!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY THE ENDING!!

Written and directed by Arthur C. Pierce (writer of The Cosmic Man (1959), Invasion of the Animal People (1959), Beyond the Time Barrier (1960), The Human Duplicators (1965) and Mutiny in Outer Space (1965)) this is not to be confused with Roger Corman’s hybrid of newly shot footage and scenes from Russian science fiction films, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. If anything, Pierce’s first credited film as director (he directed, uncredited, scenes for The Human Duplicators and Mutiny in Outer Space, both credited to Hugo Grimaldi), is an even more threadbare lost world/alien women tale featuring stock motion “dinosaurs” (of the dressed up and optically enlarged lizard variety), nondescript acting and a story that you’ll forget even while you’re watching it.

The first thing you need to know is that there are no women on this prehistoric planet other than the alien women the space mission brings with them. There are dinosaurs and a few cavemen turn up, but this prehistoric planet remains remarkably women-free. The planet I question is where one of a trio of alien spaceships ends up when members of its crew, the Centaurians, a race rescued from their dying homeworld, hijack it as the fleet is returning home. Against orders, another of the ships heads off to rescue their comrades and finds themselves on a primitive world in the Solaris system. Due to the effects of time dilation, they arrive to find the descendants of the original crew, where they fight dinosaurs and cavemen, fall prey to natural hazards likes pools of acid and reveal at the end that planet is Earth.

There’s a scintilla of a decent idea at play in Women of the Prehistoric Planet – it’s an unusual 60s space film in that no-one in the cast turns out to be human (those cavemen excepted) and although it was in cinemas the same year that Star Trek (1966-1969) first aired, the fact that there are notable similarities with Gene Roddenberry’s series and Pierce’s film must be entirely coincidental (the film was in production, under the title Prehistoric Planet Women, in June 1966, three months before the first episode of Star Trek made it to the screen). Both feature space missions by a multi-national crew with plenty of women on board, even if they are, as in Star Trek, largely reduced to supporting, admin posts (there’s even a character here named Scott(y)). Any similarities end there though and they’re entirely coincidental but it would seem that there was something in the air in 1966, something that inspired Roddenberry and Pierce to be thinking along roughly the same lines.

Also like Roddenberry, Pierce tries to address the ideas of tolerance and speciesism but unfortunately delivers his intriguing ideas at deafening volumes and with relentless intensity. He also makes some interesting use of Einstein’s theory of relativistic time distortion, with the crew of the space mission aging slower than the loved ones they’ve left behind, a concept barely ever raised in science fiction cinema since. But having got the “clever” science stuff out of the way, we settles down to a standard issue science fiction B-movie with all the bugbears that brings with it – there’s a lot of mismatched stock footage, effects that are about what you’d expect for a film of this budget and this period and some ludicrous attempts at sprucing up the dreary plot with silly asides – at one point, the crew of the ship try to cross an acidic pool using a rope and log contraption though wide shots reveal that they could simply have walked around it.

Elsewhere there’s some terrible dancing, the seemingly obligatory traipsing around a studio set dressed as a jungle and the terrible comedy stylings of Paul Gilbert – when you think things can’t get any worse, he treats us to a painful slapstick routine involving a karate demonstration. It’s interminable stuff that’s doubly disappointing given the more interesting ideas that Pierce flirts with buy has neither the resources nor the will to do anything further with.

The poster is as misleading as the title, straplines promising unwary punters that “it’s the battle of the sexes as savage planet women attack female space invaders!” and urge us the “SEE: gigantic tarantulas eat men alive! SEE: men swallowed in treacherous planet pools of acid! SEE: Humans preserved in huge ice tombs! SEE: prehistoric nymphs bathe in the pools of paradise!” Only a few of these promises are met and even those that are let downs – those “gigantic tarantulas” turn out to be largely immobile puppets that the cast gamely cling tightly to throughout their brief struggles. Women of the Prehistoric Planet went out on release in the States with the equally misleadingly titled The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966), directed by Michael A. Hoey and produced, uncredited, by Roger Corman.