One Million B.C. (Budgetary Constraints)

For some reason this credit kind of tickled me. I wish they’d gone all the way and said “Directed by Hal Roach and Hal Roach”. Has anyone ever done that? Harold Ramis should’ve with MULTIPLICITY, it might have added the single laugh needed to allow the film to qualify as a ’90s American comedy.

Things I enjoyed — the random animal noises during dinosaur fights — elephants trumpeting, leopards growling, and a dog barking. Victor Mature makes a convincing Tarzan-type cave-dude, better than John Richardson in the remake. Carole Landis has a nice strappy top. The idea of the present-day foreword, in which a bearded expert starts to tell Carole, Big Victor, et al about prehistoric life, and then we go into flashback and the same actors are playing cavefolks. It’s like the previous year’s THE WIZARD OF OZ — “And you were there, and you, and you!”

Roy Seawright’s process work is excellent — humans interact with lizards, crocodiles and even an armadillo with a sproingy rubber horn glued to his snout, and the animals really do seem to be gigantic. They don’t seem remotely like dinosaurs, mind you.

I was struck by how the plot was near-identical, incident for incident, with that of the Hammer remake, which added YEARS to the title and entertained me hugely as a kid. It still does. Rubber dinosaurs, cavegirls with false eyelashes, a dubbed Raquel Welch (her grunts were too American), Maltese landscapes… Where the remake departs, it generally improves — for instance, it sensibly ends with the volcanic festivities, rather than dragging on for another dinosaur fight. And the Hammer film is guilt-free, since no real animals were harmed during its making. ONE MILL duplicates a splendid set-up from the ’33 KING KONG, with humans walking in place in the foreground as a dying dinosaur tracks past in the background, but the Roaches movie appears to use either a real dying lizard, or a dead lizard that’s been rigged with a bladder to make it “breathe” in an agonised way, and a bubbling geyser of stage blood. All of which is rather unpleasant to think about despite the technical skill involved.

But I’m not so nice that I didn’t laugh at some of the reptile antics. When the inevitable earthquake-volcano apocalypse strikes, most of the lizards voluntarily hurl themselves into the chasms opening at their feet, as if anxious to enjoy as little screen time as possible. Their eagerness makes me suspect, and hope, that at the bottom of the chasm was a nice bed of lettuce, rather than searing lava as the Roaches would have us believe.

“Business stinks, I don’t wanna live!”