Femmine delle caverne

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...

Michael Carreras directed this campy prehistoric film that stars Michael Latimer as African big game hunter David Marchant who is captured by a hostile tribe and taken to a temple guarded by a white rhino. A lightning bolt hits the temple, splitting a wall, which David runs through and into the past, where two rival, warring(and beautiful!) all-female tribes(one blonde, the other brunette) vie for his attentions, though the brunette Queen Kari(played by Martine Beswick) is particularly ruthless, and will stop at nothing to either possess David, or kill him... Silly film is nonetheless semi-watchable, and almost works as a guilty pleasure, though not a minute of it rings true!

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. (**)

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."

David (Michael Latimer), a hunting guide in the jungle, must dispatch a wounded leopard. In the process, David's inadvertently enters the sacred ground of the white rhino. That is a no-no; so, David must die. He touches the rhino's horn which opens a door to pre-history. We go in with him and the adventure begins.

This is part of the Hammer prehistoric collection and has the same feel, including actresses. The storyline is consistent and well organized. Of course, all the native dances are hokey but what do you expect from a 1967 jungle rendition? One day archaeologists will find that they did wear fur bikinis.