“This is the way it was,” claimed posters for One Million Years BC, convincing a generation of school kids that cavemen fought jerky, stop-motion dinosaurs with spears and that troglodyte cave-girls looked like Raquel Welch and wore fur bikinis. Forty years on, Hammer’s mammoth epic has aged like a prehistoric fossil.
Yet, its story of grunting crusties battling a menagerie of T-rexes and giant turtles across a volcanic landscape (actually Canary Islands Tenerife and Lanzarote) remains an important cinematic landmark.
DVD Extras:
“A lot of filmmaking today is simply the reinvention of the wheel,” sagely notes special effects supremo Ray Harryhausen in a brief interview extra, fuelling fans’ claims that this cult classic is the missing link between the original King Kong and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. In her interview slot, Welch (still gorgeous after all these years) proves equally generous about “that silly dinosaur movie” – as she should, since it made her into an international sex symbol.
