Quand les femmes font Ding Dong

When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding-Dong (1971)

* (out of 4)

Italian sex comedy has Ari (Antonio Sabato) winning a pig catching contest and his reward is the virgin Listra (Nadia Cassini). She's looking forward to some good sex but instead he'd rather fight a rival group. Before long all the women stand together to hold out the ding-dong play until the men pay more attention.

You know, the Italian sex genre lasted several decades and there's no question that it probably had an impact on various American movies that followed. With that said, there are some really bad ones out there and this one here certainly fits that category for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is the fact that the film is downright unfunny from the start to the end. Another major problem is that it clocks in at 97-minutes, which is about 96-minutes too long.

The biggest problem here is that the screenplay is extremely lame. You get fart jokes, jokes aimed at gay characters and all sorts of sexist jokes. It would seem that this type of stuff set during the caveman period would lead to some great fun but it doesn't because the screenplay is very silly and downright bad. I mean, I might have laughed at this stuff if I was a seven-year-old who stumbled upon this film at midnight on Cinemax.

Another problem is that the movie is deadly slow and just gets dragged out to the point where you're wanting to scratch your eyes out. I will say that the movie looked great. I thought the costumes were good and for the most part I thought the setting was perfect. You at least really did feel as if you were watching something set during the time period. Considering the budget, that was impressive. There's also some attractive ladies getting naked throughout but all of this can't save the movie.

This incomprehensible prehistoric sex comedy offers none of the kitschy pleasures of QUANDO LE DONNE AVEVANO LA CODA (WHEN WOMEN HAD TAILS) with the exception of a memorable theme song and a similar production design. 10th rate in every way, including the quality of the Something Weird double-feature DVD print.

This is the second film based on the weird adventures of some group of prehistorical men (the first being 'Quando le donne avevano la coda'). Like about all of the production of Italian b-movies from the 70s (spicy movies or 'poliziotteschi' movies), you can't expect anything smart in concept, neither really smartly done (there's some good enjoyable exception), but the movie has a good rhythm and sure comes to be better than the predecessor in stupid games with Italian language, single scenes, characters and story overall. It also needn't justify man's knowledge of environment's basic elements (which have already been quite badly depicted in the first movie of the series) and focuses more on reconstructing or justifying human relationships (there's even a homosexual cave man) and technical conquests. It's obviously far from being a (really) good movie but it keeps funny all the way and efficiently ironizes on human vices, little and big tragedies (think only of their stupid tiny little wars, one of the funniest filmed situation of the movie), and in the end comes with the usual load of stunning beauties present in this kind of movies, but in this case their presence doesn't really come to be 'disturbing' or merely useless, sure is they aren't as 'well' portrayed as male characters, but has it really been otherwise in one of the infinities of men fantasies whose are composed of these Italian b-movies?I suggest this one. (Don't know anything about foreign translation quality)

I liked the movie because it is just plain corny, but the sound quality on the copy that I bought is really poor. I love the theme music at the beginning of the movie but I'm not going to describe it because I would ruin it. A must see if you like cheesy cavemen movies like Caveman with Ringo Starr or Cave Girl.

I'm not a big fan of these prehistoric cave-woman movies (i.e. "One Million Years B.C.", "When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth). Somehow though the Italians managed to take this very dumb late 60's/early 70's "genre" and make it even DUMBER. (They did, however, put in a lot more skin than in the Anglo-American movies--and, after all, no one ever watched these things for the plot, dialogue etc.) This movie probably wouldn't be funny in any language, but the English dubbing here is especially terrible, and they seem to have borrowed the music from "Surfin' Bird" and a Creedence Clearwater Revival song(!). Still, this has a couple points of interest.

Two tribes of prehistoric cave-women are sick of their men always fighting, so they both vow to stop having sex ("ding-dong") with their men until they stop all the wars. If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it's the plot of the Aristophanes play "Lysistra". And while this is an exceeding lame version of it, you have to kind of admire the movie for trying to expose the chronic masturbators of that era to the classics.

This movie also features Nadia Cassini, who was probably the third most famous actress in 70's Italian sex comedies after Edwige Fenech and Gloria Guida. Of course, the average person probable doesn't care about that (but then the average person wouldn't be on a IMDb site for a for a goofy low-budget prehistoric cave-women movie called "Quando gli uomoni amarano la clava--etc."). Anyway, if you ARE a fan of Italian exploitation actresses like Edwige Fenech or Gloria Guida, I'd definitely encourage you to check out Nadia Cassini's body--of work. That's all I have to say about this ridiculous movie though.