Slave Girls (1967)

Well Deserved Praise

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

I'm not really sure what the filmmakers were thinking when they made "Prehistoric Women". Was it a latter-day male fantasy movie? Was it intended as a feminist drama? Did the screenwriter like brunettes more than blondes? Whatever the motivation, you really must watch the film to believe what I'm about to write. A great white hunter in Africa (David, played by Michael Latimer) gets lost and blunders into a female civilization in which brunettes have enslaved blondes. I mean, they really have. The brunette queen Kari is none other than Martine Beswick. When David rejects her advances, he's thrown into a dungeon with enslaved and shackled males who perform menial chores. While there, David meets an old slave (Dido Plumb) who shows him the ropes while being mercilessly beaten by sadistic male guards. There are lots of ceremonial native dances, a bizarre marriage ritual involving a white rhinoceros, and much inane dialogue before the men are fed up and finally decide to revolt. After much cartoonish violence (none of it very convincing) the evil queen is impaled on the white rhino's horn, after which David eventually returns to his hunting party and experiences a very predictable twist ending.The interactions between Latimer and Beswick, and especially between Latimer and Plumb are the highlights of the movie. Some of the most laughable scenes ever committed to film occur in the dungeon and during the female tribe's rituals. One of the best lines: David (after watching a dungeon guard beat the old slave): "He hates you! Why?" Old slave: "The man he used to hate died last week." The scene in which the old slave's shackles are removed after 50 years are especially amusing, since Plumb asks "Are we free?" several times before dropping dead. It's impossible not to laugh when you hear dialogue like that.Depending on your taste for bad cinema, "Prehistoric Women" will either leave you shaking your head or make you laugh during the entire movie. I laughed like a hyena, and I think you will too.

SLAVE GIRLS (aka PREHISTORIC WOMEN) is undoubtedly one of the worst of all the Hammer Films productions; it's a cheap, cheerful, inordinately cheesy outing that sees a rugged adventurer hero captured by a tribe of savage warrior women who proceed to torture him until he manages to lead a slave revolt against them.I was most surprised to find out that this is the film that CARRY ON UP THE JUNGLE spoofs so well, memorably featuring Valerie Leon in much the same role as Martine Beswick here. The spoof is much funnier than this supposedly serious original. SLAVE GIRLS suffers from endless padding in terms of choreographed dance routines and native chanting, plus some absolutely awful special effects, from rubbery jungle plantation to a rhino attack at the climax which sees the rhino rolling along on a trolley.Sure, the film boasts plenty of attractive starlets in their fur bikinis (in a bid to attract male attention after the success of Raquel Welch in ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., no doubt) but the acting is very poor and the script even worse. You do have to wonder what they were thinking; this feels more like a cheap Monogram programmer of the 1940s than a colourful Hammer romp as it should have been.

Hammer hokum about a hunter with high-waisted pants who finds himself in a jungle kingdom where pretty brunettes rule over pretty blondes (I kid you not). The brunettes' horny leader (Martine Beswick) takes a liking to him but he's more into blondes. Drama ensues. Cheesy Hammer 'lost world' film with a campy performance from sexy Martine Beswick. Love that seductive dance scene. It may seem tame by today's standards but I'm sure in the '60s a movie full of babes in fur bikinis was very titillating. Lots of unintentionally funny lines and situations. The very premise of brunettes enslaving blondes is laughable. It's no classic but it is goofy fun. Not the kind of movie you really can or should take seriously.

There can't be many films sillier than "Slave Girls" (a.k.a "Prehistoric Women"). This absurd farrago from the folks at Hammer is an attempt by them to wring a few extra profits out of the sets and costumes from their earlier hit "One Million Years B.C." Scripted, produced and directed by Michael Carreras, "Slave Girls" is a film that invites derision wherever it is seen – Maltin refers to it as "idiotic", while Halliwell calls it "feebly preposterous". What neither of them remembers to mention is that the film retreats so far into its own outlandish unreality that it somehow rises above – (or should that be sinks below?) – criticism on normal terms. The film exists in two versions – the British cut running for approximately 74 minutes, and the longer 90 minute American version. This is a review of the American cut.In Africa, a game hunter called David Marchant (Michael Latimer) is organising a leopard hunt for his safari party. Unfortunately, the leopard is injured but not killed by an over-eager member of the party, so Marchant feels obliged to follow the animal into dangerous tribal territory to perform its mercy killing. He is discovered by the tribe whose territory he has trespassed into and they take him away to be killed in front of their idol, the White Rhinoceros. During the sacrificial ritual, a strange lightning bolt opens a crack in the cave wall and Marchant escapes through it. However, his problems have only just begun, for he finds himself going through some kind of time warp into a past dimension. Here, a tribe of dark-haired women have total control of the region and keep fair-haired women as slaves for their personal gratification. The leader of the dark-hairs is the cruel and treacherous Queen Kari (Martine Beswick). She wants Marchant to be her mate and even offers to share power with him if he accepts, but he is appalled by her tyranny and refuses. One of the blonde slaves, the beautiful Saria (Edina Ronay), senses that Marchant might be able to liberate the enslaved fair-hairs from Queen Kari's terrible rule, so she sets about persuading him to join them in their struggle for freedom."Slave Girls" has a cult following, and from a brief description of its plot it's not hard to see why. Films like this don't get made very often!?! The most incredible thing about the film is that it is so deadly serious – not a single tongue to be found in a single cheek despite the sheer lunacy on display. Latimer as the hero is hopelessly wooden, but the two central female parts are played with admirable gusto by Beswick and Ronay. If they feel any sense of embarrassment in performing their roles – and surely they must – they hide it with remarkable courage, and enter fully into the spirit of things. The photography is technically quite good, and Carlo Martelli's melodramatic music adds an earnest sense of drama to the ridiculous proceedings. "Slave Girls" is an almost impossible film to review because it bears all the hallmarks of a 1-out-of-10 bomb, yet to rate it so lowly seems grossly unfair. It deserves two stars for sheer courage, another for its leading female performances, and one more for technical proficiency. Awful it might be, but at least it's ENJOYABLY awful!