A time of beginnings, of darkness, of light, of the Sun, the Earth, the sea, of man! The beginnings of man living with man, by the sea, in the mountains. The beginning of love, hate, and fear. Man's fear of the unknown. Man's fear lest the Sun should leave him, leave him alone in everlasting darkness. A time when the color of a woman's hair condemned her to sacrifice to the Sun. A time when there was as yet no Moon.
The Cliff Tribe led by Kingsor are about to sacrifice three blonde women to their Sun God, but one of the women, Sanna, escapes and is rescued by fishermen of the Seaside Tribe, among whom is Tara, who becomes enamoured with her.
Tara takes Sanna to his people, who also worship the Sun God, but without sacrifices. After building a hut for herself, she joins them at a celebration of a successful hunt, in which the men have captured a plesiosaur. The plesiosaur breaks free, but is subsequently killed and butchered. Ayak, a brunette woman who is jealous of Tara's feelings for Sanna, denounces Sanna as a witch and incites the elder women against her.
Kingsor and his men arrive, looking for Sanna. She flees, and hunters of her former tribe, led by Kane, give chase. During the search, the hunters are attacked by a Chasmosaurus, which gores Kane. When Tara seeks Sanna, the Chasmosaurus charges him and injures Khaku, one of his companions. He is chased to a cliff, where the Chasmosaurus loses its footing and plunges to its death. Khaku dies of his injuries shortly after, while Kane's wounds are tended to by the Seaside tribeswoman Ulido.
Khaku's funeral pyre at the shore is followed by a tribal frenzy during which an enraged Ayak burns down Sanna's hut. Sanna meanwhile becomes trapped by a carnivorous plant, and cuts off a portion of her hair in order to escape. As Tara goes looking for Sanna, he finds her hair trapped beneath the plant and assumes she is dead. Satisfied by this, Sanna's former tribe stop hunting her and join with Tara's tribe, with Kane, now healed, marrying Ulido.
Sanna seeks shelter in a Megalosaurus nest, fooling the mother and its baby into thinking she is one of them. Sanna grows attached to the baby and plays hide-and-seek with it, as well as teaching it to sit. Tara meanwhile sees one of the women in Sanna's tribe dyeing her daughter's hair with tar, in an attempt to prevent her from being sacrificed like Sanna.
Some weeks later, while Tara is hiking back to his tribe, which has been taken over by the overzealous Kingsor, he is carried off by a giant Rhamphorhynchus. After killing the pterosaur, he finds Sanna and her tamed dinosaur. They are subsequently discovered and Tara is sacrificed to a Tylosaurus by Kingsor. Tara manages to escape and returns to Sanna.
The tribe then goes searching for Sanna again, and the two run away into a forest, where Sanna's dinosaur "parent" rescues her, but Tara is recaptured and the tribe prepare to burn him. The coastline, however, begins to recede, and the tribe is attacked by giant crabs. As a tsunami looms overhead, Sanna arrives to save Tara and they escape with Kane and Ulido aboard a raft. Kingsor tries to command the water to heal in a last effort to appease his deities, only to be swept away. While Ayak is running towards the raft, she steps into a trap of quicksand and is sucked down to her death. As the waters calm, the four survivors stop to witness a lunar eclipse, left in awe by the creation of the Moon above them.
[The film] was a giggle, that was Hammer and they asked me if I’d like to do a prehistoric one, as I'd never done a prehistoric one, I said "Yes, why not, let's have a go," [...] As there was no language in it, it was all made-up language, nobody had to learn their lines.
Director Val Guest's screenplay was based on a treatment by J. G. Ballard (author of Empire of the Sun).[7] But like Hammer's other prehistoric films, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth anachronistically portrays the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era from about 252to66 million years ago living alongside Homo sapiens of the Late Quaternary Period (±200,000 years ago). The film's characters use a language that was specially written for the film, albeit of only a dozen words or so, a frequent one being "neekro", which means "kill", and also "akita", which is heard many times.
Special effects
The stop-motion plesiosaur, sculpted by Roger Dicken and animated by Jim Danforth
The effects unit at Bray Studios was used on the production.[8] The stop-motion animation creature effects were created by Jim Danforth, assisted by David W. Allen and Roger Dicken, with each model costing over $3,000 each on average.[9] Allen made the crab puppet, which was made from a real crab shell, though Dicken modified it with horns and spikes in order to make it look less plain. Dicken sculpted the plesiosaur, the Tylosaurus, the feet of the Rhamphorhynchus and model humans used in scenes where characters interacted directly with the creatures.[10]
Due to lack of time and money, and a violent altercation between Danforth and James Carreras,[11] many scenes were canceled, including one that featured giant ants which would have been portrayed through an articulated, dog-sized model created by Dicken for close-up shots.[10]
Filming
Exteriors were shot on Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. Locations included Maspalomas beach, Ansite Mountain, Amurga, and Caldera de Tejeda. Guest recalled, "there was one enormous German hotel and practically nothing else on the island, there was one awful road, that you went by jeep; you got there by boat, there was no airport or anything. [...] We planned very, very, carefully."[6]
Release
The film had its world premiere on 1 October 1970 in London with a U.K. general release on 25 October 1970.[12][2] It was released in the United States debuting in San Francisco on 10 February 1971.[2]
Home media
The film was released on DVD as an exclusive from Best Buy with a G rating, but was quickly recalled because it was the original uncut version and contained nudity; it is now a collector's item. The uncut version was also released on Blu-ray in the United States on 28 February 2017 and DVD on 4 April by Warner Archive.[13][14]
Reception
Box office
The film was popular at the box office.[15] In the United States the film grossed $1.25 million at the box office.[16]
The special effects are considered a benchmark in portraying realistic stop-motion animation effects. The film's title is referenced in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park with a large rectangular banner hanging in the island's visitors' center. The banner later plays a visibly prominent role in the final action sequence as the film ends.
