GusF Essentially an unacknowledged remake of Hammer's most financially successful film "One Million Years B.C.", it's not on the same level as that film but it's still great fun. Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop motion, did not return for this film but Jim Danforth is a more than worthy substitute. The dinosaurs look brilliant for their time and they hold up remarkably well. It's a shame that stop motion is essentially a lost art form in the 21st Century. While both films were shot in the Canary Islands, the locations used here were less exotic and otherworldly. This has a darker, murkier appearance than the previous film, which I didn't really like. I don't think that Val Guest was the director that Don Chaffey was, I'm afraid.As in "One Million Years B.C.", the entirety of the dialogue is in the cave people's fictional language, though in this instance it seems to consist mostly of three words: Neekro (anything to do with killing or death), Akoba (the name of the Sun God, as well as Robert Brown's character in the aforementioned film) and Akita (everything from "over here" to "hey you," basically). These three words were repeated ad nauseam and it gets a little trying after a while. There is too much dialogue in the film and not enough dinosaurs, frankly. At 96 minutes, the film is about 20 minutes too long.With films like this, it's sort of hard to criticise them in the same way as other films. It doesn't have a plot per se but, than again, neither does "One Million Years B.C."! They're both basically a collection of set pieces but the set pieces in the earlier film were better and it was far more visually striking and memorable. When it comes to the acting, Patrick Allen (whose excellent voice was also put to use for the film's opening narration) does the best job of delivering the made-up language with conviction while Imogen Hassall, one of several Hammer actresses to die in their 30s, is not far behind. Victoria Vetri and Robin Hawdon are likable in the lead roles but they're no Raquel Welch or John Richardson.Overall, this is very fun film but "One Million Years B.C." is still the exemplar of the prehistoric fur bikini genre.

Coventry "Blondes have more fun" is what the popular expression says, but this definitely isn't applicable to the prehistoric world perspective of writer/director Val Guest! The blond-haired protagonist of this film leads quite a miserable life as a fugitive and outcast. She – Sanna – initially lives in a tribe for which the sun is their God and they ritually sacrifice their blond family members. During the ceremony in which Sanna is supposed to be sacrificed, a heavy storm breaks loose and she manages to escape. She joins another tribe and immediately receives a lot of male attention, but the brunettes in that tribe promptly invent the behavior female jealousy and poor Sanna is again exiled. Roaming through the raw landscape, she seeks shelter in a broken dinosaur egg shell and mama dinosaur takes custody over her the very next day. I have tremendous respect for Val Guest! After all, he was the director of some of the greatest and most groundbreaking (Hammer) productions such as "The Quatermass Experiment" and "The Abominable Snowman". Val Guest undeniably was a very visionary and intelligent director, but perhaps this bombastic project was *slightly* over- ambitious and unfeasible. There were quite a lot of dinosaur flicks and caveman adventures being released in that era (1960- 1970), but Guest wanted his to be superior and more realistic than the rest. They even invented a specific language existing of 27 different words, but all I ever heard was "akita". Akita, akita, akita! At a certain point I was convinced that "akita" was the primitive word for "boobs" or "cleavage", because literally all women in this film have luscious curves and are scarcely dressed, so I automatically presumed that all males were delirious. Via the trivia section here on the website, I later found out that "akita" simply means "look over there". Bummer! Even though original and clever, the restricted vocabulary of the cast members quickly leads to dull, repetitive and overlong footage. The dinosaurs look impressive enough, thanks to the brilliant expertise of Jim Danforth, but there's too few action and excitement. Besides, the title doesn't make a lot of sense since the dinosaurs are a lot less fierce than most of the women. Speaking of which, did I mention that the women are gorgeous? Blondes or brunettes, prehistoric women are genuine beauties! Akita, dammit

