The Big Whatsit

Prehistoric Women lies somewhere beyond the critical remit. It’s a shambles, the celluloid equivalent of an M5 rush hour pile-up. The acting is appalling, the directing directionless, and everything has been done on the cheap. Yet it embraces its own rubbishness so effectively that its stock in entertainment value can’t help but rise. At times, I thought I was watching the absolute worst of the Ultimate Hammer Collection, and on artistic merit I probably was. But afterwards, I had only warm feelings towards it. Bilge it was, yet fun bilge all the same.

Prehistoric Women probably wouldn’t have happened but for the success of One Million Years B.C. Once Hammer realised they had chanced upon a winning formula, they naturally tried to repeat it, only with a fraction of the budget and without any dinosaurs or Raquel Welch, which were probably the earlier movie’s biggest selling points. What they did have were the sets, the props and costumes, and the film kind of got worked in around that.

Where the concept for Prehistoric Women came from is anyone’s guess. Some have it that the plot is loosely reworked from a forgotten 1950s affair, which raises the scary prospect that there are two films with stories that are this silly. In any event, Hammer jettisoned anything that might have cost money, tossed in a bevvy of shapely females, knocked out something that passed for a script and filmed the results.

An ominous sign of the minuscule budget comes early, as the opening credits play over stock footage of various, random scenes of nature culled straight from the sixties equivalent of Life on Earth. We then meet David Marchand (Michael Latimer), a ‘great white hunter’ who leads safari expeditions into deepest, darkest Africa. David is that rarest of beasts - a hunter with a conscience. When one of his team - a bluff old Colonel Blimp type, natch - fires one off and wounds a leopard, David volunteers to enter the wild and finish it off, such is his respect for the animal kingdom. This he does, but at the expense of entering the territory of a native tribe who are compelled to sacrifice him as an offering to the White Rhinoceros God. First however, they subject him to one of the film’s many, lengthy dancing scenes. These typically are a cheap as chips rip-off of the mating dance seen in Zulu. I don’t know what cuts were made to transform the 87-minute movie into the shorter edit that was originally screened in the UK (and retitled as Slave Girls, into the bargain), but they could have done worse than lop off the meaningless prancing as seen here.

David is a lucky man. As he’s about to be skewered, he touches the horn of the model rhino, and everything goes still. Then, a crack in the wall appears, which leads into the same jungle but from thousands of years ago. Obviously, David enters this world, and comes across the titular women. The babes - and babes they are; none of them look over 25 or come with anything smaller than a C cup - have a simplified system of governance; the brunettes rule, and the blondes serve. Their queen is Kari (Martine Beswick) who first appears naked, though some fortunately placed foliage keeps her unmentionables under wraps. For reasons of pure plotting convenience, Kari takes a fancy to David and offers him a position as her sex slave. But our hero is made of stronger stuff than the majority of male viewers and refuses. Besides, he’s already fallen for Saria (Edina Ronay), one of the blonde slaves whose dead-eyed acting and tiny animal skin bikini clearly ticks every box on his wishlist.

As David learns, there’s one thing worse than a woman scorned, and that’s to say to Queen Kari ’sorry love, you’re just not my type.’ Before he knows what has hit him, your man has been chained up and tossed into a dungeon with the lingering menfolk, beardies who toil the rocks for no apparent purpose. He then learns that the men and the blondes used to rule the land together until the enslaved ‘dark haired ones’ made a pact with a nearby tribe of ‘devils’ and overthrew their masters. What this means is that every now and then, one of the slaves is offered to a devil as his bride and sits ceremonially atop the white rhinoceros, awaiting her fate. The white rhino means something to Prehistoric Women’s story. In the tale they’re extinct, and the people are now doomed to worship its image until the animal returns. Not very likely, you might imagine, given the rhino is essentially Savannah-based and unlikely to roam about in jungles, but perhaps I, unlike Michael Carreras (responsible for the script and direction) have watched one wildlife show too many.

Kari tries it on with David again, leading to the film’s greatest scene, which involves the Queen performing some sort of pre-nuptial dance for her reluctant beau. It’s good because Beswick is by some distance the best thing in Prehistoric Women. By all accounts, she was about the only one involved who tried to make it work, putting everything into her performance and playing Kari as she should have been played i.e. as a total dominatrix, surely the inspiration for such future sirens as Blake Seven’s Servalan and Diana, the vampish alien commander in V. The show she puts on for David is rightly the stuff of legend, brilliantly provocative and revealing the pay-off from the thousands of abdominal crushes that must have gone into a body made for sin.

By this stage, David should be a gibbering wreck of sexual tension. Instead, he stays true to his morals and rejects Kari once again. Screeching ‘Never! Never! Never!’ she tosses him back into the village chokey, but not before one of the film’s most jaw droppingly dire exchanges of dialogue takes place (and that’s saying something). ‘What makes you so cruel?’ David asks the Queen. Agonisingly straight-faced, Kari replies that ‘Cruelty has made me cruel.’

Prehistoric Women has a thousand more thrills to offer before its climax. The microscopic budget really comes into its own during a key final scene, where a real rhino turns up, or is it a model being wheeled around on casters? Do rhinos really glide like that? There’s more dancing, a curse rather improbably being lifted, and a closing shot that’s daft enough to send the entire effort crashing over a cliff edge of credulity, like the movie has much of that left by the finish. It’s awful, yet laughably brilliant at the same time. Some aspects of it defy any attempt at reason, like how David’s blue shirt gets torn in one scene only to be immaculate by the next - is mending clothes what the blonde slaves do all day, when not preparing meals or dancing sulkily for the Queen? I found myself wanting to know why everyone spoke English, where the prehistoric men were, what had happened to the redheads, why there were no children or old people and exactly what Kari’s obsession with taking baths in her cave was all about, let alone where they got the bubble bath from?

There’s no excuse for any of it, yet Prehistoric Women never offers one, instead letting the viewer gently disengage their brain and enjoy what amounts to this campest of classics. I couldn’t hate it, despite the surprising lack of titillation on offer, which let’s be honest is the only reason why anyone would have paid to see it in the first place. It’s absolutely without merit, and it revels in that fact, and no one can argue that they weren’t warned. After all, what else would anyone expect from a film called Prehistoric Women that featured an S&M-ready Beswick on its publicity?