The second of Hammer’s prehistoric trilogy, coming between One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Creatures the World Forgot (1971), is largely a remake of the first film, complete with love story between members of rival dark-haired and fair-haired tribes, lots of historically impossible tussles between humans and dinosaurs and a devastating ending that leaves few survivors but both tribes united. It has the unique distinction of being based on a story treatment from the master of surreal British science fiction J.G. Ballard (or J.B. Ballard as the titles credit him) though quite how much o his work remains in screen is up for debate.
The plot meanders about all over the place, all related by scantily clad actors speaking the same gibberish language made up for One Million Years B.C. – that multi-purpose exclamation of “akeeta!” that was uttered every few seconds in the earlier film is over-used to almost comical effect here. The plot basically follows the trials of tribulations of cavewoman Sanna (Victoria Vetri) who escapes being sacrificed to the Sun God by her tribe and is rescued by men from another tribe, led by Tara (Robin Hawdon). She sees dinosaurs causing mayhem, does a lot of running around, frantically shouts “akeeta!” a lot, has sex with Tara and earns the ire of Ayak (Imogen Hassall) who wants Tara for herself. She’s almost eaten by a laughable carnivorous plant, has a nap in a dinosaur egg shell, befriending the baby that had just hatched and finally prepares to face a tsunami caused by gravitational disruption following the formation of the Earth’s moon…
Val Guest, an occasional regular at Hammer (The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2 (1957), The Abominable Snowman (1957), The Camp on Blood Island (1958) et al), supposedly extensively rewrote Ballard’s treatment and it’s certainly hard to imagine that a writer as rigorously intellectual as Ballard would come up wit anything as silly as this. Ballard had apparently come on board because producer Aida Young had read and enjoyed his 1962 novel The Drowned World but presumably Guest wasn’t as enamoured of his work. “I’m rather proud that up until now,” Ballard told Julian Petley of The Guardian in 1988, “with Empire of the Sun, my only screen credit is for what is without any doubt the worst film ever made.”
Ballard was in so many ways a visionary genius, but he was being a bit hard on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. It’s far from “the worst film ever made” – it’s not even the worst of Hammer’s prehistoric films. Like its predecessor it’s an immensely silly film that’s also a lot of mindless fun. The ludicrous science, which Ballard would surely have baulked at, has to be taken as read – the ending is particularly ridiculous – though it’s exciting stuff and as a kid it would have seemed like the most impossibly exciting thing ever seen on a screen.
American actress Victoria Vetri steps into Raquel Welch’s fur-lined shoes and in the three years since One Million Years B.C. censorship restrictions had begun to slip and there was a lot more nudity in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth than in the rather chaste earlier film. Surprisingly the British Board of Film Censors saw no problems with the (brief) sex scene and the toplessness, awarding in a ‘U’ certificate, prompting some angry letters from shocked parents who didn’t know what they were getting themselves and their impressionable young children into.
But kids weren’t taking their seats for the sight of Ms Vetri disrobing – that was just something you had to put up with when the dinosaurs, the reason you were in the first place, were off screen. There was no Ray Harryhausen to shepherd the film’s monstrous herd this time, but Jim Danforth stepped up to the plate and does a sterling job with the film’s scaly menagerie – a couple of briefly seen but very hungry over-sized crabs are particularly nasty little beasties. The odd perspective issue here and there aside – the monsters occasionally don’t seem to be in the same plane as the humans – the effects are extremely good, the animation smooth and the creatures themselves nicely designed and built. The baby dinosaur that Vetri befriends is nauseatingly cute in the extreme (though its mother is a wonderful creation) and does raise the question of just what audience the film was aiming for – kids, the only one likely to put up with the cute mini dinosaur or adults, for who the sex and nudity were more appropriate.
Elsewhere a couple of the never-convincing optically enlarged and dressed up lizards pop in to spoil the fun and there are some equally unconvincing attempts to recreate small parts of a prehistoric world on sound stages, but an excited young audience would have neither noticed nor cared. Hammer spent even more money on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth than they did on One Million Years B.C. and again jetted its cast and crew off to the Canary Islands for five weeks of location work and again the film looks lovely – Carl Toms was back to design the costumes again, Dick Bush headed the camera team and John Blezard art directed though most of his work was already done for him by those wonderful locations.
Don’t give any thought to the ludicrous plot – we knew enough about the moon even before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot there nine months after filming began on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth to understand that the thesis for its creation here is laughable – just enjoy the dinosaurs who easily outclass their human co-stars and provide the bulk of the film’s not inconsiderable charm. It was released in the UK on a double bill with the comedy western The Great Bank Robbery (1969) and although it struggled to recoup its reported £2.5million budget it did well enough to encourage Hammer to rush a third and final prehistoric adventure into production, the awful Creatures the World Forgot (1971).
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