User reviews

In 1966, Hammer studios gave the world its cave-girl classic One Million Years B.C., which featured a bevy of fur bikini-clad beauties, including the pneumatic Raquel Welch and the lissom Martine Beswick. The next year, obviously unwilling to consign a wardrobe full of skimpy animal-skin costumes to the skip, they also made Prehistoric Women (AKA Slave Girls), a ridiculous jungle adventure which saw Beswick once again playing a wildcat with a nasty streak.

Written and directed by Michael Carreras, Prehistoric Women is technically one of Hammer's weakest efforts: a poorly scripted studio-bound clunker with an unbelievably daft plot and some mind-numbingly bad performances. However, it is also one of those rare films that manages to be consistently entertaining simply thanks to its unrelenting awfulness.

Michael Latimer plays David Marchand, a jungle guide who is taken captive by savage, white rhinoceros worshipping natives who intend to sacrifice him to their god. Just as he is about to be killed, David touches their sacred rhino statue, which freezes time and opens a doorway into a kingdom where a tribe of big-breasted, brunette beauties, led by the heartless Queen Kari (Beswick), have enslaved a tribe of equally-buxom blonde babes.

After falling for a slave girl named Saria (Edina Ronay), and witnessing Kari's cruelty, David vows to help the blonde women overthrow their oppressors, a task made all the more difficult when he is clapped in irons for spurning Kari's sexual advances.

Featuring loads of native song and dance numbers to pad out the action (including a nifty solo routine from Beswick, who might not be the prettiest of Hammer's women, but certainly has one hell of a hot bod!), the occasional cat-fight, a gloriously naff jungle battle, and a silly surprise ending that makes no sense whatsoever, this film is sheer nonsense from start to finish. But it's fun nonsense, which earns itself a rating of 6/10 from this easily pleased viewer.

And, if nothing else, I did learn a vital lesson in jungle survival: never bow down in front of a charging rhino (even if it looks like it is made from papier-mâché and is being pulled along on a trolley!).

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. (**)

A goofy Hammer movie whose sole raison d'etre seems to be to disprove the old adage that blondes have more fun, "Prehistoric Women" (1967) certainly did have me laffing out loud. In it, great white hunter David Marchant (unconvincingly portrayed by pretty boy Michael Latimer) is captured by Aftrican tribesmen for hunting on their lands. One lightning stroke later, Marchant finds himself in a land where brunette women rule, where hotty blondes are slaves, and in which Queen Kari (Martine Beswick) rules over all in the service of the white rhinoceros god. We never exactly find out whether or not Marchant has been zapped back in time, or whether he is in present-day Africa, or is dreaming. Maybe he's hallucinating with a bad case of dengue fever! By the end of this picture, I promise you, you'll be too brain dead to care. The film is as campy as can be--almost on a par with "Cobra Woman" (1944)!--with loads of priceless dialogue and situations. The natives' singing and dancing routines will surely have you howling! The only real special effect to speak of is Martine's abdomen; her superflat tummy looks like the result of 50,000 grueling sit-ups! Actually, Beswick is remarkably sexy in her regal role, and the picture drags whenever she's not on screen. A preposterous back story doesn't help matters either. My main man H. Rider Haggard, "the father of lost-race fiction," would flip in his grave if he ever saw this movie. Still, it's supposedly better than the 1950 American original. I can't even imagine...

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!

David (Latimer) is a guide to an African expedition. The fool he's working for shoots, but only injures a leopard. David goes to put the leopard out of its' misery, and unknowingly enters the land of The Sacred Great White Rhinoceros, which is guarded by fierce natives. They capture David, and their leader speaks English. He sentences David to death, while the others babble and wail nonsense (literally "ooga booga--listen for the phrase). David escapes, and wanders further into the Rhino's land. He is captured, this time by unfriendly women. You can guess the rest of the plot.

The only acting required is to keep a straight face throughout the silliness. Beswick succeeds admirably at this, and went on to better, more dignified roles with Hammer and AIP ( 1971's "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde", 1974's "Seizure", etc.). Ronay succeeds. Latimer has a hard time keeping from smiling and in one instance, laughing.

