When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970): Part Two.

As always, this will make a whole lot more sense if you read Part One of our Two Part retrospective first. Go ahead. We can wait. Back? Good! On with the review! Or as the Cavegirls say, Yo kita!

Alrighty then, when we last left our review of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), behind the scenes, producer Aida Young had pulled off a minor miracle securing suitable replacements for everyone involved with Hammer Films' highly successful dinosaurs vs. cavemen epic, One Million Years B.C. (1966):

A new director in Val Guest; a new stop-motion animator for the dinosaurs in Jim Danforth; and a new ingenue to fill Raquel Welch’s leather bikini in Victoria Vetri.

Meanwhile, on screen, our heroine, Sanna, was on the run from the Rock Tribe after escaping from being the main attraction at a ritual sacrifice to their sun god. Hopefully, her new boyfriend Tara finds her first. And he’d better hurry, too, because she’s about to get eaten by a giant, woman-eating plant but manages to pull off a daring escape.

Now, the tenants of that last escape required Sanna (Vetri) to hack off some of her hair. These very same locks are found by Tara (Hawdon) near the deadly plant after the rest of Kingsor’s search party was nearly wiped out by a rampaging Chasmosaurus; and putting two and two together, Sanna is now presumed dead. 

Only she isn’t dead. Not yet, anyway, as she foolishly – well, maybe not so foolishly as this plays out -- seeks refuge in the nest of some giant dinosaur eggs just as one of them hatches out. 

But the baby critter essentially imprints on her and poses no threat. And when momma dinosaur comes back, she finds Sanna asleep in the empty eggshell, assumes this is her new baby, and, therefore, doesn’t eat her.

Time passes, the baby dinosaur / sibling grows much larger, and he and Sanna frolic about as she teaches him a few tricks. Alas, during a game of follow the leader, Sanna is spotted by a Rock Tribe hunting party, who report this sighting back to Kingsor.

Overhearing this, Tara, again, hoping to find her first, heads out alone only to be attacked by a pterosaur, who plucks up its victim and carries him back to the nest in a bit of a gender-swapped callback to One Million Years B.C.. 

But Tara manages to slice a wing in half, sending the beast into a fatal tailspin. Badly wounded, the displaced fisherman stumbles upon Sanna’s campsite before he collapses.

After nursing him back to health, these two make it official and consummate their relationship. But after a brief honeymoon of contentment and consensual sex, they are discovered and captured by Kingsor. And it's only due to the timely intervention by Sanna’s pet dinosaur that helps her elude capture.

But Tara isn’t quite so lucky and is hauled back to the beach, twice, and is nearly sacrificed, twice, as an accessory to Sanna’s perceived witchery. The first time he is saved from being burned alive – think Viking funeral -- by another plesiosaur, which shatters his floating funeral pyre.

The second rescue is a little more, well, biblical, as once more, the lights in the sky grow strange, the weather goes sideways, and the sea suddenly retreats as if suddenly drained away, which unleashes a herd of giant crabs, who start picking off the most curious who ventured out to see where all the water went.

Meantime, Sanna makes her move to free Tara while everyone else panics as the real reason for the water’s sudden retreat reveals itself: a tsunami, which is about to bring all that water back all at once in a giant deadly wave.

Seeing this, Kingsor tries to command the wave to stop with the expected non-results. And as the encampment and most of the people are wiped out (-- including Ayak), Sanna, Tara, and a few of the more enlightened others manage to make it onto one of those fishing rafts and ride the tidal wave until it finally exhausts itself.

Then, as the waters recede, the few soggy survivors look to the heavens and witness the first lunar eclipse as that second celestial body turns out to be the newly formed moon, bringing our prehistoric morality tale to an end.

After surviving the scorching heat, vintage aerial transportation of the deathtrap variety, and a violent sandstorm, the production of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth wrapped location shooting on the Canary Islands in mid-November, 1968.

