BY FRED BLOSSER
“One Million Years B.C.†(1966)
with Raquel Welch was sufficiently profitable for Hammer Films that producer
Aida Young and studio executive Anthony Hinds were incentivized to create a
sequel. In final analysis, “When
Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth†(1970) seems more a reboot of the earlier movie than
a sequel to it. Victoria Vetri, who had
been Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1968 as “Angela Dorian,†succeeded Welch
as the female lead, and Jim Danforth took over the FX role from the otherwise
occupied Ray Harryhausen, with assistance from David Allen and others. Filming began in October 1968 but post-production
FX work delayed final completion and release for two years, probably sinking
any publicity value from Vetri’s Playmate fame. The picture opened in the U.K. in October 1970, in western Europe in
January 1971, and Stateside in March 1971 from Warner Brothers-Seven Arts. The European print ran 100 minutes and
included a few frames of fleeting nudity and implied sex. The skin was negligible by today’s
premium-cable standards but apparently deemed unfit for small-town moviegoers
in the Nixon era. Warner-Seven Arts
deleted the nudity from the U.S. edit and secured a “G†rating for the kiddie
audience. The film had a brief life in
drive-ins, but wider exposure followed in syndicated TV airings in the ‘70s and
‘80s.
The first home-video releases of
“When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth†were simultaneous editions from Warner Home
Video in 1991, in formats now as extinct as the dinosaurs themselves, VHS and
Laser Disc. Both products were struck
from the rated-G print. I paid the
$59.95 asking price for the VHS cassette and probably would have sprung for the
Laser Disc too, had I owned a player at the time. I was glad to have the movie in a form that I
could watch at leisure in those days before streaming video and Netflix, when
local video stores rarely carried such second-tier titles for rental. A DVD edition appeared in 2008 as a two-fer
with Hammer’s “Moon Zero Two,†retailed through Best Buy. The DVD created a brief stir because the
unrated European print had been used as the source, supposedly by accident,
even though the case carried the “G†rating. The new Blu-ray from Warner Archive Collection also is sourced from the
European print, but this time the case warns (or teases, depending on your
perspective) that it is the “International Theatrical release version which
contains nudity.â€
The opening credits attributed the
“screen treatment†for the film to critically acclaimed writer J.G. Ballard,
misspelled onscreen as “J.B. Ballard,†and the screenplay to British science
fiction, horror, and thriller veteran Val Guest, who also directed. The respective accounts of Ballard and Guest
are sketchy and inconsistent as to what each writer contributed to the final
product. Such as it is, the story isn’t
bad -- even in 1971, you didn’t go to a movie titled “When Dinosaurs Ruled the
Earth†expecting dramatic complexity -- although it mostly serves to fill time
between the appearances of Danforth’s gorgeous stop-motion dinosaurs.
Sanna (Vetri) is one of six young
blonde maidens chosen by the fanatical chief of the prehistoric Mountain tribe,
Kingsor (Patrick Allen), as human sacrifices to appease the tribal sun god for
recent celestial unrest. Little do the
primitive tribesmen know, but the tremors on earth and in heaven that scare
them are caused by the formation of the Moon separating from Earth, not by
divine displeasure. Sanna escapes in a
sudden windstorm, falls into the sea, and is rescued by Tara (Robin Hawdon), a
young fisherman from the neighboring Shore tribe. At the Shore village, where tribespeople are
trying to tie down an unruly plesiosaur, Tara’s girlfriend Ayak (Imogen
Hassell) becomes jealous of Sanna, who flees again when Kingsor comes to
reclaim her. Chases, escapes, and more
dinosaurs ensue, including a charming if biologically unlikely subplot in which
a mama dinosaur and her baby welcome Sanna into their family after mistaking
her for a newly hatched sibling. Where
the earlier movie closed with a catastrophic volcano eruption, Guest’s ends
with the tide receding an unnatural distance, leaving a bleak mud flat from
which a giant crab emerges (the surrealistic mud flat seems to have been
Ballard’s idea), and then roaring back again in a biblical deluge generated by
the newly condensed Moon. In another
charming touch, a raft carrying Sanna, Tara, and their friends Ulido (Magda
Konopka) and Khaki (Drewe Henley) washes gently to rest on a matte-painting
cliff in the final scene after the flood subsides and dawn breaks.
Many fans seem to feel that the
casting of “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth†is inferior to the earlier movie’s,
but Vetri holds her own in the lead. The
script gives her more to do than “One Million Years B.C.†demanded of Welch,
and she delivers. She has screen
presence and she looks great in skimpy
togs that accentuate her impressive physical attributes. Hammer clearly understood that sexy outfits
sell tickets at the box office, even in movies whittled down to a
family-friendly rating. It’s a strategy
still employed today by moviemakers, more than forty-five years later: case in
point, the ads for the new PG-13 action movie “Ghost in the Shell,†which place
Scarlett Johansson’s generous curves in a skin-tight body stocking front and
center. Hawdon, Allen, and Hassell
support Vetri with plucky, straight-faced performances. That may be the most anyone can ask of actors
who are required by the script to strip down to their skivvies and talk in
made-up Stone Age language. Fans of
modern CGI may disagree, and probably will, but the dinosaurs designed and
animated by Danforth and his associates have more heft and personality than
anything in the recent, expensive blockbusters “Kong: Skull Island†(2017) and
“Jurassic World†(2015). The music by
Mario Nascimbene, the maestro of biblical and Viking soundtracks, adds a
measure of classic-cinema panache lacking in today’s mostly by-the-numbers
action and fantasy scores.
The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray is welcome as
the latest iteration of “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth†for the home
market. The colors are strong, and the
definition at a 1.78:1 aspect ratio is about as good as can be expected from
older studio elements, short of a costly digital makeover. The disc includes the original movie trailer
and, anticipating the needs of the target Boomer audience, English SDH captions. It’s questionable in this instance whether
captioning is necessary, since the dialogue consists of fifteen or twenty
nonsense Caveman words repeated over and over again, but it’s the thought that
counts.
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