Prehistoric Women

source: Prehistoric Women

Trailer—Slave Girls

Slave Girls

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.

Hammer hokum about a hunter with high-waisted pants who finds himself in a jungle kingdom where pretty brunettes rule over pretty blondes (I kid you not). The brunettes' horny leader (Martine Beswick) takes a liking to him but he's more into blondes. Drama ensues. Cheesy Hammer 'lost world' film with a campy performance from sexy Martine Beswick. Love that seductive dance scene. It may seem tame by today's standards but I'm sure in the '60s a movie full of babes in fur bikinis was very titillating. Lots of unintentionally funny lines and situations. The very premise of brunettes enslaving blondes is laughable. It's no classic but it is goofy fun. Not the kind of movie you really can or should take seriously.

At last, somebody was bold enough to make a movie in which cave people speak English! Heck, why not? Movie goers have heard English dialogue spoken as the apparent native language of Indians, Africans, Egyptians, Romans, Japanese, Chinese, Martians, Venusians, and Metalunans. This Hammer production was made on the same sets as "One Million Years B.C.", released the year before. Martine Beswick is featured in both films. Pretty girls abound in this story of two all-female tribes -- one all blond, the other all brunette. The brunettes are ruled by Miss Beswick in royal bear skin cap and a crown of big animal teeth. Her tribe enslaves the blondes, including the well-endowed Edina Ronay. This manless society of frustrated females is discovered by hunter Michael Latimer. Ah ha! This movie isn't about prehistoric times, it's just about prehistoric women. No wonder they speak English!

That is certainly what David, the handsome explorer, thinks, after falling in love with the beautiful blonde slave Saria with whom he has a brief encounter in the jungle before being arrested by the wild and sexy brunette queen Kari. I certainly think that my first love for the theatrical release of "Slave Girls" is much above the USA television screening of "Prehistoric Girls" - lacking 90% of the fighting action between Martine Beswick and two slave girls (she was a queen who did not leave the fighting for her bodyguards) - and the beauty of the actresses in the big screen. Helas, cinema is dead, and even the TV version exists only in a few private recordings, and no video edition. Good cult film, it was.

Michael Carreras directed this campy prehistoric film that stars Michael Latimer as African big game hunter David Marchant who is captured by a hostile tribe and taken to a temple guarded by a white rhino. A lightning bolt hits the temple, splitting a wall, which David runs through and into the past, where two rival, warring(and beautiful!) all-female tribes(one blonde, the other brunette) vie for his attentions, though the brunette Queen Kari(played by Martine Beswick) is particularly ruthless, and will stop at nothing to either possess David, or kill him... Silly film is nonetheless semi-watchable, and almost works as a guilty pleasure, though not a minute of it rings true!

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.

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. (**)