“The location was fantastic,” said Allen (Kinsey, 2007). “The whole place was deserted … We drove for miles and miles through absolutely unknown territory where roads would run out and eventually pick up again. We thought the bandits were going to take over any minute and then suddenly we turned a corner and there was this most marvelous 25 story hotel and nothing else!”

The production would then head back to Shepperton Studios in England, where shooting would resume for about another seven weeks on the interior sets along with getting the plates needed for the FX that would eventually be integrated into the film.

“We had two or three units working, because everything had to coordinate and an awful lot had to be done against blue backings,” recalled production manager Christoper Sutton to Bruce Hallenbeck (Little Shoppe of Horrors Magazine, 1994). “Of course, where the actors were fighting non-existent creatures Jim Danforth put the creatures in afterwards.”

If there was any dino-action involved in the scene, the footage was shot without sound, allowing Guest to verbally direct his actors. Said Allen (Kinsey, 2007), “Val would talk you through it, saying it’s twice that height Patrick. You were amongst the rocks and he would say beforehand how [the dinosaur’s] coming along through here. [And] you’d just see the head first. You’d probably do [the scene] ten different times, ten different ways, so that he’s got plenty of material to cut.”

Now, this is where the production ran into some serious trouble that could’ve been avoided due to some assumptions, poor planning, and a lack of communication between Young and Danforth before shooting even started.

(L-R) Jim Danforth, Victoria Vetri.

“Once I got to England, it turned out that I was going to be the 2nd unit director,” said Danforth in an interview with Steve Archer (Little Shoppe of Horrors Magazine, 1990). “When I took the job on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, I never thought about doing that sort of thing -- no one had ever mentioned it. But, Aida Young, just very matter-of-factly said, ‘Well, you’ll have your unit, and you go there and you’ll shoot this; and the other unit will go there and shoot that.’”

Danforth had some experience with directing 2nd unit when he shot some additional live-action footage to punch up the climax of Jack the Giant Killer (1962), but that was about it. In One Million Years B.C., Harryhausen was involved from the jump and had some sway with his producers and director on what and where to shoot to get what he needed. Danforth did not have that luxury. In Harryhausen’s film, the footage was shot to match his set-pieces. In this film, Danforth’s set-pieces had to be forced into the existing footage.

According to Kinsey (2007), “The problem was by the time Danforth joined the production Hammer had already decided which parts of the film would be shot on location and which parts would be done at Shepperton.” This left him scrambling from the get-go, trying to catch up and get what the production needed and still stay on time and on budget -- a budget number that was apparently a secret.

“The locations had all been chosen before I started on the production and I didn’t see them until I arrived in the Canary Islands to begin shooting,” said Danforth (Johnson, Del Vecchio, 1996). And unlike Harryhausen, “I was totally unable to alter some of the misguided planning which had occurred before I arrived. This cost Hammer a great amount of money and time because it necessitated many matte paintings (some of which were done twice) to enhance studio sets which had been built too small to contain the dinosaur action.”

According to Danforth, this was a decision made by Young, who felt it would be cheaper to shoot these scenes back in the studio.

Said Danforth (Stoker, 1996), “I would have chosen to do a lot of things on location instead of in the studio, primarily parts of the mother dinosaur sequence and all of the Chasmosaurs sequence. What happened is that their schedule added about twenty more matte shots to the picture that were never planned or budgeted for. At Shepperton, we had to make a matte shot every time we got far enough back to show the dinosaur, whereas in the Canary Islands all we had to do was point the camera at the best looking rocks and roll.”

As things progressed on location, “I would do a lot of scenes with doubles, miles away sometimes from the first unit,” said Danforth (Archer, 1990). “We had a camera crew, make-up, transport and everything; and we had people double for the actors in the long shots. If any principal players were in the scenes, Val Guest of course would want to direct them, which is only right. He directed all the scenes with Victoria Vetri in them, except for a couple we picked up later. But some of the scenes that had actors in them that he was less concerned about, I would do.”

