Best movie ever!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

"Blondes have more fun" is what the popular expression says, but this definitely isn't applicable to the prehistoric world perspective of writer/director Val Guest! The blond-haired protagonist of this film leads quite a miserable life as a fugitive and outcast. She – Sanna – initially lives in a tribe for which the sun is their God and they ritually sacrifice their blond family members. During the ceremony in which Sanna is supposed to be sacrificed, a heavy storm breaks loose and she manages to escape. She joins another tribe and immediately receives a lot of male attention, but the brunettes in that tribe promptly invent the behavior female jealousy and poor Sanna is again exiled. Roaming through the raw landscape, she seeks shelter in a broken dinosaur egg shell and mama dinosaur takes custody over her the very next day. I have tremendous respect for Val Guest! After all, he was the director of some of the greatest and most groundbreaking (Hammer) productions such as "The Quatermass Experiment" and "The Abominable Snowman". Val Guest undeniably was a very visionary and intelligent director, but perhaps this bombastic project was *slightly* over- ambitious and unfeasible. There were quite a lot of dinosaur flicks and caveman adventures being released in that era (1960- 1970), but Guest wanted his to be superior and more realistic than the rest. They even invented a specific language existing of 27 different words, but all I ever heard was "akita". Akita, akita, akita! At a certain point I was convinced that "akita" was the primitive word for "boobs" or "cleavage", because literally all women in this film have luscious curves and are scarcely dressed, so I automatically presumed that all males were delirious. Via the trivia section here on the website, I later found out that "akita" simply means "look over there". Bummer! Even though original and clever, the restricted vocabulary of the cast members quickly leads to dull, repetitive and overlong footage. The dinosaurs look impressive enough, thanks to the brilliant expertise of Jim Danforth, but there's too few action and excitement. Besides, the title doesn't make a lot of sense since the dinosaurs are a lot less fierce than most of the women. Speaking of which, did I mention that the women are gorgeous? Blondes or brunettes, prehistoric women are genuine beauties! Akita, dammit

"When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" is sometimes described as a sequel to "One Million Years B.C" from four years earlier, although it does not contain any of the same characters. Both films were, however, made by Hammer Films, and both are based around the premise that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs. This is not, of course, historically correct, but I would not criticise the film on that basis as it was clearly intended as a fantasy rather than a serious historical picture of life in prehistoric times. As in the earlier film, the dinosaurs are realised through stop-motion animation, although Ray Harryhausen, the great pioneer of this technique, did not actually work on the movie in person as he had done in "One Million Years B.C."The main character in the film is an attractive blonde woman named Sanna, who is doomed to be sacrificed to the sun, the normal fate of blondes in her particular tribe. She manages to escape by jumping into the sea, and is rescued by Tara, a young man from another tribe. Tara already has a very pretty and curvaceous brunette girlfriend named Ayak, but it would appear that even in the Palaeolithic Era gentlemen preferred blondes. Tara takes a decided fancy to Sanna and her golden locks, provoking Ayak's furious jealousy. A further complication arises when Sanna's own tribe come looking for her. One of the big attractions of Hammer's "cavemen" films, at least for male audiences, was that they all featured several glamorous actresses in revealing bikini-type costumes. (Those who prefer male flesh to the female variety will be pleased to note that the hirsute male stars all wear even less). "One Million Years B.C." had helped to make a big star of its leading lady, Raquel Welch, and "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" was intended to do the same for the Playboy centrefold Victoria Vetri, but signally failed to do so. Vetri certainly had the looks of a Hollywood goddess, but seemed to lack the indefinable charisma which had taken Welch to the top. Her acting career was perhaps not helped by the fact that she was sometimes billed under her real name and sometimes under the pseudonym "Angela Dorian". I will not try to compare the two ladies' acting skills because films of this nature do not generally require much in the way of acting. There is no comprehensible dialogue in English or any other known language; all the characters speak an invented language consisting of only about two dozen words. (The similar language spoken in "One Million Years B.C." had an even more deficient vocabulary). No subtitles are provided, and exactly what the dialogue means generally remains obscure, although it is occasionally possible to guess the meaning of individual words from the context. (It seems clear, for example, that "makan" means "dead", "to die" and possibly also "to kill", and that "nikro" means "bad" or "evil"). I was surprised to learn that the distinguished author J. G. Ballard had a hand in the script; he was clearly a less fluent writer in Cavemanese than in English. Because they are required to do little more than proclaim nonsense syllables, none of the actors involved, Vetri included, really stand out. (At least, not for reasons other than their physical charms). As in "One Million Years B.C." the real stars are the dinosaurs which are not simply treated as the antagonists of the human characters; Sanna befriends a mother dinosaur and her baby, and this relationship is to play an important role in later plot developments.. This film is less well remembered today than its predecessor, probably because it lacked an iconic star like Raquel Welch, but to my mind it is the better of the two. Certainly, it contains its fair share of nonsense; the early scenes are said to be set "before the moon existed", but the moon clearly exists by the end of the film, implying that it has miraculously been created during the relatively short time-span of the plot. (In fact, Earth's moon is some 4.5 billion years old, much older not only than the human race but also than the dinosaurs). Nevertheless, the plot is more coherent than that of the earlier film, and the animation sequences are even better. The film-makers do not repeat the mistake which Harryhausen made of optically enlarging small, inoffensive creatures to apparently gigantic size. There was to be a third film in the series, "Creatures the World Forgot" from the following year, but as I have not seen that film for a long time will not attempt a comparison with "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth". 5/10