The script is laughable. It goes from business-like British, to nonsense, to pseudo-Biblical talk among the second group that captures Michael. For those who've seen "Carry On: Up the Jungle" (1970), there are two scenes from PW satirized in that film.

The movie shows as much T and A as Hammer dared in the mid 60's. It doesn't take a Freudian to figure out what these women are worshiping. Could be appreciated on a "so bad it's good" scale.

And so will yours-for decent entertainment,if you make it all the way through this tripe. Made by Hammer Studios, the once-legendary specialists in literate horror films, ''Prehistoric Women'' (aka ''Slave Girls'') features Michael Latimer as David Marchant, a Great White Hunter who, chasing a wounded Leopard, runs afoul of a group of hostile natives who sentence him to death for disturbing their Kingdom. But, as Fate, or the screenwriters would have it, he suddenly finds himself thrust back in time to yet another Kingdom where Brunette women have enslaved all the Blondes they can get their whips on. The reasons for this are too silly to go into, but one involves the worship of a White Rhino, which is also The God of another tribe of warriors called the ''Devils Of Darkness''. Anyway, the Brunettes are headed by the beautiful but cruel Queen Kari (Martine Beswick) who takes an immediate fancy to Marchant. Alas, he has fallen in love with Blonde slave Saria (Edina Ronay) who eventually convinces him to lead the female (and a few ancient male) slaves in a revolution. So goes the ''plot''. The film is beautifully photographed in color and CinemaScope on sets left over from Hammer's remake of ''One Million Years B.C''. The acting (especially by the incredibly sensuous Beswick)is not bad,and the women, both Blonde and Brunette are easy on the eyes. But the pacing is excruciatingly slow, the story dull, and the only moments of true entertainment come from a Command Performance by the Blondes who Dance nightly for the Queen's Dinner Show.Oh yes, and the appearance of the plastic White Rhino at the climax. The musical score sounds as if it was written for a 60's Bible Spectacle, and there is virtually no direction by Michael Carreras. This sat on the shelf for two years in it's Native England, before Hammer released it (shorn of at least 16 minutes) as a second feature, while in the not-so-lucky U.S, it showed up in 1967 supported by another Hammer production, the infinitely superior ''The Witches'' retitled ''The Devil's Own'' here. Both are available on very impressive dvds, but ''Prehistoric Women'' is best left to Pre-History.

There's a priceless line of dialog here. Wicked queen Martine Beswick orders her slave girls to dance, even though one of their colleagues has recently been killed. The girls do a half-hearted dance number. Martine complains about their lethargy. One of the slave girls explains: "When the heart is heavy, so are the feet."

David (Michael Latimer), a hunting guide in the jungle, must dispatch a wounded leopard. In the process, David's inadvertently enters the sacred ground of the white rhino. That is a no-no; so, David must die. He touches the rhino's horn which opens a door to pre-history. We go in with him and the adventure begins.

This is part of the Hammer prehistoric collection and has the same feel, including actresses. The storyline is consistent and well organized. Of course, all the native dances are hokey but what do you expect from a 1967 jungle rendition? One day archaeologists will find that they did wear fur bikinis.

"Prehistoric Women" is the most endearing and lovable of Hammer Films' Cave Girls In Trouble films. I fell in love with it instantly during a late night creature feature screening at the age of 14 or so and pursued it for years before finally managing to tape it off cable. Now there are wonderful DVD releases of restored widescreen prints & home entertainment really never had it so good. It's garbage for sure but exquisite garbage, a kitschy sendup of Great White Hunter films that is so poker-faced that one is often tempted to conclude that Hammer was trying to be serious here.

Mesmerizingly filmed on interior soundstages made up to look like what a juvenile might think a jungle resembles, the film packs the visual authority of a classic "Star Trek" episode with a plot more fitting for a Playboy magazine cartoon. It's fun, sexy, campy, never boring, and perhaps the ultimate (sic) Jungal Trash movie, where white Anglo types go to exotic jungle locations to have all sorts of fascinating adventures, while the natives carry the luggage.

Martine Beswick may have found fame as a Bond girl ("From Russia With Love", "Thunderball") but her iconic image as a topless primal sex goddess rising from a dappled fake studio jungle pool will stick with me at least for the rest of my days. One might have wished that the movie had been made a couple years later so she could have turned to face the camera with her wonderful breasts, but half of the film's charm is that it was made during a different era. The tension between the juvenile sex fantasy it suggests and the need for staid British respectability (cough) adds to the fun.

