When fur bikinis ruled...well, just ruled.
MOVIE OF THE DAY: For a movie called When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, this film -- written and directed by Val Guest -- has surprisingly few dinosaurs in it and the few that it does have don't play much of an integral part in the plot. They don't do any ruling, that's for sure.
This is one of a series of movies Hammer Films made in the late 60s and early 70s featuring cave people interacting with dinosaurs (the most famous of which was One Million Years BC, starring Raquel Welch). This historically inaccurate premise was mostly an excuse to show a lot of scantily clad ladies running around in prehistoric bikinis, intermixed with some stop motion dinosaur action, which this film certainly does, although it has much more of the former than it does the latter.
The loose, episodic plot (based on a premise by sci-fi novelist JG Ballard) has something to do with a tribe of primitive humans who worship and sacrifice blonde virgins to the sun. When one of these virgins -- played by Playboy playmate Victoria Vetri (who would one day go to jail for shooting one of her husbands) -- escapes, the tribe hunts her down. She takes refuge with another tribe, this one of beach dwellers. When she falls in love with one of the tribesman, the tribe's jealous females kick her out. She is then adopted by a female dinosaur and becomes friends with the female dinosaur's baby, who she trains like a dog. Eventually, the beach tribesman catches up with her. They get together and pretty soon the virgin sacrifice is just a sacrifice. Eventually the bad tribe captures them and all looks hopeless until a convenient tsunami settles things.
All of the supposedly primitive humans look very late 60s modern. The male lead wears a fake beard that makes him look like all those guys that used to appear in ads for Spanish Fly in cheesy magazines back in the 70s. Vetri is certainly striking looking, especially in a rather prominent nude scene.
The film features some very good visual effects by Jim Danforth and some not so good visual effects by Jim Danforth. There's some stunning Canary Island location photography by Dick Bush, intercut with some pretty cheesy photography. Overall it's a rather lazy, slapdash effort, although it does have its moments. When T&A Ruled the Earth might have been a more accurate title.
