When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth *** (1970, Victoria Vetri, Robin Hawdon, Patrick Allen) – Classic Movie Review 2,435

The lovely, exotic-looking Playboy 1968 Playmate of the Year Victoria Vetri stars as the scantily clad cave girl Sanna, in Hammer Films’ amusing 1970 film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Writer-director Val Guest’s daft but amusing 1970 Hammer Films’ follow-up to One Million Years BC (1966) casts lovely, exotic-looking former Playboy 1968 Playmate of the Year Victoria Vetri as the scantily clad leading cave-lady Sanna.

The film is fondly recalled, as referenced in the 1993  Jurassic Park, with a large banner hanging in the island visitors’ centre, again shown in the 2025 sequel Jurassic World Rebirth.

Vetri’s co-star is the hunky Robin Hawdon as her prehistoric pal Tara, and the duo live in a celluloid dreamworld never-never land when people co-existed with dinosaurs, albeit none too peacefully apparently. Any real acting, though, comes from Patrick Allen as Kingsor. Allen also provides the opening narration.

There’s very little plot, but the screenplay is held back by being severely restricted to a 27-word caveman language that was ingeniously devised for the movie, supposedly drawing on Phoenician, Latin and Sanskrit sources. The dialogue includes such gems as ‘N’ yde krasta m’kan neecro redak’ which means ‘come fast kill evil flying monster’.

Key words in the caveman language are: “neecha” = “stop” or “come back”; “zak” = “gone” or “left”; “akita” = “look” or “see”; “neecro” = “bad” or “evil”; “m’kan” = “kill” or “killed”; “mata” = “dead” and “yo kita” = “go”.

Val Guest recalled: ‘As there was no language in it, it was all made-up language, nobody had to learn their lines.’

A small cliff-top tribe hopes to survive by sacrificing three blonde women to their Sun God in return for protection from the giant lizards and other creatures preying on them. Sacrificial offering Sanna is saved when a freak storm interrupts the ceremony, escapes and jumps off the cliff. She is rescued by Tara and some men on a raft, but her search for a safety is imperilled by rival tribes and huge and deadly dinosaurs.

Jim Danforth and Roger Dicken’s old-style stop-motion visual effects in the Ray Harryhausen style are impressive (at least for their day) and were Oscar nominated (losing to Bedknobs and Broomsticks). Created at the effects unit at Bray Studios, they include the birth of a cute baby dinosaur and giant crabs. David W Allen made the crab puppet from a real crab shell, and Dicken added scary horns and spikes. Dicken sculpted the plesiosaur (animated by Danforth), the Tylosaurus, the feet of the Rhamphorhynchus and model humans. They are considered a benchmark in stop-motion animation believability. Sadly, many scenes were cancelled through lack of time and money.

Respected director Val Guest is responsible for the brain-in-neutral script from a story, or treatment, by famed author J G Ballard (Empire of the Sun, Crash), but makes amends with his entertaining direction.

Guest unchivalrously said that Vetri was ‘a real nothing, and a very strange mixed up lady. It was tough to take her. She was a nitwit.’ She refused to have her hair turned blonde from its natural auburn for the film, so, as the story required a blonde woman, Vetri demanded a wig instead.

Nevertheless, Val Guest recalled: ‘The film was a giggle. Hammer asked me if I’d like to do a prehistoric one, and I said “Yes, why not, let’s have a go”‘

The film was released in 1970 in the UK as a double bill with Moon Zero Two (1969). In 1971, Warner Bros reissued the film in the US in a double bill with The Valley of Gwangi (1970) so a lot of fans got to see it. It was popular and grossed $1.25 million in the US on a budget of £566,000.

Vetri said that the four-minute longer UK version of the film contains nude scenes, including Sanna making love to Tara in a cave.

The original uncut version was accidentally released on DVD from Best Buy with a G rating, but quickly recalled. The uncut version was released on Blu-ray in the US on 28 February 2017 and on DVD on 4 April 2017 by Warner Archive.

The film was intended to include a tyrannosaurus, but the very conservative head of Hammer ordered Guest and Danforth to remove the creature because he thought it resembled the stereotypical stance of gay men!

The landscapes of Earth during the Quaternary period were filmed in Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura (Canary Islands). Locations included Maspalomas beach, Ansite Mountain, Amurga and Caldera de Tejeda.

Cave Girls were in vogue. It is the third in Hammer’s Cave Girl series, preceded by One Million Years BC (1966) and Prehistoric Women [Slave Girls] (1967), and followed by Creatures the World Forgot (1971).

Runtime: 100 minutes (UK) and 96 minutes (US).

The film had its world premiere in London on 1 October 1970 and premiered in the US on 10 February 1971. General release dates: 25 October 1970 (UK) and 10 March 1971 (US).

Victoria Vetri (born September 26, 1944)

A lover of fast cars, Vetri won a pink AMX for being Playmate of the Year in 1968.

She appears briefly, playing Terry Gionoffrio, in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), credited as Angela Dorian. In the film, Rosemary remarks to Vetri’s character Terry that she resembles Victoria Vetri.

Vetri was charged with attempted murder after she allegedly shot Bruce Rathgeb, her husband of 25 years, at close range in their Hollywood apartment on 16 October 2010. On 7 September 2011, after pleading no contest to a charge of attempted voluntary manslaughter, she was sentenced to nine years in prison.  She was released on parole in April 2018, aged 73.

The cast

The cast are Victoria Vetri as Sanna, Robin Hawdon as Tara, Patrick Allen as Kingsor / The Narrator, Drewe Henley as Khaku, Sean Caffrey as Kane, Magda Konopka as Ulido, Imogen Hassall as Ayak, Patrick Holt as Ammon, Carol Hawkins as Yani.

http://derekwinnert.com/the-valley-of-gwangi-1969-james-franciscus-gila-golan-richard-carlson-laurence-naismith-classic-movie-review-2434/

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2.435

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com