‘Savage! Primitive! Deadly!’
Prehistoric Women is a 1950 fantasy adventure film directed by Gregg C. Tallas (Cataclysm; Night Train to Terror) from a screenplay he wrote with Sam X. Abarbanel (Sound of Horror). It stars Laurette Luez, Allan Nixon, Joan Shawlee, Judy Landon and Mara Lynn. Released by Alliance Productions, this low-budget independent Cinecolor film was also titled The Virgin Goddess and is nearly all narrated by David Vaile (who in 1971 played a TV newscaster in Simon, King of the Witches).
Prehistoric Women is seemingly influenced by and is similar to the seminal 1940 prehistoric film One Million B.C. A loose British remake was made in 1967 by Hammer Films starred Martine Beswick (Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde).
Plot teaser:
Tigri (Luez) and her stone age friends, all of which are women, hate all men. However, she and her Amazon tribe see men as a “necessary evil” and capture them for potential husbands. Engor (Nixon), who is smarter than the rest of the men, is able to escape them. He battles a bearded giant After he is recaptured by the women, he discovers fire and drives off a dragon-like creature. The women are impressed with him, including Tigri, their prehistoric queen…
Reviews:
“The truly sad thing about Prehistoric Women is that, as far as these kinds of films go, this is actually one of the better ones. Now, don’t get me wrong here: I’m certainly not making any artistic claims for this thing. Rather, this is my way of observing that amongst these cinematic accounts of primitive man, the bar tends to be set awfully low.” And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
” … limits it’s characters to a handful of primitive words and heavy use of pantomime. Despite the events being easy enough to follow, we’re given a narrator to fill in the blanks. Although he occasionally leaves the soundtrack and lets things unfold as we see them, he spends a lot of time describing what we’re seeing as it happens (like having a charter howl in pain and being told the character howls in pain)! There are times the film comes across like watching a movie with a description-for-the-blind service turned on.” Baker’s Log
Choice dialogue:
Narrator: “It seems that even in those days women were still women”.
