When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

Written by whitsbrain on January 30, 2024

This sat in my Watchlist for a long time. It's not been available to stream anywhere. Because I'm a nut for stop-motion effects, dinosaurs, and maybe even for cave women, I coughed up the $20 for the blu-ray and watched it. It's not a good movie. There are lots of barely clothed cave people shouting "AKEETA!!!!!" every other word. It's uncertain what that word actually means because all of the actors apparently just made up a language as they filmed.

Basically, Sanna and Tara form a bond and everyone else chases them around. If caught, they will be killed because Sanna (Victoria Vetri) was supposed to be sacrificed, escaped, and has made the sun angry or some such thing. In the end, there's a happy ending as the moon is formed from the sun (???!!!), and everyone is killed by a massive tidal wave except Sanna and Tara, and a swinging couple that they've befriended.

The stop-motion effects were very well done by Jim Danforth. There were a couple of lesser effects where they glued fins and stuff to a lizard, crocodile, and Komodo dragon, and I'd like to think that Danforth had nothing to do with those misfires. I'm assuming it was done by some other scrub who was forced to do so by cost-cutting executives.

In summary, this was not much of a movie, but it was fun to watch. I liked the effects overall, and was very impressed with Victoria Vetri and Magna Konopka, for reasons that might be obvious, but that's my business.