One Million Years B.C. (1967)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A Disappointing Continuation

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

You got dinosaurs, prehistoric man (and women), adventure, thrills, desperate situations and the age old theme of man struggling to survive. Food is a constant battle and shelter not so much. Forget about clothes as they go bare minimum in this one. Remember, back in the fifties, this type of movie was a hit and can't miss. You pay your fifty cents, get your popcorn and cokes and you and your date along with friends went out and had a good time. Of course they always had a double feature plus a cartoon too. The speech in this movie is sparse but they make up for it with hand gestures and grunts of disapproval and approval proving that we can communicate with each other no problem. Notice the three different cultures displayed here. The rock people who live a hard life which makes them hard, these Neanderthal types that are one third man and two thirds beast and the beach people who are mellow and clean. Make you own detail observations please as I just wanted to make the point. I watch this every five years or so for some of the memorable scenes. The one where they catch a wart-hog, bring it home, roast it and then devour it with no regard to women, children or elders getting their share or any share makes you wonder about how these people will survive long-term. Survival of the fittest comes through quite clear. With the beach people, you get the impression that being next to salt water creates a different mindset for how you treat each other as they share and take care of each other. Definitely have your favorite snack and tasty drink on hand for this, have some meat finger foods like chicken wings or drumsticks for atmosphere and pick out a character that you want to emulate and relate to. Let your inner cave-person out....

For their 100th release, Hammer Films remade the 1940 cavemen groaner One Million B.C. It would prove to be a roaring box office success, whilst simultaneously making Raquel Welch an iconic poster girl and Ray Harryhausen an even bigger hero.Plot is slight. Two tribes exist in prehistoric times, the Rock People and the Shell People. The former are more aggressive and basic, the latter more forward and assured. Tumak (John Richardson) of the Rocks and Loana (Welch) wind up together, fighting prejudices and lots of giant beasties! Hooray!That's really it, the message is clear but ultimately we are here for the dinosaurs and giant creatures (well OK, the scantily clad cave dwellers as well), with Harryhausen once again showing why he was a legend in his field of animation. With good fights, a bit of sexy sizzle and a volcanic finale, it's all good really.It's no history lesson of course, but as Harryhausen was wont to say, they wasn't making a film for history professors! 7/10

I'm not well 'up' on my prehistoric mammals, the ones which inherited the Earthy from the Dinosaurs, or I'd suggest remaking this film to be little bit more accurate from a natural history standpoint. You wouldn't want to set it in the Ice Age. You'd have had to cover Raquel in fur, and covering so much as an inch of her skin (beyond what's needed to avoid an 'R' rating, of course) was to be avoided at all costs. After all, that was what people, especially guys, paid to see. But how about having the hero defend the village from an attack by a saber-toothed tiger? Hunting Woolley Mammoths would be out; they, from what I know, lived in cold, snowy climates, and that would have required covering Raquel up, as I noted above. That's why the extra research would be needed. What monsters would people have faced in those days in a warm climate, where Welch could stick with her doe-skin bikini? What about hunting horses no bigger than dogs? Harryhausen did fine with that little project in 'The Valley of Gwangi', and they did exist. It;s known that these little horses lived in North America and they were hunted to extinction. It took the Spanish to introduce ridable horses to their possession in the Americas in the 1500s.I'm sure Ray Harryhausen would have done as well with a saber-toothed tiger as he did with a T-Rex or a triceratops. The basic plot needn't have changed, but the relationship between Tumac, his father, and his brother might have been softened a bit. You don't have to get rid of the sibling rivalry entirely, but it doesn't have to be lethal.Still, fun to watch.

****SPOILERS**** Tumak, John Richardson,kicked out of his caveman tribe the Rock People for grabbing a piece of pork roast without the permission of his old man the tribal chieftain Akoba, Robert Bown, is left to die in the wilderness until when he's just about done in, from the broiling sun and starvation,Tumak wakes up out of his delirium and thinks that he just died and went to heaven. There's this bevy of sexy and well endowed women looking like California beach girls out fishing and playing catch by the shore! Leading the golden girls is beautiful and tanned Loana, Requel Welch, who takes a liking to Tumak in his very cave-man like appearance. It's when Tumak fights off the giant turtle with the help of Loana fellow Shell People that her liking the good-looking and a bit uncouth, especially in his eating habits, Tumak turns to love.This attraction of Loana to the outsider, from the Shell People, has her boyfriend the hot headed Ahot,Jean Weldon,get a bit hot under the collar or caveman suite that leads to a wild confrontation between the two suitors, for Loana affection, with Tumak ending up at first getting the short end of the stick! In the end Tumak not only ends up getting the entire stick but Loana as well as she together with him leaves the Shell People and gets out in the open desert to find their way back to uncivilization in the uncivilized and grunting,in that they never developed a language of their own, Rock People that Tumak belongs too.****SPOILERS*** By now Tumak's brother Sakana , Percy Herbert, took over the leadership of the Rock People by almost killing his pop Akoba by dropping him down a 30 foot embankment as he was holding on, at the edge of a cliff, for dear life after he screwed up in trying to kill a mountain goat to have for dinner. With pops now a broken and disable old man Sakana is more then determined to knock off his brother Tumak in not that he's just a threat to his leadership of the clan but that he never really liked Tumak in the first place! Meanwhile Loana has her own troubles with Tumak's Rock & Roll, from the Rock Clan, girlfriend Nupondi, Martine Boswick, who's jealous as hell at her for taking her handsome caveman, Tumak, away from her! This leads to a wild cat fight between the two cave women that ends with the proverbial sh*t hitting the fan when after both the Shell and Rock people start rumbling in the rock pile that all of a sudden the local volcano, as if on cue, erupts and finally puts an end to all this pre historic insanity!P.S Requel Welch at age 25 was never more beautiful and real, before her almost 30 years of involvement in cosmetic surgery, in the movie "One Million years B.C" which made her almost overnight the ultimate sex symbol of the 1960's and 1970's for every red blooded American boy as well as boy the world over. Little did we know at the time that within three years after making the movie Raquel would show her true acting ability, besides her 37-24-36 vital statistics, in film classics, ranking right up there with "Citizen Kane" & "Casablanca", like "Flearup" & Myra Breckenridge".