I'll readily admit that I'm not a huge fan of Hammer's prehistoric adventures. The distinct lack of English dialogue in these films always seem to me to hamper them too much, so that the story gets dumbed down to the level of 'us vs them' chasing and a literal caveman mentality. In the end, the only reason you can watch these is for the spectacle, and indeed that's the case when it comes to WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, a film that features some great and detailed sequences involving dinosaurs and not a lot else.The somewhat broad storyline involves a blonde-haired cavegirl who escapes certain sacrifice only to fall in love with the member of another tribe. Eventually, she's outcast from there too, and then hunted down by her former neighbours, all of whom seem determined to see her killed. There's not a great deal more to it than that, I'm afraid.There's not really any scope for acting here. Victoria Vetri was a Playboy pin-up, not an actress, so she fills the bikini readily enough and that's all that's required of her. Patrick Allen beats his chest and sports a masculine beard but is given little to do other than look menacing. The romance scenes between Vetri and Robin Hawdon are sweaty and laughable and, as I mentioned before, the only really enjoyable bits are those involving the dinosaurs. Jim Danforth was the man behind them, and a blinding job he does too.

Hammer's follow-up to One Million Years BC sees it covering similar ground - a caveman soap opera featuring gorgeous, beautifully coiffed cavegirls in stylish fur bikinis vying with each other for the attentions of a series of grubby, unprepossessing cavemen, while assorted animated rubber anachronisms cavort around in the background (and the foreground. And, indeed, the mid-ground).I'm not sure why this movie seems so lack-lustre. Admittedly, it doesn't have Raquel Welch as the sympathetic blonde hottie, but it does have Playboy centrefold Victoria Vetri (who gets her kit off in the uncensored version if you're in the market for that sort of thing)(and I am), not to mention the gloriously pneumatic (and ultimately tragic) Imogen Hassall filling the Martine Beswick role of nasty brunette crumpet.Admittedly it doesn't have Ray Harryhausen animating the critters, but it does have Jim Danforth whose animation is silky smooth and incredibly naturalistic.Admittedly it doesn't have a climactic earthquake, but it does have a tidal wave, preceded by the enormously entertaining spectacle of feverish raft-building and Patrick Allen (subbing for Robert Brown) trying to hold a tsunami back by sheer force of personality with a notable lack of success.Admittedly it doesn't have John Richardson's rugged good looks hidden behind a mountain of hair, but it does have Robin Hawdon making a valiant attempt to be a prehistoric feminist in relatively clean-shaven fashion.I've decided - it's just as good! Bring me the DVD and bring it now! Ahot!