James Hitchcock "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" is sometimes described as a sequel to "One Million Years B.C" from four years earlier, although it does not contain any of the same characters. Both films were, however, made by Hammer Films, and both are based around the premise that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs. This is not, of course, historically correct, but I would not criticise the film on that basis as it was clearly intended as a fantasy rather than a serious historical picture of life in prehistoric times. As in the earlier film, the dinosaurs are realised through stop-motion animation, although Ray Harryhausen, the great pioneer of this technique, did not actually work on the movie in person as he had done in "One Million Years B.C."The main character in the film is an attractive blonde woman named Sanna, who is doomed to be sacrificed to the sun, the normal fate of blondes in her particular tribe. She manages to escape by jumping into the sea, and is rescued by Tara, a young man from another tribe. Tara already has a very pretty and curvaceous brunette girlfriend named Ayak, but it would appear that even in the Palaeolithic Era gentlemen preferred blondes. Tara takes a decided fancy to Sanna and her golden locks, provoking Ayak's furious jealousy. A further complication arises when Sanna's own tribe come looking for her. One of the big attractions of Hammer's "cavemen" films, at least for male audiences, was that they all featured several glamorous actresses in revealing bikini-type costumes. (Those who prefer male flesh to the female variety will be pleased to note that the hirsute male stars all wear even less). "One Million Years B.C." had helped to make a big star of its leading lady, Raquel Welch, and "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" was intended to do the same for the Playboy centrefold Victoria Vetri, but signally failed to do so. Vetri certainly had the looks of a Hollywood goddess, but seemed to lack the indefinable charisma which had taken Welch to the top. Her acting career was perhaps not helped by the fact that she was sometimes billed under her real name and sometimes under the pseudonym "Angela Dorian". I will not try to compare the two ladies' acting skills because films of this nature do not generally require much in the way of acting. There is no comprehensible dialogue in English or any other known language; all the characters speak an invented language consisting of only about two dozen words. (The similar language spoken in "One Million Years B.C." had an even more deficient vocabulary). No subtitles are provided, and exactly what the dialogue means generally remains obscure, although it is occasionally possible to guess the meaning of individual words from the context. (It seems clear, for example, that "makan" means "dead", "to die" and possibly also "to kill", and that "nikro" means "bad" or "evil"). I was surprised to learn that the distinguished author J. G. Ballard had a hand in the script; he was clearly a less fluent writer in Cavemanese than in English. Because they are required to do little more than proclaim nonsense syllables, none of the actors involved, Vetri included, really stand out. (At least, not for reasons other than their physical charms). As in "One Million Years B.C." the real stars are the dinosaurs which are not simply treated as the antagonists of the human characters; Sanna befriends a mother dinosaur and her baby, and this relationship is to play an important role in later plot developments.. This film is less well remembered today than its predecessor, probably because it lacked an iconic star like Raquel Welch, but to my mind it is the better of the two. Certainly, it contains its fair share of nonsense; the early scenes are said to be set "before the moon existed", but the moon clearly exists by the end of the film, implying that it has miraculously been created during the relatively short time-span of the plot. (In fact, Earth's moon is some 4.5 billion years old, much older not only than the human race but also than the dinosaurs). Nevertheless, the plot is more coherent than that of the earlier film, and the animation sequences are even better. The film-makers do not repeat the mistake which Harryhausen made of optically enlarging small, inoffensive creatures to apparently gigantic size. There was to be a third film in the series, "Creatures the World Forgot" from the following year, but as I have not seen that film for a long time will not attempt a comparison with "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth". 5/10

xnet95 I actually sat here and read through all 44 reviews chronologically to see what people had to say about this movie. Why? I wanted to see if anyone else had been as deeply affected by this movie as I had been. When I sat down to watch this flick, I just wanted to see some dinosaurs and have a light-hearted evening of mindless entertainment, but what I saw shocked and sickened me. This movie isn't about dinosaurs, it's about man's inhumanity to his fellow man (and obviously women - blond women). This film shows how ignorance, intolerance, and belief can (and many times do) lead to cruelty. If you look at the history of the human race, you can see this time and time again. Didn't the Catholic Church force Galileo to face the Roman Inquisition because his view that the earth orbited the Sun (and not vice-versa) threatened their BELIEF system? Weren't women burned at the stake in Salem hundreds of years ago because those in control BELIEVED they were witches (and not hallucinating because they ate grain fungus)? How often do we read about Islamic fundamentalists today strapping bombs onto themselves and blowing people up because they BELIEVE they'll get 57 virgins in heaven after they die? This movie is heavy and disturbing because it shows how horrible and wrong we can be when we allow BELIEF to get in the way of critical and analytical thought. Why has there always been a significant portion of humanity that chooses belief over science? We think we are enlightened today, but there are still people that enjoy watching FoxNews, or belong to the Moral Majority, or BELIEVE in Creationism. It looks like humanity hasn't progressed much from the time this movie portrays.