Als Dinosaurier die Erde beherrschten

Poster tagline: ENTER AN AGE OF UNKNOWN TERRORS, PAGAN WORSHIP AND VIRGIN SACRIFICE!!! The legendary Hammer studio not only made horror movies, but also produced this pseudo-adventure set in prehistoric times that were so popular in the late 1960s and early 70s. The script might as well have been written by a lobotomized chimpanzee, it's a completely plotless hodgepodge, mixing together dinosaurs, Stone Age hunters, and even stressing (and having some relevance to the flimsy plot) that the moon didn't exist at the time and was just forming (yeah), evident in the final scene of raging earthly disasters. Prehistoric women have long, well-kept hairstyles, are clean-shaven and wear leather bikinis, while all the men beards to distinguish them from today's men. What I can't deny this film, though, is the truly excellent effects, something this kind of crap doesn’t deserve. Great, and I underscore that, great post-window-scanning puppets of prehistoric animals (I counted eight) that seem to have come out of Ray Harryhausen's workshop in its heyday. The effective rear projection and the interlacing that doesn't hit the eyes is simply a joy to behold and I understand the Oscar nomination. Maybe I would have rated it more positively overall, but the lack of plot, the overacting, the eternal running around the rocky landscape and the babbling in incomprehensible gibberish, which was supposed to add a touch of authenticity (only at the beginning there are about 10 English words), were very tiring towards the end. If you really want to try a genre-similar film, try One Million Years B.C., which unleashed this trend of pseudo-adventures and is much more entertaining. (12.03.2013)

Of course, that movie is relatively weak in terms of plot, and you can't rely on the characters much, but I watched it because I wanted to see more of the special effects mastery that it offered. It's not always seamless, but it still shows that stop motion is simply a path that I would like to see even today. It's just that there's a bit too little of it, unfortunately. (12.10.2015)