Mujeres prehistóricas

A goofy Hammer movie whose sole raison d'etre seems to be to disprove the old adage that blondes have more fun, "Prehistoric Women" (1967) certainly did have me laffing out loud. In it, great white hunter David Marchant (unconvincingly portrayed by pretty boy Michael Latimer) is captured by Aftrican tribesmen for hunting on their lands. One lightning stroke later, Marchant finds himself in a land where brunette women rule, where hotty blondes are slaves, and in which Queen Kari (Martine Beswick) rules over all in the service of the white rhinoceros god. We never exactly find out whether or not Marchant has been zapped back in time, or whether he is in present-day Africa, or is dreaming. Maybe he's hallucinating with a bad case of dengue fever! By the end of this picture, I promise you, you'll be too brain dead to care. The film is as campy as can be--almost on a par with "Cobra Woman" (1944)!--with loads of priceless dialogue and situations. The natives' singing and dancing routines will surely have you howling! The only real special effect to speak of is Martine's abdomen; her superflat tummy looks like the result of 50,000 grueling sit-ups! Actually, Beswick is remarkably sexy in her regal role, and the picture drags whenever she's not on screen. A preposterous back story doesn't help matters either. My main man H. Rider Haggard, "the father of lost-race fiction," would flip in his grave if he ever saw this movie. Still, it's supposedly better than the 1950 American original. I can't even imagine...

There's a priceless line of dialog here. Wicked queen Martine Beswick orders her slave girls to dance, even though one of their colleagues has recently been killed. The girls do a half-hearted dance number. Martine complains about their lethargy. One of the slave girls explains: "When the heart is heavy, so are the feet."

"Prehistoric Women" is the most endearing and lovable of Hammer Films' Cave Girls In Trouble films. I fell in love with it instantly during a late night creature feature screening at the age of 14 or so and pursued it for years before finally managing to tape it off cable. Now there are wonderful DVD releases of restored widescreen prints & home entertainment really never had it so good. It's garbage for sure but exquisite garbage, a kitschy sendup of Great White Hunter films that is so poker-faced that one is often tempted to conclude that Hammer was trying to be serious here.

Mesmerizingly filmed on interior soundstages made up to look like what a juvenile might think a jungle resembles, the film packs the visual authority of a classic "Star Trek" episode with a plot more fitting for a Playboy magazine cartoon. It's fun, sexy, campy, never boring, and perhaps the ultimate (sic) Jungal Trash movie, where white Anglo types go to exotic jungle locations to have all sorts of fascinating adventures, while the natives carry the luggage.

Martine Beswick may have found fame as a Bond girl ("From Russia With Love", "Thunderball") but her iconic image as a topless primal sex goddess rising from a dappled fake studio jungle pool will stick with me at least for the rest of my days. One might have wished that the movie had been made a couple years later so she could have turned to face the camera with her wonderful breasts, but half of the film's charm is that it was made during a different era. The tension between the juvenile sex fantasy it suggests and the need for staid British respectability (cough) adds to the fun.

A word must be said about the slack-jawed, lunk-headed portrayal of the native population of wherever this film is supposedly set. It's not racist so much as ignorant, or rather accuracy and cultural sensitivity were not the objectives. Same goes for the misogyny and sexism of the movie, which is buffoonish and groan-inducing, but hey, the target audience was white European males between the ages of 12 and 75, or whenever men stop responding to suggestive fantasies about cavorting with blond slave girls or being dominated by mean, leggy, shapely brunettes. Hubba-Hubba.

If you don't fall into that demographic you might want to try something else a bit more sober, or even better yet just down a couple of adult beverages & have fun laughing at the movie. And surprisingly there really isn't any content that goes beyond PG sensibilities and is actually wholesome enough for subversively twisted family entertainment. Just explain to the kids that it's a cartoon, really, and has about as much in common with the real world as a Three Stooges short. Great escapist guilty pleasure fun, and just as silly as it was in 1967. May it stay just as silly for another forty two years.

7/10; Check out something called "Luana - The Lady Tarzan" for the Italians' take on the themes at work here. The two would make a marvelous double-bill for a kitsch film festival or DVD rental night.

At last, somebody was bold enough to make a movie in which cave people speak English!

Heck, why not? Movie goers have heard English dialogue spoken as the apparent native language of Indians, Africans, Egyptians, Romans, Japanese, Chinese, Martians, Venusians, and Metalunans.

This Hammer production was made on the same sets as "One Million Years B.C.", released the year before. Martine Beswick is featured in both films. Pretty girls abound in this story of two all-female tribes -- one all blond, the other all brunette. The brunettes are ruled by Miss Beswick in royal bear skin cap and a crown of big animal teeth. Her tribe enslaves the blondes, including the well-endowed Edina Ronay. This manless society of frustrated females is discovered by hunter Michael Latimer.

Ah ha! This movie isn't about prehistoric times, it's just about prehistoric women. No wonder they speak English!

What "Prehistoric Women" lacks above all is conviction: the backdrops look painted, the hairlines are too neat, the speech is too modern-sounding, the sets look stagy. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense (how exactly the "legend of the white rhinoceros" is tied to the rest of the story is never made entirely clear), Michael Latimer is a bland lead and the pace is padded with lots of tribal dancing. The new DVD version presents the movie in widescreen: you do win extra "information" on the sides of the picture, but on the other hand you lose what appear to be (in the full-screen trailers for the movie) some juicy closeups of Beswick's and Ronay's abs. (**)