Space 1979 Random Pile: The one made by people who thought T. rex looked gay

 

Title: When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth

What Year?: 1970

Classification: Weird Sequel/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

As I write, I’m looking at finally winding down this feature, and I’m trying to wrap up loose ends with a lineup where anything goes. For the first entry, I’m definitely going with a stop-motion dino movie. As I commented when I reviewed Planet of Dinosaurs, this was a genre that was already going downhill by the 1970s, and as we saw with Caveman, a lot of what people then and now thought about it came from remakes, homages or outright parodies of much earlier films, especially if it also involved cavemen. For our lineup, then, I have chosen a singular rarity, a 1970s movie that still tried to treat the subject as drama rather than comedy. I present When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, an arguable sequel to a remake that still isn’t as good as its parodies.

Our story begins with a harsh landscape and a vaguely pompous narration about the “dawn of man, of man living with man”, with the further tidbit that there is no moon. We then move to a scene of imminent human sacrifice, disrupted when the moon suddenly appears in the sky. Our heroine, Sanna, escapes and swims out to sea, where she is rescued by Tara, a caveman from another tribe. He takes her home, but she is threatened by a jealous rival, Ayak, because apparently this is the only “primitive” tribe that doesn’t have polygamy. Things go from bad to worse when Sanna’s old tribe shows up, and she is driven into the wilderness. There, she meets up with a newborn lizard creature that soon enough grows into a loyal pet. When the angry tribes try to kill her and Tara, she quickly turns the tables, but Tara is captured. It’s up to her to rescue him, but when the moon finally triggers a massive tidal wave, can anyone survive?

When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth was a production of Hammer, as an unofficial follow-up to the studio’s own 1966 version of One Million BC, directed by Val Guest from a story credited to J.G. Ballard. The movie starred actress/ model Victoria Ventri as Sanna and Robin Lawdon as Tara, with the late Imogen Hassall as Ayak. The special effects were a mix of atop-motion creatures and magnified live reptiles, with the former being provided by Jim Danforth. A long-running complaint held that a realistic Tyrannosaurus planned for the movie was excluded by a Hammer executive who dismissed it as looking like a “poof”, a stereotyped British gay man. The movie was released in two versions, one of which contained significant nudity. Of the cast, Lawdon went on to be better-known as an author, while Ventri and Hassall would continue to be plagued by typecasting, criticism and personal scandals. A 2010 DVD release of the movie was withdrawn because it proved to contain the uncensored version while showing a “G” rating. In 2017, the uncut movie was released on Blu Ray as “unrated”. The following year, Ventri was released from prison after serving a sentence of attempted manslaughter.

For my personal experiences, I picked up this movie a long time ago on an ancient VHS tape I still haven’t replaced. For the purposes of this review, what this brings me to is a little recent semi-casual reading on “dead unicorn tropes”. What connects the two in my mind is that in full hindsight, the whole “caveman” movie genre can be considered a “dead unicorn”. I’ve personally viewed examples from before 1920 that were already using it for laughs. Any straight treatments of wider note can be handily counted in single digits if not one hand, with only Quest For Fire dating later than the early 1970s. Most damningly of all, even “good” examples still land on an equal footing with the better parodies like Caveman. That leaves the present movie as a most singular discovery, a straight-faced and unironic treatment that still manages to check off almost every purported cliché of the genre. Fur-clad “primitives” with hairstyles and grooming that were unknown before 1950, check; (poorly) invented language without subtitles, check; anachronistic or fictional prehistoric life, check. About the only thing “missing” is cringey male treatment of women, and that’s mostly because the catty cavegirls pose more of a threat to each other than men or beasts ever do.

Moving on, what we will keep running into is that while the movie rarely if ever fails to take itself seriously, it doesn’t really make much sense, either. This shows most in the posited caveman language, a conceit that was only really workable with the silent-film talent like D.W. Griffith behind the camera. Here, it is simply and obtrusively lazy, with the same two or three words repeated with no regard for tone or context; I noticed this even more in the viewing for this review because the tape was playing with subtitles I had forgotten how to turn off. What is worse is that the plot is far more convoluted than it has any reason to be, with the latter acts dominated by the tribes threatening or doing terrible things to Tara while Sanna usually runs away. Then there are at least two or three when I swear everyone simply stops and screams for absolutely no comprehensible reason, the main reason one or both of the leads manage to get away as often as they do. Finally, the only character I have ever mustered enough interest in to follow is Ayak, who shows some emotional range when her schemes put Tara on the line along with her rival. Honorable mention goes to a shaman type whom I suppose is the chief villain, who only stood out to me in the finale, where he stands his ground shouting an incantation at the looming waves.

Of course, there are good moments from the creature effects, but at a certain point, they become a source of distracting strangeness. To start with, it cannot be underestimated how much the film struggles to put together a believable ecology; there is at least a sense of a range of environments, from beaches to desert to forest, but the wonky sets, shots and razor-sharp gradations prevent them from being convincing. (I also swear the characters keep passing the same cactus, and the crew never shoot it right.) The stop-motion creatures are a similarly odd mix. The only “real” dinosaur is a chasmosaur that lives in a cave for no obvious reason, quite possibly a replacement for the axed theropod. We see more of the dinosaurs’ relatives, notably a captive plesiosaur that provides the most effective sequence, as well as a pterosaur with the usual ability to carry off people with limbs that in reality might not have held up its own weight. Things get iffier with the sympathetic “character” creature, which is intriguing when it’s small but just looks generic when full-grown. Then we have the creatures that are flat-out fictional, from crabs that actually work (more on that momentarily) to gagged-up lizards that deserve to be ignored.

That leaves the “one scene”, and the one that stays with me is the appearance of the giant crabs in the final act. To me, these are truly the best if not only reason to watch this movie at all. Their scenes are fragmented by the human melodrama (including Ayak’s pointless and random death), but the standout is their first appearance. As the tribes feel the first shocks of the approaching cataclysm, a group of the hunter/ warriors race along the beach. As they run by, the camera takes in what looks like a cluster of large rocks in the foreground. Suddenly, one of the rocks moves, unfolding into a crab that really isn’t that much bigger than the largest extant crustaceans. The body is spikey, the claws and limbs a bit stubby, and further details remain a bit hazy. Still, it certainly goes at a good clip as it runs straight for the hindmost of the hunters. What follows is satisfyingly grisly, yet still not as entirely unnerving as the first sight of the creature.

In closing, the one thing I have left to say is just how random this movie is, especially in the wider context of the 1970s. The dinosaur movie went into the decade on its last legs, limping from the willful mismarketing of Harryhausen’s excellent Valley of Gwangi, and this movie might as well have gone at the coffin with a nail gun. In full hindsight, the best thing that can be said about it is that it is a symptom rather than a cause; the next best, that it still isn’t the worst stop-motion dinosaur movie of the ‘70s or any other decade. (Dear Logos, Planet of Dinosaurs isn’t either…) What it is to me is the foremost example of a movie that I should love, but succeeds only in not quite driving me to hate it. With that, the best I can do is move on, and I just might get rid of that tape while I’m at it.