Les Femmes préhistoriques

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...

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."

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. (**)

In 1966, Hammer studios gave the world its cave-girl classic One Million Years B.C., which featured a bevy of fur bikini-clad beauties, including the pneumatic Raquel Welch and the lissom Martine Beswick. The next year, obviously unwilling to consign a wardrobe full of skimpy animal-skin costumes to the skip, they also made Prehistoric Women (AKA Slave Girls), a ridiculous jungle adventure which saw Beswick once again playing a wildcat with a nasty streak.

Written and directed by Michael Carreras, Prehistoric Women is technically one of Hammer's weakest efforts: a poorly scripted studio-bound clunker with an unbelievably daft plot and some mind-numbingly bad performances. However, it is also one of those rare films that manages to be consistently entertaining simply thanks to its unrelenting awfulness.

Michael Latimer plays David Marchand, a jungle guide who is taken captive by savage, white rhinoceros worshipping natives who intend to sacrifice him to their god. Just as he is about to be killed, David touches their sacred rhino statue, which freezes time and opens a doorway into a kingdom where a tribe of big-breasted, brunette beauties, led by the heartless Queen Kari (Beswick), have enslaved a tribe of equally-buxom blonde babes.

After falling for a slave girl named Saria (Edina Ronay), and witnessing Kari's cruelty, David vows to help the blonde women overthrow their oppressors, a task made all the more difficult when he is clapped in irons for spurning Kari's sexual advances.

Featuring loads of native song and dance numbers to pad out the action (including a nifty solo routine from Beswick, who might not be the prettiest of Hammer's women, but certainly has one hell of a hot bod!), the occasional cat-fight, a gloriously naff jungle battle, and a silly surprise ending that makes no sense whatsoever, this film is sheer nonsense from start to finish. But it's fun nonsense, which earns itself a rating of 6/10 from this easily pleased viewer.

And, if nothing else, I did learn a vital lesson in jungle survival: never bow down in front of a charging rhino (even if it looks like it is made from papier-mâché and is being pulled along on a trolley!).

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.