Quando le donne avevano la coda

I saw this movie in Aberdeen,S.D. in the summer of 1974, as the third show in a dusk-to-dawn marathon at the local drive-in. There was a car-full of us, well lubricated with wine and weed, and I thought this was one of the funniest pictures I'd ever seen. We practically peed our pants laughing. Fast forward to 1995. I see "When Women Had Tails" at the local video store and,remembering the hilarity, take it home. I got through, maybe 20 minutes. It sucks really bad. Really, really bad. The actors, the script, it all sucks. They didn't even have the decency to show some nudity (I mean...come on,it's supposed to be a sex comedy).

Just goes to show...you were stupid when you were 19. At least I was.

Is it possible for a movie to get any worse than this? There's a bunch of apes wandering about, mumbling b******, acting supposedly silly and we are supposed to laugh? There is no plot here to keep you going in the first place. Even when the women finally show up, there is no sign of improvement; the most expected things happen and by the time the film is over, you might be far asleep. Beware: this is not a trashy cult movie, this is trash -period! I can't believe there's even a sequel to this!

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This movie is a gas! So, what is bad, anyway? This is an easy favorite if you go for surrealist- social-DaDa-dumb-stuff that is 'beautifully' done (but I like THE SEVEN FACES OF DR LAO too and who's ever heard of that?)... and I watch this movie 'straight' (real ART is all the drug I need) and I love the 'bad' dubbing and the ridiculous music (Ennio Morricone's, remember the great music in THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY) and costumes... the whole gang of poor orphan cavemen, Zog, Kao, Put(poot) and Grr... Who could hate them? The great beauty show segment! There are priceless moments of 'dumb yet sophisticated' humor. There are fun classic phrases our family loves to repeat like when the caveman Grr says "It was a nice try...there's no need to be so cynical" and " I don't know what he's doing... but I'm next!". The script is chock full of these great modern phrases you would never expect to come out of a group of cavemen and this incongruity is the real comic genius of this film and it sustains it! I've laughed my head off just thinking about them!

Lena Wertmuller wrote the screenplay... famous for Swept Away and Seven Beauties. And I've searched all over to find her attributed to this film! I know she wrote it because we point it out in the credits every time we make our poor normal friends watch it! And yes, take heed, this film is a test. You either love it or hate it, and from the look of the statistics posted here at this website... most of you hate it! Forgive Lena, relax and have some laughs. Watch it with friends. So what if your bored for a few moments here and there? You just need to be brave, you need a bit of the degenerate poet in you... a bit of the "silly intellectual"... a bit of the "foibles of humanity amuse you"... and good luck.

There were 150 women at the end of the movie? Honestly, I never made it that far. The product of a really boring graveyard shift at Jumbo Video, my shift partner grabbed this one off the rack because he wanted to watch something with jugs and thought it'd be weird enough for me to give it a try (he was right). I'm sure our copy had the title "The Time Before Women Had Lost Their Tails" (I remember thinking how that didn't make any sense as Filli doesn't have a tail). Painfully juvenile, the cast makes the Teletubbies look like the Marx Bros. In all these years, its never occurred to me that it was Italian. I remember that they were speaking gibberish, but I'm pretty sure it was Caveman gibberish and not a foreign language. Either way, there were no subtitles or dubbing, which didn't make it any easier. Just a lot of gibberish and over-exaggerated mime. Long, boring stretches of attempted situation comedy of the lobotomy-kind, the movie never even rises to its sexploitation ambitions, keeping Filli (Feely) to a bikini minimum (to they dismay of my shift partner who was so perplexed by the movie he watched it like a deer caught in headlights)and hammering its "Johnson" punchline home with such dead horse-brutality that they obviously thought it'd only get funnier with each replay.

I've often heard film critics cry over losing 90 min of their lives to some dreadful movie they've had to watch. They have no idea.

Way back at the dawn of human civilization cavemen sat around and made lame jokes, hit each other over the heads with what ever they could grab, and women were never seen and apparently at one time had tails. These cavemen lived in a geographically diverse region with a cockatoo, a camel, a monkey - but no women. This film tells of the "hilarious" misadventures of seven(or so) cavemen - having burned their land with the new discovery of fire - moving on by water to a new land where they find this woman with the extra appendage. Along the way we get such "great" moments of comedy like a fat cavemen swallowing a frog that keeps croaking in his stomach. A monkey throwing rocks at their heads. A man swallowing a mouse to get the frog in his stomach. The obligatory "gay" caveman. The list could go on and on. This movie is the very definition of cinematic dreck. I was bored from the onset and it only got worse as the cavemen bobbled around hitting each other, making poor jokes such as puns on the word perch, hitting each other, and mauling poor Seta Berger who looks like she lost a bet to a producer to appear in this nonsense. She is indeed one of two bright spots in this film. She isn't much of an actress so you have to guess why she is an ass-et? The other "bright" spot is the music. As soon as I heard the score, I said to myself that it sounded very familiar. I had never heard the actual score but the music was unmistakably that of Ennio Morricone. It's a nice score and the best thing in an otherwise crude, boring, lewd, unimaginative, and ridiculous film essentially about a group of Moes finding a woman for the first time and, first wanting to eat her like some animal, being taught what she could do. Awwwwh! Sorry, I'm stifling a yawn as I relive the plot! The end of the film has some 100 or so mostly naked women on screen with all the erotic feel of pulling a scab off your knee. This movie was painful to sit through and offers nothing of any real merit whatsoever. The fact that it spawned a sequel doesn't surprise me as it offers that one thing which will prick viewer interest - tail.