Sunday, September 23, 2018

313. Prehistoric Women

313. Prehistoric Women (1950)
Director: Gregg G. Tallas
Writers: Sam X. Abarbanel and Gregg G. Tallas
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A narrated tale of prehistoric women finding husbands.

I also watched this just over ten years ago as part of the Sci-Fi set and, frankly, didn’t like it any better back then. The entire movie is narrated including having the narrator describe action occurring on-screen. When the narrator isn’t talking, we instead get dialogue in prehistoric gibberish. It’s all a bit much. I mean, the first ten minutes are the narrator telling us about the wise woman of the tribe telling the story of how the tribe was founded. So it’s someone telling us a story of someone telling a story.

It’s not meta if it’s stupid.

So, very briefly, because there’s nothing to say about this movie, we start with a tribe of prehistoric women—only women. Their tribe was founded when their former leader attacked the chief of their tribe that was using all the women as slave labor. The new matriarchal tribe thrived, but was attacked by the monstrous caveman Guadi who stole a few members and killed the leader. Now, fifteen years later, all the children have grown up and are ready to get married.

What follows is what you’d expect: The women capture men, fight over one of them, then the men escape using fire and kidnap all the women. Proper order is restored of women doing back-breaking labor in service of men. On the way back to the men’s tribe, Guadi attacks. The men burn Guadi to death and agree to return to the women’s tribe and marry them. THE END

Another one of those flicks you can’t even get mad at. I spent the whole time knitting, checkng Twitter, and wondering if it was done yet. I could go into plot holes like somehow the women are stymied by these men even though their tribe was founded by women overpowering men and their tribe has thrived by collectively acting against the men. Then the men are all isolated and yet the women don’t organize against them. And if I wanted to get snarky-political, I’d say this is a film that dares to ask what the world would be like if you don’t take the red pill, but it doesn’t even warrant that kind of effort, not that kind of scorn.

I mean the narration gets a little obnoxious talking about the “weaker sex” even though the women here are consistently kicking the men’s asses, but I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully ironic. I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully anything. Plus it’s hard to imagine it’s saying anything about men and women at all, that it’s interested in women at all. Like all those sword & sandal pics, this is about having buff young men run around shirtless and oiled up. I don’t think the intended audience was too interested in anything “between” sexes, let alone battle.

Unless you’re into the idea of femdommed cavemen (and I’m sure somebody is), there’s just not much in this movie to recommend it. Even if you want beefcake, the print is too washed out to really provide any visuals. Let me emphasize any. This movie made the bold choice to forego day-for-night shots and just shoot at night without any lighting. The women are doing an ecstatic ritual dance, but good luck making any of it out in that inky black frame.

The movie is in the public domain and I’ve added a copy to archive.org here, just be warned that there’s not much to it. The movie is easily riffable, but just becomes a bit of a slog because there’s nothing going on.

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