A word must be said about the slack-jawed, lunk-headed portrayal of the native population of wherever this film is supposedly set. It's not racist so much as ignorant, or rather accuracy and cultural sensitivity were not the objectives. Same goes for the misogyny and sexism of the movie, which is buffoonish and groan-inducing, but hey, the target audience was white European males between the ages of 12 and 75, or whenever men stop responding to suggestive fantasies about cavorting with blond slave girls or being dominated by mean, leggy, shapely brunettes. Hubba-Hubba.

If you don't fall into that demographic you might want to try something else a bit more sober, or even better yet just down a couple of adult beverages & have fun laughing at the movie. And surprisingly there really isn't any content that goes beyond PG sensibilities and is actually wholesome enough for subversively twisted family entertainment. Just explain to the kids that it's a cartoon, really, and has about as much in common with the real world as a Three Stooges short. Great escapist guilty pleasure fun, and just as silly as it was in 1967. May it stay just as silly for another forty two years.

7/10; Check out something called "Luana - The Lady Tarzan" for the Italians' take on the themes at work here. The two would make a marvelous double-bill for a kitsch film festival or DVD rental night.

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!

David Merchant (Michael Lattimer), while big game hunting, stumbles through a time (or whatever) warp. He encounters a "prehistoric"-type situation, first with African tribesmen, then falls into a setting in which cavewoman-garbed-bikini-clad blond girls are enslaved by similarly clad dark-haired women, led by the evil Queen Kari, played by Martine Beswick. Men are also enslaved, kept inside caves. In fairness, there is a background to the enslavement based on misdeeds as well, but in any event, the slaves wait in "spiritual bondage" until the legend of the "White Rhino" is fulfilled. The best scenes are the dancing scenes with the blond slave girls, and most of all, a dance by the statuesque Kari as part of her attempt to take David as her lover and offer him part of the throne, altho in return for her effective subservience to him. He resists here advances, because of her evil, and because his girl is the slave girl Saria (Edina Ronay). There is, as might be expected, a rousing climax.

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.

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.

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.

RELEASED IN 1967 and written/directed by Michael Carreras, "Prehistoric Women" (aka "Slave Girls") chronicles events in deepest Africa when a hunting guide (Michael Latimer) enters the forbidden area of the white rhino and passes through a portal into a prehistoric world where dark-haired white women led by Queen Kari (Martine Beswick) cruelly rule over blondes. Meanwhile, all men are kept captive in a cave dungeon, which is where the guide will find himself if he doesn't submit to Kari's amorous whims.

Beswick is striking and has a killer body, but she never tripped my trigger, maybe because she seems too Amazonian. Regardless, the flick's filled with gorgeous women, including the protagonist's wannabe babe, Saria (Edina Ronay). The indoor English sets are too obvious, contrasted by the authentic opening location shots.

There are so many curious native dance sequences that the movie borders on being a musical. Thankfully, they're entertaining and the tribal ditties are catchy. The story seems to be a commentary on gender dynamics from a late 60's English perspective, but the film's too cheesy to take overly serious. Nevertheless, it has its points of interest, particularly the prehistoric women (lol).

THE MOVIE RUNS 1 hour 30 minutes and was shot in England (Elstree Studios, Borehamwood) with establishing shots of Africa.

GRADE: C

SLAVE GIRLS (aka PREHISTORIC WOMEN) is undoubtedly one of the worst of all the Hammer Films productions; it's a cheap, cheerful, inordinately cheesy outing that sees a rugged adventurer hero captured by a tribe of savage warrior women who proceed to torture him until he manages to lead a slave revolt against them.

I was most surprised to find out that this is the film that CARRY ON UP THE JUNGLE spoofs so well, memorably featuring Valerie Leon in much the same role as Martine Beswick here. The spoof is much funnier than this supposedly serious original. SLAVE GIRLS suffers from endless padding in terms of choreographed dance routines and native chanting, plus some absolutely awful special effects, from rubbery jungle plantation to a rhino attack at the climax which sees the rhino rolling along on a trolley.

