Les Femmes préhistoriques

There's a scene at the beginning, which continues at the end, forming a frame for the main portion of this tale, and features a tribe of Negroes dancing. The star of this show is a young woman wearing her bottom very low on her slender loins.

Later, Martine Beswick, as the evil queen, does a strip tease/bikini dance to entice her male captive. He rejects her, so I doubt his balls are intact! Then she gets pissed and lashes out at him with a whip.

I suspect this movie is some brunette's fantasy about brutalizing the blondes they are jealous of, since the slave girls are all blondes, and the mistress race is all brunette.

David (Michael Latimer), a hunting guide in the jungle, must dispatch a wounded leopard. In the process, David's inadvertently enters the sacred ground of the white rhino. That is a no-no; so, David must die. He touches the rhino's horn which opens a door to pre-history. We go in with him and the adventure begins.

This is part of the Hammer prehistoric collection and has the same feel, including actresses. The storyline is consistent and well organized. Of course, all the native dances are hokey but what do you expect from a 1967 jungle rendition? One day archaeologists will find that they did wear fur bikinis.

What "Prehistoric Women" lacks above all is conviction: the backdrops look painted, the hairlines are too neat, the speech is too modern-sounding, the sets look stagy. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense (how exactly the "legend of the white rhinoceros" is tied to the rest of the story is never made entirely clear), Michael Latimer is a bland lead and the pace is padded with lots of tribal dancing. The new DVD version presents the movie in widescreen: you do win extra "information" on the sides of the picture, but on the other hand you lose what appear to be (in the full-screen trailers for the movie) some juicy closeups of Beswick's and Ronay's abs. (**)

Michael Latimer stars as a hunting guide in Africa who runs afoul of a tribe that worships a white rhino god. Through a fairly silly turn of events, he gets chucked into the distant past where a tribe of brunette cave women lead by Martine Beswick have enslaved a tribe of blonde cave women making them do nifty dances and work in the mines and stuff. Nobody seems to like this one ... I do. I admit that it's incredibly silly, but I refuse to dislike a film where Beswick dances in an animal hide bikini. Shame on anyone who thinks otherwise.

There's a priceless line of dialog here. Wicked queen Martine Beswick orders her slave girls to dance, even though one of their colleagues has recently been killed. The girls do a half-hearted dance number. Martine complains about their lethargy. One of the slave girls explains: "When the heart is heavy, so are the feet."