User reviews

Sure this film is filled with all sorts of historical (hysterical) inaccuracies but I bet millions of teens and preteens didn't go to the movie theaters to get a history lesson back in 1970. I know I sure didn't want to see a Discovery Channel documentary when I fed "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" into my DVD player. I wanted to be taken back to an imaginary time that existed in the exciting corners of my brain when I was a kid --- you know, when cavemen fought against big old dinosaurs to stay alive and compete for food. Heck, is the world Hammer created any different than, let's say, the world Hollywood created for "King Kong"? I don't remember anyone complaining about dinosaurs and giant apes supposedly existing in 1930.

But I digress, this is the incredible love story between a caveman (Robin Hawdon) and a cave cutie (Victori Vetri) who have to fight off jealous cave competitors and giant stop-motion dinos to find their place in the sun. If you allow yourself to be transported into this imaginary world, you can really enjoy the story for all it's worth. You have beautiful leads, prehistoric romance, some sex (if you watch the uncut version), volcanoes, battles between cave tribes, dinosaur danger, and a completely made-up language for the dialog. What fun! It's not "Jurassic Park" but even that blockbuster saw fit to pay tribute by naming it's theme park display after this aged little film.

Seen 35 years or so later, the special effects are a little disappointing and I've never seen such good looking cave people before (outside of Raquel Welch, of course). But this is a enjoyable way to pass some time on a Saturday afternoon.

I just saw this film for the second time in 36 years (it's 2007), and for the first time "uncut". It went from a "G" rated kid's matinée to an "R" rated exploitation guilty pleasure. But it's still not a bad movie even with the two restored sex scenes. If your a fan of the genre and you have already seen Hammer's 'One Million Years B.C.', then you must see this uncut version of 'When Dinos...' just to see the direction Hammer films was taking in the early 70's. I'm waiting for the restored DVD to become available. The version I saw was off the net in poor VHS quality and the restored elements were in even worse shape. I already own the first Hammer film on DVD. I would have no reservations picking up this sequel if it were released in it's original "R" form.

"When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," like its predecessor "One Million Years B.C." was one of those great movies when I was a kid that helped ease my transition from comic-book-reading, baseball-card-collecting dinosaur geek to comic-book-reading, baseball-card-collecting chick freak. I was seven when it was released, and I still remember the TV airwaves saturated with advertising. I whined and screamed and begged my brother to take me, and he did. Great part was, we caught this flick as part of a double-feature with Harryhausen's "Valley of Gwangi." Eat your heart out, stop-motion animation fans!

Perhaps because of the great childhood experiences surrounding this movie, there's a kid-voice in my head that still sees it as near-flawless cinema. But in all honesty, it's just G-rated exploitation in the purest sense of the word. The dinosaurs in the movie promos draw the young boys in, and once their behinds are in the seats they slowly become less cognizant of the prehistoric beasts and more cognizant of the way Victoria Vetri's cave tunic gives her breasts that extra lift or the way her legs seem to be constantly shimmering with sweat. Even at seven I noticed this, which is why "Dinosaurs" provided a great transition into puberty for me half a decade before it actually hit. A lot of fun, this, but don't mistake it for art. Watch it for the beasts and the (scantily clad but not naked) boobs, toss in a bag of microwave popcorn and a few beers. It may be G-rated but it's still kind'a fun.

I remember seeing this movie with my brother at the theater back in 1971. When we arrived, we received a book with the language used in the movie and a rough translation. I can find no mention of that book on any web site, and haven't purchased the video to see if it is still printed. It was great fun watching it again today after so many years. Even without the translation, the movie is very enjoyable and great fun to watch. Although the "dinosaurs" leave a little to be desired compared to today's movies, they did a great job integrating real lizards into the film.

When I was a kid, 8 or so, I liked this film. I had taped it from TV and I watched it quite often. I was in awe with those dinosaurs, even though I didn't get much of the film.

Now I've seen the movie again after many years and I couldn't help but to laugh at the whole seriousness of the film. There's a short narrative in English in the beginning, but the rest of the film is spoken in Cavemannish, in where the most common word seemed to be "Akita". There were subtitles on the film, so you keep up with the story, even though it's not extremely hard to follow. Blonde chick Sanna (Victoria Vetri), who is going to be sacrificed to the sun, escapes after a some sort of lunar upheaval. So the frightened leader Kingsor (Patrick Allen) starts to hunt her, but a good caveman Tara (Robin Hawdon) fells in love with the girl and tries to protect her.