Sure, the film boasts plenty of attractive starlets in their fur bikinis (in a bid to attract male attention after the success of Raquel Welch in ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., no doubt) but the acting is very poor and the script even worse. You do have to wonder what they were thinking; this feels more like a cheap Monogram programmer of the 1940s than a colourful Hammer romp as it should have been.

A lot of scantily clad women showing off their pulchritude and doing some exotic dance moves is the best reason I can think of to watch Prehistoric Women. If you find others let me know.

Michael Latimer white safari guide in 19th century Africa gets caught by a nasty tribe who's been that way for several centuries ever since someone took their white rhinoceros god away. Latimer goes into some She like fire and emerges back in time when the social pecking order was brunette amazons rule with blond slaves and an even lower caste, men.

But Queen Martine Beswick is getting a booty call and she thinks the newcomer Latimer is the best who can scratch that itch. But Latimer has decided to throw in with the blonds and overthrow the social order.

That's it folks, about as dumb a plot as you'll ever find in a film. I'm sure even the great rhinoceros didn't approve of this sacrilege to his name.

As for the ending, all I can say is that someone was reading Mark Twain or seeing the Bing Crosby classic, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. You do better to see that.

"Prehistoric Women" is a terrible film and probably the worst thing to come from Hammer Studios. If there is worse, I don't know about it and I would appreciate for you to email me to set me straight! Unfortunately, it's a really bad movie but not necessarily an enjoyably bad film...but it comes rather close. It IS kitschy, silly and will make you wonder why they bothered making such a pile of crap in the first place. And, you know it is bad when it is willed with beautiful and sexy women...and it's STILL boring!

When the film begins, a hunter (Michael Latimer) wanders into the territory of some very unfriendly natives. They capture him and toss him into the territory of some brunette savages that have perfectly coiffed hair, hot bodies, perfect English and an overwhelming desire to beat the crap out of the blonde women and have their way with the hunter. But David the hunter is an egalitarian sort of guy and doesn't want to have his way with the cruel brunette (Martine Beswick), even though she is smoking hot, because he is put off by the plight of the blondies. So, to punish him for not being a hot stud, they toss him into a cave with all their enslaved men and he helps to eventually lead a slave revolt.

While the plot doesn't sound 100% dumb, it IS. The film is chock full of dancing...very, very bad dancing which I think was choreographed by a goat. And, the dialog is just god-awful and clichéd. Is there anything good about the film other than the generally beautiful women wearing loin cloths? No.

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.

I was not impressed. I enjoy Amazon themed films and what guy doesn't enjoy watching dozens of nubile young blondes dancing around a campfire? But in this case the film lacks any substance whatsoever. The lead character is a guy named David (Michael Latimer) who is supposed to be an African big game hunter but instead he is the one who gets caught by a tribe of hot lusty women.

So boy meets girl, or should I say boy meets two girls. One blonde slave girl, and one brunette princess who wants to shag our male hero David. There is absolutely no good action or thriller scenes in this film. I thought the amount of time wasted on a variety of tribal dance scenes that went on way too long wasted almost one third of the entire film which made the film even more boring if that was even possible.

I give it a higher than deserved 3 out of 10 rating because of the blonde slave girls who were hot and abundant, but other than that you could get the same thrill out of scanning through a few pages of some old National Geographic magazines.

Don't be fooled by the wildlife footage that opens this film, once the credits are over it's strictly a soundstage job.

Martine Beswick's Nupondi was so obviously the best thing in 'One Million Years B. C.' that back at Elstree Michael Carreras rewarded her by giving her a film to herself; and it's her commanding presence as She Who Must Be Obeyed presiding over a tribe of big-haired brunettes with Roedean accents that worships the Rare White Rhino and enslaves the local blondes that earns this delirious piece of hokum of the kind not seen since the days of Maria Montez 10 out of 10; and was the reason that when Michael Latimer died a few years ago the poor fellow was upstaged in his own obituary in 'The Daily Telegraph' by a colour photograph of Miss Beswick.

The music by Carlo Martelli isn't bad either; but I can't imagine it must have been much fun for members of Kari's tribe to just stand about just holding spears all day.