Les Femmes préhistoriques

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.

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.

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...

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 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."