In short: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

Escaping the grand opportunity of being sacrificed by her native tribe, stone age woman Sanna (Vicoria Vetri) finds shelter with a neighbouring tribe. There, she falls in love with the strapping young hunter Tara (Robin Hawdon). Alas, the jealousy of a rival and the local tendency to blame her for every sun storm, mild earth quake or dinosaur attack, drive her into exile, where she bonds with a single dinosaur mom and her somewhat adorable dinosaur kid.

Reading official plot synopses of this Hammer production, directed by Val Guest, in the old, undervalued People vs Dinosaurs genre is quite the revelation. So that’s what these people were babbling about in their badly made up stone age language! The sun god? Huh. There also seems to be some business about our heroine being thought a witch because of her blonde hair (with scenes of other blondes dying their hair black): the evil magic of peroxide! Let’s try and imagine what these crazy kids would have thought about Botox.

As it happens when people talk in a ridiculous language that never actually existed, and the filmmakers decide to leave us without subtitles, it’s difficult to keep up any interest in characters or the human drama bits (whatever they are actually about) of the film – most of the actors’ inability and/or unwillingness to actually emote in ways other than often quite hilarious scenery chewing doesn’t help – so it’s left to the dinosaur action to keep an audience interested. I’m happy to report that there’s a regular feed of said dinosaur action, most of it realized via decent to great stop motion (though there is one bit featuring one of those unfortunate real lizards with glued-on dinosaur bits that always make me a little angry). This is a film that promised us stone age people versus dinosaurs, and by gawd, it’s going to deliver early, often, and with a certain élan.

Guest does of course know the adventure movie biz, so things stay lively despite the dialogue and not giving a toss about the characters problems. When in doubt, he adds dinosaurs, a bit of nudity, as well as a completely inexplicable scene of a whole tribe of fake stone age people having some kind of religious freak-out. In a delicious turn of events, this is apparently based on a treatment by J.G. Ballard. Alas, most Ballardians speaking to that great author later on don’t seem to have wanted to get into his involvement with this particular masterpiece, so it’s anybody’s guess how involved this treatment was or what was actually in it. But hey, at least we’ll always have the dinosaurs, the bonus giant crabs and the man-eating mushroom plant thingie (?).