Thursday 9 June 2011

Prehistoric Women (1967) - Michael Carreras


Thursday 9th June 2011.

Now it's not often I struggle to watch a film, but this just takes the biscuit. It's Hammer at it's absolute nadir, some old rubbish about tribes of women in darkest Africa that can talk English perfectly. Karl (our hero) stumbles into their world and manages to get himself mixed up in an uprising. You see the blondes are the slaves of the brunettes, and a little further down the ladder are the menfolk. Laughable stuff really, and you know it's all going pear shaped when early on Karl witness's a tribal dance and then has a natter to the tribesmen in (you've guessed it) English. They explain that they are going to have to kill him. 'Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?' yawns the bored sounding Karl, blah blah blah. Then a huge white plastic rhino shoots out of a wall, Karl grips it's horn and the tribesmen are frozen just as they are about to spear him. Jesus wept.

On the one hand you want to believe this is an attempt at showing how women have been oppressed throughout time, but of course it really isn't that. It's just an excuse to have huge stacks of women flesh packed into animal skin bathing suits. Woeful is too positive a word for this. I'm actually writing this while the film is still on, that's how tragic it is. Totally studio bound, with the cheapest of cheap jungle sets, if the camera work was any more static it would be considered still photography. The only thing it has going for it is Steven Berkoff, but even that's not enough to make me smile. I can't even bring myself to waste more time by writing this, which I see more as a warning than a review, since I'll never get the 90 minutes I spent watching this back. So if you ever get the chance to see this, just say no. You've been warned.

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