The world is habituated by humans and dinosaurs side by side. Big monsters attack, even tough some of them seem to be vegetarians instead of flesh eaters, seemingly randomly in several scenes just to bring in some action to the film. As an effect film "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth" is hopelessly aged, despite this some scenes look actually quite nice.

There is this campy feel in the film and it's hard to take it seriously, but you have to say, that it pretty brave to do a film, that uses some sort of mock up language as its main language. And the film is silly, you can't get around that.

Val Guest directed this third prehistoric based Hammer studios film, with fine F/X by Jim Danforth & Roger Dicken. The story involves a beautiful tribeswoman(played by stunning beauty Victoria Vetri) who was targeted for human sacrifice but escaped by the timely intervention of nature. Now on the run, she later finds romance with another tribesman, as they must dodge hostile tribes and dinosaurs in order to survive. Like Raquel Welch before her, Victoria Vetri is the star attraction, and goes farther being unclothed than Welch did! Just as silly and historically absurd as its predecessors, Miss Vetri makes it watchable. Note that the DVD(a double feature) was withdrawn from circulation because it mistakenly used the uncut(Nudity) British version instead! This is the only version worth watching however, so perhaps Warner Brothers will one day re-release it through their archive collection.

A movie that just seems to get better with the passing years. The dialog is in "caveman" with no subtitles, which means the story is told almost entirely in visual terms. But, hey, that's how movies got started in the first place! Worth noting is the Canary Island scenery which is fresh and evocative. The human scenery is attractive as well with stars Victoria Vetri and Robin Hawdon spending the entire production in nothing more than fur bikinis. Hawdon's career in film acting never took off but he did a lot of stage work in England and a lot of writing as well. Worth reading is his 1984 novel, "A Rustle in the Grass" -- a delightful novel (a la "Watership Down") about a colony of ants. His most memorable scene in this movie consists of "beefcake-bondage" and it comes when he's tied spread-eagle-style between two wooden posts. Fuel for a fire is then piled between his spread-open legs. Curiously, though, his tormentors allow him to keep on his loincloth which certainly won't protect his more sensitive parts from the rising flames but which will, unfortunately, block some of the view and thus lessen the fun. Well, they were only cavemen and thus have a lot to learn about the nudity factor in torture and executions.

"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

For B-Movie Fans, there's much to love here. You got your scantily clad hot-looking cavewoman(and well the lovely Victoria Vetri is certainly hard to beat when it comes to that category...only Miss Raquel Welch it seems to me is even in her league), cool stop-motion dinosaurs from Jim Danforth. Of course this film is a little too similar to ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. but nonetheless if you loved that one, you should very well enjoy this one too. Just grab some popcorn, sit back and enjoy.

"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

how do you tell Victoria Vetri apart from Angela Dorian? The former is a blonde actress and the latter a brunette Playboy centerfold girl. Other than that, they are one and the same person. She's blonde in this film, made by Hammer to cash in on the popularity of their previous cavegirl outing, One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch. That's the one that everybody remembers, but want to know something? This is the better film of the two, and so strong that Steven Spielberg contains a homage to it in Jurassic Park. Vetri is fetching enough that we really are willing to suspend our disbelief and buy into the idea of her falling asleep in a cracked open dinosaur egg, waking up in the morning to find the Moma Beast staring at her, and then be adopted by the big thing! Incidentally, Magda Konopka, as her brunette rival for a hunky caveman, is pretty terrific eye candy, too. The special effects are fine, almost impossible to tell apart from those in a Harryhausen film. A strong sense of mini-epic and welcome sense of humor keep this a cut above most films in this genre. And Vetri is one of the unheralded blonde beauties of the screen.

The Cave Man vs Dinosaur movie is ridiculed as unscientific. Harryhausen came to the defense of the concept in his Film Fantasy Scrapbook-casually suggesting archaeological evidence was pushing back human origins or closing the gap between them and dinosaurs. We will never prove 100 percent what was living in prehistoric times and I could not care less one way or the other. This is supposed to be a fantasy film. The idea of humans alongside dinosaurs isn't meant to be historical fact, but imaginative fun.In watching this film and its predecessor, what strikes me the most is the total professional manner the actors treat the subject matter. Especially impressive is Patrick Allen who spends a good deal of time shouting Neekro but handles it like he's doing Richard the Third! He behaves as professionally as Frank Langella playing an evil toy in Masters of the Universe.

These days people would wink at the camera or have a joke-filled script--claiming that its the only way to deal with such nonsense. One thing about the 60s and a studio like Hammer was that they treated their films seriously.

