Starring: John Richardson, Raquel Welch, Robert Brown
Tumak (Richardson), after an argument with his tribe-leader
father (Brown), goes out into the wilderness. After a great deal of travelling,
Tumak discovers another, more advanced, tribe and the beautiful Loana (Welch).
Will their love save them from warring tribes or horrific beasts?
For a studio famed for its horror pictures, it’s strange
that this caveman fantasy feature is probably Hammer’s most famous film. Let’s
be honest though and say that One Million Years B.C isn’t exactly a profound
experience. It exists as simple titillation. People remember more than anything
else, Raquel Welch in THAT fur bikini (and to a lesser extent, her catfight
with Hammer regular Martine Beswick) as
well as Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion creatures, which work much better than
when the film opts to use simply enlarged footage of lizards. Its understanding
of prehistory is all over the place as every schoolboy knows that dinosaurs and
cavemen never even came close to living at the same period (not to mention
given that Christ was born the relatively recent two thousand years ago, the
B.C tag seems a little redundant.) Even so, a film with ambitiously no English
dialogue and interesting views of Spanish vistas, One Million Years B.C is
strangely captivating viewing.
No comments:
Post a Comment