Prehistoric Women / Slave Girls (1967) ***

Can a dash of feminism rescue campy trash? Or even a genetics overload? Or is it enough to wonder what career hole Carol White (Never Let Go, 1960) found herself in to end up here? Or should we just sit back and watch the Pan’s People-style choreography and admire the astute re-use of all those bikinis left over from Hammer’s previous venture into this territory, the much more successful One Million Years B.C. (1966). Whatever, there’s no escaping the wooden acting and the one-note direction.

Dennis Wheatley (The Fabulous Valley, The Lost Continent, They Found Atlantis) and C.S. Lewis for that matter had the knack of transporting characters back in time or into other worlds. There’s usually some routine artefact, door or whatnot, that allows access to an amazing kingdom, or, in this case, queendom.

Here, big game hunter David (Michael Latimer), about to be sacrificed to some pagan African god, instead finds himself thrown back in time, chasing bewitching blonde Saria (Edina Romay), who, unfortunately is on the run, so when she is apprehended, so is he. Queen Kari (Martine Beswick) takes him as her lover. But he’s less keen, repulsed by her harsh rule. When one of her subjects rebels, the queen doesn’t delegate the task of bringing her into line but takes her on mano-a-mano. David, put to work with the other male prisoners, soon plots his escape.  

Setting aside the expected mumbo-jumbo – the tribe worships a mythical white rhino (phallic symbol anyone?) for example – if you want to extract anything more from this, there are fresh fields to plunder. For example, brunettes, such as Kari, are in control, but only after rebelling against the blondes who had subjugated the black-haired women in similar fashion as Kari. As well as having a female ruler, the movie makes a relatively pertinent point that gender scarcely comes into it when a dictator imposes such harsh conditions on their subject, Kari, for example, making the blondes eat off the dirt.

I’m not convinced the irony is deliberate. David, scion no doubt of Victorian nobility who made their pile from scarcely paying their downtrodden peasants a living wage, and who goes around shooting leopards, is hardly in a position to ask the queen to cool it. When she even considers giving him some equality – a big role reversal right there – he wants her to treat everyone in a nicer fashion.

And she has the insecurity of Napoleon, needs to be loved, and not in mercenary fashion, and willing to attempt some form of rudimentary seduction if that’s what it takes to tempt the suddenly high-principled David into her bed. There’s an element of upending the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes trope, as though brunettes have always hankered after putting those ditzy blondes in their place.

Hammer lost sight of the fact that One Million Years B.C. owed as much to Ray Harryhausen as the statuesque temptations of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini and in its haste to cash in on that film’s big box office rushed into production a movie minus the battling dinosaurs. Although, of course, they could merely be making historical amends, since everyone knows dinosaurs and man (never mind women in fur bikinis) did not co-exist. And possibly ignored the fact that the puny Michael Latimer was no substitute for the brawnier John Richardson of the previous picture.   

If you’re not so interested in gender politics, you can always enjoy the dancing, which appears to take up a disproportionate amount of time (well, all those bikinis, need to be used). I was disappointed to discover the choreography was not the work of Flick Colby of the legendary BBC TV Top of the Pops dance troupe, but by one Denys Palmer, an actor it appears, whose main claim to fame was appearing in a classic Dr Who episode.

This was triple-hyphenate job, so blame Michael Carreras (The Lost Continent, 1968) for the screenplay and the direction and for taking on the production duties, or praise him for seeding a campy knock-off with issues that register more strongly today.

This was intended to be a big step-up for Michael Latimer but he was so charisma-free that he didn’t score another movie credit until low-budget British B-picture Man of Violence (1970). Martin Beswick (The Penthouse, 1967) never got another shot at a top-billed role. Carol White did better, next up was Poor Cow (1967) and from there it weas a small step to Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969), but she doesn’t stand out here the way she did in Never Let Go (1960). If anyone stole the show it was Edina Ronay, and much good it did her, her next outing was in the lamentable Three (1969).

A curiosity, half-rubbish, half-interesting.