Pellucidar is a fictional Hollow Earth invented by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs for a series of action adventure stories. In a crossover event, Tarzan, who was also created by Burroughs, visits Pellucidar.
The Savage Land is a hidden prehistoric land that features in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. It is a tropical preserve hidden in Antarctica. It has appeared in many story arcs in Uncanny X-Men as well as other related books.
One Million Years B.C. is a 1966 British adventure fantasy film directed by Don Chaffey. The film was produced by Hammer Film Productions and Seven Arts, and is a remake of the 1940 American fantasy film One Million B.C.. The film stars Raquel Welch and John Richardson, set in a fictional age of cavemen and dinosaurs coexisting together. Location scenes were filmed on the Canary Islands in the middle of winter, in late 1965. The UK release prints of this film were printed in dye transfer Technicolor. The U.S. version released by 20th Century Fox was cut by nine minutes, printed in DeLuxe Color, and released in 1967.
Val Guest was an English film director and screenwriter. Beginning as a writer of comedy films, he is best known for his work for Hammer, for whom he directed 14 films, and for his science fiction films. He enjoyed a long career in the film industry from the early 1930s until the early 1980s.
Caveman is a 1981 slapstick comedy film written and directed by Carl Gottlieb and starring Ringo Starr, Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long and Barbara Bach. The film is set in prehistoric times and revolves around the rivalries between cavemen.
Go motion is a variation of stop motion animation which incorporates motion blur into each frame involving motion. It was co-developed by Industrial Light & Magic and Phil Tippett. Stop motion animation can create a distinctive and disorienting staccato effect because the animated object is perfectly sharp in every frame, since each frame is shot with the object perfectly still. Real moving objects in similar scenes have motion blur because they move while the camera's shutter is open. Filmmakers use a variety of techniques to simulate motion blur, such as moving the model slightly during the exposure of each film frame, or placing a glass plate smeared with petroleum jelly in front of the camera lens to blur the moving areas.
Imogen Hassall was an English actress who appeared in 33 films during the 1960s and 1970s.
Victoria Vetri is an American model and actress.
Bray Film Studios is a British film and television facility in Water Oakley near Bray, Berkshire. It is best known for its association with Hammer Film Productions.
One Million B.C. is a 1940 American fantasy film produced by Hal Roach Studios and released by United Artists. It is also known by the titles Cave Man, Man and His Mate, and Tumak.
James Danforth is an American stop-motion animator, known for model-animation, matte painting, and for his work on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), a theme-sequel to Ray Harryhausen's One Million Years B.C. (1967). He later went on to work with Ray Harryhausen on the film Clash of the Titans (1981) to mainly do the animation of the winged horse Pegasus.
Cabazon Dinosaurs, formerly Claude Bell's Dinosaurs, is a roadside attraction in Cabazon, California, featuring two enormous, steel-and-concrete dinosaurs named Dinny the Dinosaur and Mr. Rex. Located just west of Palm Springs, the 150-foot-long (46 m) Brontosaurus and the 65-foot-tall (20 m) Tyrannosaurus rex are visible from the freeway to travelers passing by on Southern California's Interstate 10. The roadside dinosaurs are best known for their appearance in the film Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985).
Moon Zero Two is a 1969 British science fiction film from Hammer Films, directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring James Olson, Catherine Schell, Warren Mitchell, and Adrienne Corri. The screenplay was by Michael Carreras from an original story by Gavin Lyall, Frank Hardman, and Martin Davison.
The Lost World is a 2001 British made-for-television film adaptation of the 1912 novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, directed by Stuart Orme and adapted by Tony Mulholland and Adrian Hodges. It was filmed at various locations on the West Coast of New Zealand. The 145-minute film was divided into two 75-minute episodes when broadcast on BBC One on 25 and 26 December 2001, receiving 8.68 million and 6.98 million viewers respectively. Bob Hoskins played Professor Challenger and was supported by James Fox, Peter Falk, Matthew Rhys, Tom Ward and Elaine Cassidy.
Sean Caffrey was an actor from Northern Ireland.The Stage described him as "part of a generation of actors that came out of Northern Ireland in the 1960s to find prominence on British television," and the Belfast Telegraph called him "a largely unsung professional, who was always in demand."
The Lost World is a 1992 film, based on the 1912 novel The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The movie is set in Africa rather than the book's setting of South America, and the character of Lord John Roxton has been replaced with a female character played by Tamara Gorski. It was followed by a sequel the same year, Return to the Lost World, with the same director and main cast.
Creatures the World Forgot is a 1971 British adventure film directed by Don Chaffey and produced and written for Hammer Films by Michael Carreras. The film concentrates on the daily struggle to survive of a tribe of Stone Age men. Very little dialogue is spoken throughout the film, apart from a few grunts and gestures.
Dinosaur Island is a 1994 B-movie directed by Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski. Wynorski called it "a very 1950's type of picture, like The Lost Continent except that we're going to have better dinosaurs and more girls."
Patricia Donahue was an actress who performed in television and films from 1956 to 1984.
Roger Dicken is a British special effects artist. He was nominated for an Academy Award in the category Best Visual Effects for the film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
↑ "[...] ricordo che ci fu un violento scontro tra l'animatore Jim Danforth e Carreras, che praticamente lo mandò via perché stava impiegando troppo tempo a completare i trucchi: quel film è infatti uscito con alcune sequenze di effetti ottici tagliate, perché la lavorazione fu appunto interrotta." Cozzi, L. (1999), Hammer. La fabbrica dei mostri, Profondo Rosso, p. 149, ISBN 88-89084-09-X
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