You have to miss the prehistoric age, when cave men, dressed in furs, grunted and hit each other with clubs. The life!- one minute, killing a wild boar, the next, scooped up by a gigantic pterodactyl. Alas, if there were two things learned in high school science class, they were that Charles Darwin sailed a ship called the Beagle and dinosaurs and cavemen never coexisted during the course of Earth’s history, as unfortunate as that may be.
One Million Years B.C. is produced by Hammer Films, a London-based production company that specialized in horror and science fiction throughout the 1950’s and up until the 1980’s. The film follows a band of primitive cavemen operating under one “alpha male” who demonstrates his superiority by grunting and cutting to the front of the line during dinner. When one dashing caveman (John Richardson), replete with perfect beard, is banished from the clan after a fight with his tribe’s alpha male, he roams the vast wasteland of Earth chased by giant lizards and turtles, meeting an attractive cave woman (Raquel Welch) and falling in love, as prehistoric monstrosities swoop down from jagged cliffs and try to snatch the two humans up.
The real star of the film is Ray Harryhausen, the special effects master who creates stop-motion pterodactyls and triceratops amongst a variety of other creatures. Harryhausen is a prominent figure in stop motion model animation, inspired by King Kong in 1933. His creations would often interact with the live-action world, as in One Million Years B.C. where they are featured in wide-angle shots, and then subtly interspersed with close-ups of the characters reactions. The result is wonderfully dated, an ode to rudimentary special effects marked by individual ingenuity rather than computer technology and rendering software.
Harryhausen’s effects and Wilkie Cooper’s camerawork create what amounts to a positively inconceivable plot , tethered by emotive, word-free performances and a surprisingly vivid prehistoric landscape; why they chose the assertive “This is the Way It Was” as a tagline for the entirely hypothetical events cannot be said, but Harryhausen did not expect professors to see One Million Years B.C..
It really would be nice to once in awhile read a movie review that would intelligently discuss the pros and cons of a particular film and one that would treat the artists involved with at least the minimum of respect. Alas, with “mantis fist” (whatever that is) that is evidently not going to be the case.
I would urge folks who wish to read a serious, thoughtful review of ONE MILLION YEARS BC to do some “googling” . It wont be too difficult to find writers who speak about the picture sensibly and without resorting to Junior High School level verbiage.
For my money, while ONE MILLION YEARS BC is not the best Ray Harryhausen film ever made it is clearly entertaining and those lucky enough to have seen the complete, uncut 100-minute British version (that was available on laserdisc some years back) will surely agree.
If you’re looking to ‘One Million Years B.C.’ for religious weight, you are deluding yourself… I went off on this movie because it is an exploitative B-movie. If one were able to find a “serious” review of this film, it would no doubt be by a biased source that enjoys the idea of man and dinosaur coexisting during the 2,500 year history of the earth- just watch ‘Religulous’ for the proper criticism of ‘One Million Years B.C.’