Mulheres Pré-Históricas

Michael Latimer stars as a hunting guide in Africa who runs afoul of a tribe that worships a white rhino god. Through a fairly silly turn of events, he gets chucked into the distant past where a tribe of brunette cave women lead by Martine Beswick have enslaved a tribe of blonde cave women making them do nifty dances and work in the mines and stuff. Nobody seems to like this one ... I do. I admit that it's incredibly silly, but I refuse to dislike a film where Beswick dances in an animal hide bikini. Shame on anyone who thinks otherwise.

"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!

There's a scene at the beginning, which continues at the end, forming a frame for the main portion of this tale, and features a tribe of Negroes dancing. The star of this show is a young woman wearing her bottom very low on her slender loins.

Later, Martine Beswick, as the evil queen, does a strip tease/bikini dance to entice her male captive. He rejects her, so I doubt his balls are intact! Then she gets pissed and lashes out at him with a whip.

I suspect this movie is some brunette's fantasy about brutalizing the blondes they are jealous of, since the slave girls are all blondes, and the mistress race is all brunette.

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."