When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth (1970)

Reviews of Films Nobody Is Going To Watch #1:

Sanna live in tribe. Tribe live on cliff. Sanna jump off cliff. Sanna swim to beach. Sanna meet beach people. Sanna meet Tara. Tara all man. Sanna love Tara. Tara love Sanna. Ayak love Tara. Ayak hate Sanna. Ayak make Sanna run away. Sanna get lost! Tara try to find Sanna. Tara no find Sanna. Tara sad. Sanna meet dinosaur. Sanna love dinosaur. Dinosaur love Sanna. (“Dinosaur love Sanna?!”) Dinosaur love Sanna.

I was perhaps forgivably startled by a reference to the involvement of JG Ballard in the making of a Hammer Studios film with the above plot. Of course, this involvement turned out to be only a formality after the producers took a meeting with him and he wrote a treatment they didn’t use. So I steadied myself, only to soon feel unmoored again as I decided at some point in its runtime that When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth was quite good, in some deftly turned sense of the word good.  

The plot is obviously good, cavegirls and boys running around and hiding and running again plus some romance. As a genre movie, it does feel a little weird, a melange of children’s entertainment, monsters, nudity and human sacrifice taking place in, implicitly, the Cretaceous if you go by the dinosaur types. However, there are, even to the amateur, some mixed signals with the exact dating. One particularly startling divergence from palaeontology’s general consensus concerns a sub-plot where Sanna trains a baby dinosaur as her pet. Here the thoughtful reader may naturally enquire as to the scientific grounds on which the domestication of a giant prehistoric reptile by a blonde bimbo may be faulted as a narrative conceit; the answer, of course, is that blonde hair does not appear until later in the genetic record. (We will pass over the other hypothesis presented here, that the moon first formed after Homo Sapiens did, but see my technical paper for the Journal of Lunar Formation, “Did It? No, It Did Not.”)

On the quality of the costumes and sets in this production, praise is due on one point – you can’t say they didn’t keep the costs down. But I think we can accept with magnanimity the budgetary and stylistic limitations when we watch films of this endearingly undeterred kind. Let it be noted that the monsters look cool and evoke a King Kong movie done entirely from the islanders’ viewpoint instead of via the usual superfluous, dreary Western interlopers.

After much running and hiding and chasing of caveboys and girls, we arrive ultimately at an enjoyable tumult. One Million Years BC, you will remember, ended superbly with the Exodus – a volcanic eruption followed by the surviving tribe’s mass migration to find a new land. This time, the Biblical allusion is to the Flood – chaotic panic at the approach of a tsunami, a giant killer crab (I forget the exact reference in Genesis), the ruthless dispatch of the jealous Ayak (Lot’s wife or something? Is that from the Flood? I don’t know, not everything has to fit), Sanna’s final gender-subverting dash into the fray to save the helpless hero (something from the Apocrypha, I should think) and the pitched battle for the raft (Ark! See?), all bring proceedings to a satisfactory finish.

Commercially, it didn’t do so well as One Million, no surprise given the sharp increase in cutesiness, and that earlier film had Raquel Welch, whose proud thrust and heroic character-arcs hold our full attention in a manner with which Victoria Vetri cannot compete. Welch wouldn’t have been right for this part, though, dependent as it is on an air of vacuous innocence which Vetri captures without apparent effort. (I’ve not seen Vetri in anything else, but a chance to watch her Hedda Gabler or Blanche Dubois would intrigue me.)

Cast aside (“it should be!", no, stop that), this holds its own, if not with Welch’s classic then with today’s adventure movies – it’s more stylishly and logically directed than recent equivalents, such is the decline. Reflecting now on this fossil of great pulp cinema, one can only endorse the film’s famous epigram: “Akita! Akita! Akita! Akita! Akita!” How true. How true that remains.

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