However, “Val never shot a frame of that film that had a thing to do with the animation without me being there,” said Danforth (Stoker, 1996). “My set-ups took a little longer because they had to be solid -- we had to chop down bushes and things to get clean matte lines and all that. When everything was prepared, we would send a PA over to tell Val’s first unit, and when Val was at a point where he could break, he would bring the actors over and do the scene. Sometimes we would both do it. Other times I would rough it out and he would put up a second camera.”

(L-R) Victoria Vetri, Drewe Henley, Val Guest. 

Now, while shooting at Shepparton, Danforth recalled an incident where he was approached by the male members of the cast during a lunch break. “There was a day when Robin Hawdon, Drewe Henley and Shawn Caffrey came and asked do you mind if we eat with you,” said Danforth (Archer, 1990). Danforth had gotten to know the cast while filming on location and said sure, sit down. “They said, ‘What we really want to do is talk to you about our parts because Val [Guest] is really only interested in directing the girls, and he just tells us nothing.”

Yeah, seems during filming Guest was only interested in shooting his female stars and their ample bosoms. (The amount of nipple slippage in this thing is astonishing.) The director was kinda leaning that way since his comedy days and his next few films would find him jumping into the softcore pool feet first with Au Pair Girls (1972) and Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) -- the first in a long line of Confessions of… sex comedies.

In the British cut of the film there were even some extended nude and sex scenes (some consensual, others not so much), but these were cut out of the American version. But when the film was released by Warner Home Video as a Best Buy exclusive Double Feature with Moon Zero Two (1969) back in 2008, there was a bit of controversy and several customer complaints as a production mistake led to the European cut being released instead of the G-Rated version as touted on the packaging, which (allegedly) led to a recall. I know I was a bit surprised to see the full frontal scenes after buying it, having never seen them before on VHS.

Principal photography on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth wrapped on January 8, 1969, and things officially switched to post-production and FX. Danforth setup shop on Stage 3, the ballroom, at Bray Studios, which would make it the last Hammer production shot there before they sold it off after moving to Elstree, where things got off to a bad start -- and it only went downhill from there.

Originally, “They gave me 12 months to complete all the effects, including mattes,” said Danfoth (Miller, 1996). “Then it was decreased to nine; and then it went, shall we say, all to hell.”

“The problem wasn’t having to wear so many hats, the problem was not having enough time to plan and budget the production,” Danforth explained further in an interview with NZPete (Matte Shot: a Tribute to Gold Era Special FX, May, 2012). “Six weeks was not enough time to plan a film with over 125 effects shots -- particularly when, at the time I joined the film, the script still needed much alteration to make things feasible. There was enormous pressure, due to the addition of over twenty unplanned glass paintings. The original plan was to have two or three.”

With the resulting and unexpected time crunch, a plan was hatched to get Danforth some much needed help from a familiar source. “After Jim Danforth was hired, Young was back on the phone saying he would need an assistant and [asked] was I interested,” said Roger Dicken (Stoker, 1996). Was he ever. “Well, I’d read about Jim in Forry Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland so I couldn’t wait to work with him.”

And while his hiring was made partly to keep the British unions happy, Dicken was up to the task and soon became fast friends with his American counterpart. “I did the donkey work. I sculpted the animals, made the molds, and did anything else that came along."

Thus, it was Danforth’s show and Dicken was happy to help, saying (Miller, 2022), “It was Jim’s concept on the dinosaurs -- he did the sculpting format; and it was a situation where he would produce some detail and texture on, say, one side of a model and I would reproduce it to match on the other, whilst he was animating, for example. Further, I was responsible for all the plaster mould making and foam rubber work on the puppets. I sculpted the Pterosaur, the Plesiosaur, the Tylosaur, model men and girls and a full sized pair of prop clawed pterodactyl feet for the close up shots of the hero being carried off.”

Again, Dicken pitched in wherever he could, adding in his own expertise to enhance several scenes. “Also, of course, there were model sets to be made, backgrounds, foliage, figures on rafts, and I produced the miniature flames for the burning oil sequence when Jim animated the Plesiosaur.”