My only real criticism is the inclusion of a quick shot from Irwin Allen's despicable Lost World where in two reptiles were mutilated and killed for the film. Other than that I think the movie does its best with its budget and resources and its unfortunate movies today are too uptight and unimaginative to try something like this.

Blonde-haired cave woman Sanna (Victoria Vetri) is picked up by a seaside tribe after being thrown into the sea by her own tribe. Tara (Robin Hawdon), a member of the dark-haired seaside tribe becomes infatuated by her and woos her with the gift of his necklace. Ayak (Imogen Hassall - who tragically committed suicide in 1980) wants Tara for herself so becomes intent on removing Sanna from the tribe, but after they fight, Sanna's former tribe come looking for her and she flees for her life. Tara starts his journey to find her and bring her back, but he faces many dangers in the dinosaurs and creatures lurking in the jungles and mountains, and a tribal prophet has foreseen a tidal wave that could possibly devastate the planet.

This film is every bit as tedious as it sounds. One of a few prehistoric films produced by Hammer than depicted humans alongside dinosaurs, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth is nothing more than cheap fantasy that mixes the excitement of dinosaur attacks with big breasted women in cave girl costumes. Don't get me wrong, the sight of Vetri and Hassall all shaven- legged and oiled up wearing next to nothing and full make-up is not something I am complaining about, but that is just about all this film has going for it. The dinosaur scenes are mildly entertaining but are often repetitive, except for one scene which sees Sanna sleep in a broken dinosaur egg only to be adopted by the mother. Very silly but quite fun in it's own ridiculous way.

A small caveman language was created for the film ("Akita! Akita!"), which, according to IMDb, is based on Phoenician, Latin, and Sanskrit sources. Very admirable indeed, but it is strange that such attention was made to the language when the film ignores the obvious historical fact that humans did not co-exist with dinosaurs! It seems a pointless detail when the film is clearly going for fun and titillation rather than anything remotely resembling historical accuracy. All in all, an easy way to spend a lazy bank holiday afternoon, but a rather boring and unspectacular cinematic experience. I would expect more from the director of The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961).

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Things I learned from this movie:

1) Dirt never sticks to cavewomen, but it does stick to cavemen. Cavemen are, in fact, so dirty that it makes you wonder why cavewomen ever consented to be with them.

2) Cavewomen, by the way, are hot!

3) Giant Crabs will eat you if they have the chance.

4) Always be nice to dinosaurs if you can, they will become your friends and save you from a horrible fate.

5) Bondage is as old as man.

6) Bikinis are as old as man. (See also "One Million Years BC" for further details.) Also, they stay on under amazing situations, although only barely.

7) The words "Agoba" and particularly "AKEETA," were important linguistic developments in the history of speech.

8) In the time it takes a tidal wave to reach the shore, you have time to make a boat and fight over it with your arch-rival.

9) Never, never stand in front of a tidal wave, waving your arms about and trying to turn it back by magic. This will not work.

10) Cavewomen are HOT! Wait, did I say that already? OK, number 10 is: AKEETA!

In short, a priceless movie. Meaning that you should pay as little as possible to see it, but you should see it.

Released in 1970 and directed by Val Guest, "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" is a prehistoric adventure/fantasy starring Victoria Vetri as a blond cavebabe who survives her tribe's sacrificial ritual to their sun god. She then tries to join another tribe where she attracts the attention of one of the dudes (Robin Hawdon) and the jealousy of one of the brunette babes (Imogen Hassall).

Wow, this flick is painfully bad. I was seriously tempted to fast-forward through the second half. This was surprising because it's basically the follow-up to Hammer's most successful film, 1966's "One Million Years BC." Unfortnately, it's nowhere the same quality. Things go wrong right away when the camera switches from excellent Canary Island locations to an obvious indoor set when it focuses on close-ups of the tribe on top of a hill. Worse, the story is dull and there's WAY too much cave-babbling, e.g. "Akita, AKITA!" The stop-motion F/X work is good, but there isn't as much as in the former film, like the great T-rex versus triceratops and the allosaurus sequences. While I like the friendly baby dino and Hassall is significantly hotter than the overrated Vetri, neither makes up for the movie's mortal flaws.

The film runs 96 minutes and was shot in the Canary Islands and England (sets).

GRADE: D

I saw this was coming up on TV this morning and hit IMDb to check it out first. Woe to me. I thought I'd give it a try anyway. I like a good fantasy movie. Harry Potter and a bunch of witches living among us- sure. But this movie started right off by throwing science out the window.

