*** More Prehistoric Fun!

As one would expect from a sequel of sorts to “One Million Years BC”, this movie features stop-motion dinosaurs, lizards with fins tapped on them, beautiful scenery, wacky natural disasters, and scantily-cladded Cro-Magnons. You get all this and more, and luckily they did a good job with it. Well, sort of.

The big problem with this movie is that the whole thing is done in some kind of 27-word caveman language and it’s rather difficult to figure out just what the heck is going on. Throw in a complex screwball plot and you’re in for a movie that’ll throw your brain against the inside of your skull quite a few times. Luckily I had the video cover on hand so I wasn’t completely confused. The story starts on a seaside cliff where members of the Shell tribe are doing what they do every Saturday night: sacrifice blondes to the Sun. This happens to coincide with the formation of the moon (which kind of splits off from the sun), which causes a storm that knocks a few people off the cliff. Sanna (one of the sacrifices) suddenly decides to climb down the cliff and fall into the water, and is rescued by members of the Rock tribe. Well the Shell tribe doesn’t like this new moon and blames Sanna, so they repeatedly go after her and finish their sacrifice. Tara, a member of the Rock tribe, defends her at every step, much to the dismay of his girlfriend/wife/fiancée/partner/whatever. Long story short: the new moon causes a tidal wave that wipes away all the problems and the survivors live happily ever after.

Of course the plot is usually not why someone would watch this movie. More then likely it’s one of two things: the good-looking people wearing practically nothing and the good-looking special effects. The former is self-explanatory. The latter is proven by the movie's nomination for an Oscar. There are a lot of dinosaurs and other creatures throughout the piece, and they fit in very well with the movie. The movie is pieced together well enough to suspend disbelief and pretend these scenarios are actually possible. Well, except the stock footage from The Lost World. Otherwise you have a nice stop motion plesiosaurus (that battles cavemen), a chasmosaurus (who also fights with cavemen), a pteranodon (who of course picks up a caveman), and some giant crabs (what does the wildlife have against cavemen anyway?). You also have Sanna’s somewhat-friendly pet dinosaur, which appears to be a Rhedosaurus of sorts.

The various creatures are of course the highlights of this movie and are well worth the price of sitting through the confusing dialogue. The dress code also helps. So overall we have a pretty good movie (for it’s type) that is about as good as “One Million Years BC” before it.

Good plot (I'm assuming)

Well done special effects

A lovely spot of world-building

Lovely views

Terrific stop-motion creatures well intigrated into the movie

Completly fictional and not even closely scientificly accurate

Hard to understand what is going on thanks to language barriers

Gets a little wierd at times

Is it just me or is that tidal wave taking an excessively long time to get there?

Credits