Creatures the World Forgot ** (1971, Julie Ege, Brian O’Shaughnessy, Tony Bonner, Robin John) – Classic Movie Review 2441

Julie Ege stars as top cave-dweller Nala the Girl in director Don Chaffey’s amusingly daft 1971 follow-up to his One Million Years BC (1966), Slave Girls (1967) and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970). The fourth and last of Hammer’s Cave Girl films, it again trades heavily on the audience appeal of scantily clad tribeswomen. 

Bizarrely, even Hammer Films forgot the creatures, as they don’t appear, hugely frustrating audiences lured by the title. So it lacks the joys of the stop-motion dinosaurs of the first and third of the series. Alas, as well as no monsters, there is no Raquel Welch or Martine Beswick, and virtually no dialogue to speak of, apart from a few grunts and gestures.

There is a lot of jumping about in furry loin-cloths as cavemen quarrel and fight, and that’s about it in producer Michael Carreras’s screenplay. There’s nothing much else of note in the movie, apart from some female nudity and a not very well-staged earthquake.

Carreras’s plot concentrates on the daily struggle to survive of a tribe of Stone Age men. Cavemen twins – Rool  The Dark Boy (Robin John) and Toomak The Fair Boy (Tony Bonner) – fall out over Ege’s Nala and the right to rule when their father dies, and other knuckle-draggers also have the hots for Ege. Brian O’Shaughnessy is Mak the Father, Marcia Fox is Noo the Mother and poor Rosalie Crutchley is cast as The Old Crone.

Also in the cast are Gerard Bonthuys (Young Toomak), Hans Kiesouw (Young Rool), Josje Kiesouw (Young Dumb Girl), Frank Hayden and Don Leonard.

If a small cult following had not revived interest in it, it could have been retitled The Movie that Time Forgot.

It was filmed at Pinewood Studios, London, and all of the exterior sequences were shot in Namibia and South Africa.

Ege appeared in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Helen, the Scandinavian girl. She is fondly remembered as Voluptua in the 1971 Frankie Howerd film Up Pompeii. When Lance Percival says to her, ‘Madame, it’s a pleasure,’ she replies: ‘Yes, I know. I’ve tried it.’

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2441

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