Review of One Million Years B.C.

The brutal, dark-haired rock-clan and the enlightened, blond shell-clan struggle to survive in a harsh antediluvian world populated by giant lizards, immense spiders, and dinosaurs. 'One Million Years B.C.' is the first of Hammer Film Production's anachronistic prehistoric adventures and sets the tone for those that follow. The men are hairy and disheveled, the women hairless (except for thick, luscious coifs), have perfect teeth, and are (usually) lovely. Hair is important, as early man seems to have been divided into blonds, brunettes, and hairy-all-over, each of which has a distinct culture (gentile and progressive, nasty and barbaric, and primitive and cannibalistic respectively). Loana (Raquel Welch) is of the blond tribe (Ms. Welch's blondness is about as convincing as the iguanas standing in for dinosaurs) and the film is likely best remembered for the iconic poster of her wearing a custom-made, 'lifts-and-separates' fur bikini. Other than the occasional lizard stand-in, the dinosaurs are excellent stop-action models (by Ray Harryhausen at the top of his game), and the bleak, desert cinematography is sometimes striking. The film is a remake of the 1940 opus starring Victor Mature, which had a similar premise, and included a pig in a triceratops costume. Harryhausen (and I'm sure everyone else involved) knew man and dinosaurs missed each other by 60-odd million years, but blending sleek, sexy cave-chicks with huge, vicious reptiles makes for an entertaining world for men and boys of all ages (plus an iguana makes a better stand-in in for a dinosaur than a guinea-pig would make for a mammoth). Silly fun, but who'd expect more. I wonder how much inspiration author Jean Auel took from these movies - every time I see one of Hammer's fetching blond cave-women doing something primevally clever, I think of Ayla, the paleolithic renaissance girl in 'Clan of the Cave Bear'.