User reviews

Released in 1970 and directed by Val Guest, "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" is a prehistoric adventure/fantasy starring Victoria Vetri as a blond cavebabe who survives her tribe's sacrificial ritual to their sun god. She then tries to join another tribe where she attracts the attention of one of the dudes (Robin Hawdon) and the jealousy of one of the brunette babes (Imogen Hassall).

Wow, this flick is painfully bad. I was seriously tempted to fast-forward through the second half. This was surprising because it's basically the follow-up to Hammer's most successful film, 1966's "One Million Years BC." Unfortnately, it's nowhere the same quality. Things go wrong right away when the camera switches from excellent Canary Island locations to an obvious indoor set when it focuses on close-ups of the tribe on top of a hill. Worse, the story is dull and there's WAY too much cave-babbling, e.g. "Akita, AKITA!" The stop-motion F/X work is good, but there isn't as much as in the former film, like the great T-rex versus triceratops and the allosaurus sequences. While I like the friendly baby dino and Hassall is significantly hotter than the overrated Vetri, neither makes up for the movie's mortal flaws.

The film runs 96 minutes and was shot in the Canary Islands and England (sets).

GRADE: D

This is one of my all-time favorite schlock films. The plot is flimsy, the babes are hot, the historical aspect is all wrong, and it is in color (a rarity for a Hammer film) When I first saw this film on late night cable, it was the uncut version. In the uncut version, Tara (played by Robin Hawdon) fell down on his back in one scene, his loin cloth flipped up, and out popped his family jewels in their entirety for all to see! I have the DVD and this scene was deleted (darn it he was quite the lad!) Even though the scene lasted a few seconds, you still got a good look under his "kilt." And besides, he was the only male actor in that film that had a little tuft of pubes poking out of the top of his loin cloth. I guess he was the hunka-hunka of the day. Sanna is gorgeous and is the object of Tara's eye since she wondered into caveman camp. The language is made up of gibberish. For days, we were going around the apartment after watching this film yelling "AKEETA! AKEETA!" which seems to be the primary word in the film next to Neecro. I don't want to tell more of the plot, get the DVD on Amazon or EBay. Too bad it isn't the uncut version where you can see all the flubs including the cables that held up the pterodactyl's legs as he snatched Tara and took him to the nest.

This epic, with bikini clad girls and loin-clothe men, is as merry as you want it to be. Two words are predominantly used throughout with pointing and waving and everyone knows what it means. They follow their leader in a chase after a blonde woman who was to be offered to the Sun, but escaped. The escapee and hunters come across dinosaurs and that's the gist of the story.

For a film made in 1969, the animals look quite presentable, the women gorgeous and the men with trimmed hairy faces. If you enjoyed movies like this 50 years ago, your kIds may still like it!

I remember watching this aged about eleven and not thinking much of it then and when I watched it on Sky movies a couple of weeks ago I liked it even less . What`s wrong with the movie can be summed up with the opening scene where a bunch of bikini clad blondes are going to be sacraficed . If the time period is set " when dinosaurs ruled the Earth " how come there`s human beings ? As every boorish schoolboy knows dinosaurs died out millions of years before primative man walked the surface of the planet . Oh and the voice over informs us there`s no moon which is another anachronism . BTW why are the blondes going to be sacraficed ? To increase the collective IQ of humanity ?

Actually watching this film as an adult male I was very impressed by the costume design or rather the lack of it . Yup it`s a Hammer production so you just know that the female cast were chosen because of their lung capacity , but this leads me to ask : If that`s what women looked like in the stone age how come it took hundreds of thousands of years for the population to reach six billion ? Costume design aside the rest of the production values are very poor , much of the location exteriors were obviously filmed in a studio with sea borne scenes filmed in a swimming pool and it goes without saying the ( Not very special ) special effects are of a DOCTOR WHO standard

Be warned that if you`re writing an article on stone age man don`t use this film as a source of information . I`ve already pointed out some mistakes and here`s some more things that are difficult to accept

1 ) In the stone age everyone had perfect teeth

2 ) In the stone age people from different tribes had no problem understanding one another if they pointed their fingers

3 ) Dinosaurs always make the same screeching noise no matter what species they belong to

4 ) When a dinosaur hatches from an egg it grows to adulthood within a few hours

5 ) Animals like snakes and crabs were a lot bigger in the stone age

6 ) If a cave woman has blonde hair she will almost always have brown eyes , while a cave man with dark hair will almost always have blue eyes indicating that genetics were somehow different in the stone age

I am a big fan of Ray Harryhausen's special effects and visual effects in all of his now classic movies and maybe if the producers of this film would have hired him instead of Alan Bryce and Jim Danforth the results would not have been so blatantly bland and unispiring. Oh sure there were many scenes within this film where the village people were either being attacked by dinosaurs or gigantic snakes and/or birds but they were just so dull and borong.

Victoria Vetri who was cast as the less than equal replacement for Raquel Welch's performance in the earlier 1966 success of One Million Years B.C., although Vetro was glamorous enough she could have been simply referred to as "the body" since she was usually scantily clad or wore nothing at all and her acting ability was non-existent.

Yes there was something of a vague plot in which the male film star Robin Hawdon who plays a guy named Tara is attacked by another tribes people whilst sharing his bed with the blonde sun goddess named Sanna (Victoria Vetri) only to be caught a second time and persecuted when the other village people catch up with them.

And so the chase continues and continues into the ocean. Maybe the story and ending would have been more interesting and creative if Tara and Sanna would have swam to the end of the ocean and fallen off the planet of Earth, thus proving that the world was in prehistoric times actually once flat and not round as we know it today.

I was bored and I snored through this cheap copy of the more classic 1966 One Million Years B.C. I give When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth a poorly rated 3 out of 10 rating.