Quando as Mulheres Tinham Rabo

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.

Now that it was OK to show brainless erotica on screen, they were allowed to make a movie like "Quando le donne avevano la coda" (called "When Women Had Tails" in English). It portrays several witless cavemen finding an island inhabited by scantily clad babe Filli (Senta Berger). Personally, I can't understand why these dopes wanted to devour her, even if they thought that she was an animal; had I seen her, I immediately would have wanted to have sex with her! Anyway, she gets one of them interested in a certain kind of game. Before you know it, they both run off together, but the other men aren't satisfied and chase them.

I should identify that most of the movie consists of scenes in which people club each other askew, asunder, and in other ways. It seems like the sort of movie filmed by a bunch of people getting together for the weekend (possibly for an orgy). But overall, I liked it, if only for the guilty pleasure that it arouses. This is certainly one that you watch to laugh at, nothing serious here. Really fun.

From time to time, one must celebrate this film, by Pasquale Festa Campanile. The wonderful music of Morricone alone puts you in a good mood. I think the original is in "Italian" and a good dubbing for this film is absolutely essential, but the rating of 4 is just unfair.

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.

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.