Dicken and friends (The Land that Time Forgot, 1974).

In the NZPete Matte Shot interview, Danforth had nothing but high praise for Dicken’s efforts and contributions, especially his efficiency and skills at building models. And these skills served him well as Dicken would go on to produce those wonderful articulated, go-motion dinosaurs in The Land the Time Forgot (1974) for Hammer’s chief rival Amicus and Warlords of Atlantis (1978) for EMI; and Dicken would also be instrumental in realizing both the face-hugger and the chest-burster props for Alien (1979).

And as things interminably ground on, and weeks turned into months, Danforth was also able to bring in his friend David Allen, too -- the two had worked together at Clokey Studios before Equinox (1970) -- to realize several set-pieces, including the baby dinosaur, some of the giant crab attack during the climax, and the triceratops like Chasmosaur rumbling out of his cave and then stampeding to its doom in a mad charge right off a cliff.

(L-R) Dicken, David Allen and Danforth.

Again, it wasn’t the animation that was causing the delays, it was the extra matte shots. As NZPete pointed out in his review of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (January 26, 2018), “Originally the plan was [to] only have a few matte shots, though due to problems arising from lack of planning on the part of the Val Guest / Aida Young partnership when shooting on a completely viable, perfect natural location, opportunities were missed that might otherwise have broadened the scope of the main unit footage, with the end result being the requirement of a number of painted mattes to flesh out the scenes.

“Being an experienced matte artist himself, Danforth personally rendered most of the glass paintings that were needed to extend set-ups involving stop-motion action.” But as things dragged on he was forced to bring in outside help, most of it coming from Les Bowie, who was known as the godfather of UK effects work. Bowie had worked with Hammer on the Quatermass films and One Million Years B.C., and was currently working on Hammer’s latest sci-fi epic Moon Zero Two at the time.

Les Bowie. 

Originally, Bowie assigned Peter Melrose to assist on the film’s matte paintings; but in an effort to save money, Young laid the painter off over the Christmas holiday with plans to rehire him after the break. But in that interim, Melrose signed on to do Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), leaving Danforth to start over again, again.

As another example of poor communication, when Danforth saw the matte painting Bowie had done for the end credits with the water-logged survivors perched on the cliff, he let out a painful moan:

Studio 3, the Ballroom, at Bray Studios. 

“It didn’t look anything like my matte shot that precedes it,” said Danforth (Stoker, 1996). “I had to go back and do mine again. Nobody told me to, but I just felt honor-bound that this movie should at least hang together. There went another three or four days down the drain while I tried to duplicate what Bowie had done -- like make the rocks much more craggy.”

Or how ‘bout when a high-speed shoot for another miniature sequence was scheduled to be filmed in the massive water tank at Shepperton, where it was decided at the last minute it would cost too much to light the set. This caused even more delays as Danforth was pulled from his work for several scouting missions to find a suitable natural site to film. (Remember, it was supposed to be cheaper shooting at the studio.)

Said Danforth (NZPete, 2012), “I was required to go on many scouting missions in an attempt to find a body of water where we could film in sunlight. Eventually I refused to keep looking and did the shots with stop motion and rear projection. And so on, and so on…”

Thus, as work continued at a deliberate but feverish snail’s pitch, “Danforth faced a daily frustration with never being allowed to know just what the budget was, let alone his visual effects budget,” said NZPete (2012). “It seemed to be a hard and fast rule with Young that such info was on a 'need to know basis' and Jim just didn't need to know apparently.”

And with that 9 month completion date looming, the film was nowhere near being completed. And when that 9 month deadline elapsed, it wasn’t much closer to being done. Then 9 months became 10 months. Then 11. And as 1969 gave way to 1970, the film still wasn’t done.

Said a frustrated Danforth (Johnson / Del Vecchio, 1996), “This would’ve been a workable procedure if Hammer had stood behind it. But eventually I apparently passed their secret budget figure and the Hammer management started to get hostile.”

