When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

Sanna and two other women are being sacrificed to a glowy thing in the sky for the crime of being born with a blonde wig. But Sanna escapes and is rescued by the handsome Tara from another tribe. He is already paired with the beautiful Ayak, but blonde wig, am I right?

Soon Sanna is cast out by her new tribe because of the glowy thing in the sky, and befriends a dinosaur. Believing her dead, Tara goes about his life of dealing with dinosaur mayhem. It’s the classic story. Cave boy meets cave girl, cave boy loses cave girl …

An unofficial sequel to One Million Years B.C., it features all the tropes of the genre. Scantily clad cave people, nonsense language, throw-away story, hominids coexisting with dinosaurs, and scenes stolen from better pictures, this time The Lost World (1960). At first I thought for a G rated film, the women were wearing some seriously PG-13 costumes. Things escalated when the costumes came off. Only the American edit was G. Still …

The stop-motion dinosaurs and their interactions with the human cast (and not the lizards in prosthetics from The Lost World) were actually quite good, resulting in an Oscar nomination. And Victoria Vetri was quite beautiful. She had a small part in Rosemary’s Baby but her career would never fully take off. She would spend six years in prison for the attempted murder of her husband.

There’s not much else to say about the film. The story really is a nothing burger, not far afield of a modern rom-com. There are quite a few of these films, but I doubt I have the stamina to watch many more. That said, I kind of enjoyed it, even if it was more than a little forgettable. AMRU 3.