One Million Years B.C. (1966)

Directed by Don Chaffey. Starring John Richardson, Raquel Welch, Jean Wladon, Robert Brown, Percy Herbert, Martine Beswick.

Dotty prehistoric adventure of primitive tribes fighting amongst each other and against beastly threats, driven by clashing dinosaurs and a dim-witted innocence that’s hard to find these days. The men all look like sweaty lumberjack hippies, the women look like they showed up for a caveman-themed photoshoot, the dinosaurs look effectively unvarnished and alien (though thirty-plus years has not improved upon the raw exhilaration found in the original King Kong). Aside from some laughable instances where actual animals (iguana, tarantula, etc.) were blown up in size to appear like gigantic ancient versions of themselves, Ray Harryhausen’s effects work is good, but the creatures fail to provide much excitement when the interim material with the grunting, one-dimensional human characters is so uninteresting, sometimes downright dull. Actually, the most eye-popping visual on hand is, of course, gorgeous Welch stuffed into a fur bikini. For the record, it was homo erectus (not homo sapiens) stomping around a million years ago, and dinosaurs had been extinct for a long, long, long time.

43/100