Before we even got to the point where humans lived alongside dinosaurs (a la The Flintstones), the narrator introduced us to the first scene by telling us that "this was a time before the moon even existed". The moon existed BILLIONS of years before even the simplest form of life existed on this planet, much less dinosaurs or mammals. I might have let this go for a silent era movie from the 1920's, but this was made in the late 1960's.

Then we are introduced to the primitive inhabitants of earth, with their salon hair and waxed bodies. Things kind of went along that way for the length of the film. Pretty women bouncing to and fro. Not much else going on here.

Not for historians, to be sure, but at least I didn't see anyone wearing a watch.

To begin with I admit that if this film wasn't full of beautiful, bronzed, oiled, busty women clad in fur skin bikinis it would have scored much lower.

All dialogue is in a made up prehistoric language. This is very ambitious and puts a lot of weight on the director and actors. It works pretty well but there is a good reason why 99.9% of movies have an active narrative. Listening to cave people (as gorgeous as they are) shouting makes of IKEA furniture at each other gets a bit dull and forces the story to be over simplistic.

The film gets boring after the novelty of the cave girls and men wear off.

Possibly ahead of its time but feels a bit dated now. The stop frame animation still stands up against modern cgi but the interaction between cave person and plasticine dinosaurs is a bit clumsy.

A great romp for 90 odd minutes.

I remember watching this aged about eleven and not thinking much of it then and when I watched it on Sky movies a couple of weeks ago I liked it even less . What`s wrong with the movie can be summed up with the opening scene where a bunch of bikini clad blondes are going to be sacraficed . If the time period is set " when dinosaurs ruled the Earth " how come there`s human beings ? As every boorish schoolboy knows dinosaurs died out millions of years before primative man walked the surface of the planet . Oh and the voice over informs us there`s no moon which is another anachronism . BTW why are the blondes going to be sacraficed ? To increase the collective IQ of humanity ?

Actually watching this film as an adult male I was very impressed by the costume design or rather the lack of it . Yup it`s a Hammer production so you just know that the female cast were chosen because of their lung capacity , but this leads me to ask : If that`s what women looked like in the stone age how come it took hundreds of thousands of years for the population to reach six billion ? Costume design aside the rest of the production values are very poor , much of the location exteriors were obviously filmed in a studio with sea borne scenes filmed in a swimming pool and it goes without saying the ( Not very special ) special effects are of a DOCTOR WHO standard

Be warned that if you`re writing an article on stone age man don`t use this film as a source of information . I`ve already pointed out some mistakes and here`s some more things that are difficult to accept

1 ) In the stone age everyone had perfect teeth

2 ) In the stone age people from different tribes had no problem understanding one another if they pointed their fingers

3 ) Dinosaurs always make the same screeching noise no matter what species they belong to

4 ) When a dinosaur hatches from an egg it grows to adulthood within a few hours

5 ) Animals like snakes and crabs were a lot bigger in the stone age

6 ) If a cave woman has blonde hair she will almost always have brown eyes , while a cave man with dark hair will almost always have blue eyes indicating that genetics were somehow different in the stone age

The complete lack of any modern language helps enormously. Lots of pantomime and tasteful eye-candy for both sexes. The people are very athletic and attractive. Their movement over vast location sets is an impressive work-out. Never dawdles. Very good photography and effects -- for the time, well integrated. Not a low-budget hack-up job. More plausible than any opera I've seen; kinda like a ballet without a consistent musical score.

This is not a real review, it should be understood more as a collection of impressions on the film.

Let's start by saying that I didn't expect a fully narrated film where the protagonists speak an incomprehensible language, but this is so nothing can be done about it. So the film is also acceptable because it is quite entertaining above all and almost solely thanks to the narrator, as a plot it is very classic and it is the usual stuff of the damsel in distress but in prehistory with the knight on duty who wants to save her at all costs, but everything this is seasoned with a bit of healthy caveman bigotry and then there are the dinosaurs who mostly form the backdrop to the events. In conclusion, the film is also fun but boring in the long run, so much so that the last part never seems to go away.

Yes i watched the whole movie and for what it was worth not terrible. The acting was kinda hard to judge because they don't speak English but a made up language that by the end of the film you will be tired of hearing. The dinosaurs left a little to be desired but were tolerable. The plot was ok but the women were beautiful. I have never thought of a world where cavemen and cavewomen all looked like supermodels. You probably shouldn't watch this unless you really have nothing else to watch.