Femmine delle caverne

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...

"Prehistoric Women" is the most endearing and lovable of Hammer Films' Cave Girls In Trouble films. I fell in love with it instantly during a late night creature feature screening at the age of 14 or so and pursued it for years before finally managing to tape it off cable. Now there are wonderful DVD releases of restored widescreen prints & home entertainment really never had it so good. It's garbage for sure but exquisite garbage, a kitschy sendup of Great White Hunter films that is so poker-faced that one is often tempted to conclude that Hammer was trying to be serious here.

Mesmerizingly filmed on interior soundstages made up to look like what a juvenile might think a jungle resembles, the film packs the visual authority of a classic "Star Trek" episode with a plot more fitting for a Playboy magazine cartoon. It's fun, sexy, campy, never boring, and perhaps the ultimate (sic) Jungal Trash movie, where white Anglo types go to exotic jungle locations to have all sorts of fascinating adventures, while the natives carry the luggage.

Martine Beswick may have found fame as a Bond girl ("From Russia With Love", "Thunderball") but her iconic image as a topless primal sex goddess rising from a dappled fake studio jungle pool will stick with me at least for the rest of my days. One might have wished that the movie had been made a couple years later so she could have turned to face the camera with her wonderful breasts, but half of the film's charm is that it was made during a different era. The tension between the juvenile sex fantasy it suggests and the need for staid British respectability (cough) adds to the fun.

A word must be said about the slack-jawed, lunk-headed portrayal of the native population of wherever this film is supposedly set. It's not racist so much as ignorant, or rather accuracy and cultural sensitivity were not the objectives. Same goes for the misogyny and sexism of the movie, which is buffoonish and groan-inducing, but hey, the target audience was white European males between the ages of 12 and 75, or whenever men stop responding to suggestive fantasies about cavorting with blond slave girls or being dominated by mean, leggy, shapely brunettes. Hubba-Hubba.

If you don't fall into that demographic you might want to try something else a bit more sober, or even better yet just down a couple of adult beverages & have fun laughing at the movie. And surprisingly there really isn't any content that goes beyond PG sensibilities and is actually wholesome enough for subversively twisted family entertainment. Just explain to the kids that it's a cartoon, really, and has about as much in common with the real world as a Three Stooges short. Great escapist guilty pleasure fun, and just as silly as it was in 1967. May it stay just as silly for another forty two years.

7/10; Check out something called "Luana - The Lady Tarzan" for the Italians' take on the themes at work here. The two would make a marvelous double-bill for a kitsch film festival or DVD rental night.

Michael Carreras directed this campy prehistoric film that stars Michael Latimer as African big game hunter David Marchant who is captured by a hostile tribe and taken to a temple guarded by a white rhino. A lightning bolt hits the temple, splitting a wall, which David runs through and into the past, where two rival, warring(and beautiful!) all-female tribes(one blonde, the other brunette) vie for his attentions, though the brunette Queen Kari(played by Martine Beswick) is particularly ruthless, and will stop at nothing to either possess David, or kill him... Silly film is nonetheless semi-watchable, and almost works as a guilty pleasure, though not a minute of it rings true!

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!).