle and tarantula shot to look mammoth add some real terror) – the backcombed stone age womenfolk seem to be just out of the salon rather than just out of the primordial slime; there are guys going apeshit in gorilla costumes; and cavemen with hair and fabulous teeth who look like vacationing BeeGees. Even the famous set piece stop-motion fight between two lumbering dinosaurs rather shows its age compared to the superior CGI of the Jurassic Park franchise. Finally a volcano blows its polystyrene top and the audience can go home.