“Oh, the animation took forever!” said an equally frustrated Young in rebuttal (Kinsey, 1997). “With Ray Harryhausen [on One Million Years B.C.] you couldn't ask for more. Ray was God. We just sat and waited. [On that one] I wasn’t the producer so I didn’t have to take the flak. But on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth I was the producer, Ray was busy, and we had a guy called Jim Danforth from America. His work was excellent but he took time; and a couple of times I knocked on the door and [asked how it was going.] Because the months were going by and this time I had nobody to go to, I was the producer. And [my bosses] kept saying to me, ‘When is this bloody picture going to be finished?!’ And I used to say the same thing to Jim. And Jim was a sweet man and his eyes would fill with tears and say, ‘I’m doing my best, you know. It’s a slow job.’ And it really was.”

While Danforth was admittedly slow, the end results would ultimately be worth it due to his fastidious efforts, professionalism in the face of hostility, and dedication to detail -- which, again, required a few of those matte paintings to be scrapped and completely redone to match the extant footage more than once.

While serving as a gopher for Bowie on Moon Zero Two, Mike Tilley would split time between the two productions after Bowie started pitching in on the dinosaur movie, too. “I recognized Danforth straight away from a couple of pictures I’d seen from Jack the Giant Killer in the old horror magazines. He was doing that scene where the giant crabs come out of the sea and he was animating one of those. In one of the back areas he had his other models all lined up,” said Tilley (Kinsey, 1997).

“It was the first time I noticed he was using a book by Edward Mybridge called Animals in Motion. Jim was using it to figure out exactly how these animals were supposed to move. He used to take Mybridge’s pictures and look at them, then get down on all fours and walk around the floor, acting out what he wanted the animal to do. He would be the animal, really, and he would have a feel for what he needed to do for each shot. It gave me quite an appreciation because the work involved was so painstaking.”

“Jim was one of those guys that gave it everything, and I think he suffered physically as a result of it,” said Brian Johnson (Kinsey, 1997), another Moon Zero Two vet, who jumped over after it wrapped to help shore-up the other, struggling production by handling some of the needed opticals. “He used to get tragically thin and pale, and look very troubled towards the end of his time.

“Most of the things he did were pretty good, but he did take an incredible amount of time doing them, and wore himself out on each occasion. Aida was used to Ray Harryhausen, but he was also producing as well, so if he came up against a problem, he could change things and do what he liked. Jim wasn’t in that position. Jim had to do what people told him they wanted him to do, and they didn’t always listen to what Jim had to say. I think Jim could’ve saved them quite a bit of money.”

The St. Louis Dispatch (June 5, 1970).

And so, as the production went over time and budget, certain animated sequences had to be cut out. “Some of Roger’s best miniatures were never used in the final film, through no fault of his own,” said Danforth (NZPete, 2012). “Certain animation sequences had to be axed. There were giant ants, about three feet long. We built the ant armatures -- and the animated man who is attacked by the crab was only used in that scene because we had already built the man armature for the ant sequence.”

Said Dicken (Miller, 2022). “I created a large, dog-sized, articulated ant model that was shipped to Spain, strapped to extras as they rolled around, and I activated the head as they were being attacked. These were filmed for the close action shots.”

In the storyboards, after the man was attacked and swarmed over, the ants were to withdraw, leaving only a skeleton, picked clean. These insects then met their doom by a diverted lava flow. But! “Due to lack of time, the whole ant sequence was scrapped from the film and, therefore, no animation was ever done.” However, for Plan B, Dicken did armor up the crab to make it more menacing.

“The metal armatures came from the States,” said Dicken. “Dave Allen, one of Danforth’s chums, made the crab puppet and sent it over from the USA. It was built around a real crab shell. However, we decided it was too plain and I made it look more fanciful by adding extra horns and spikes.”

Another scene that was scrapped was a twin pterodactyl attack on the Beach Tribe’s village, blown in by the freak windstorm. Again, some live action scenes were shot but nothing was ever animated and the footage of the fleeing villagers was incorporated into the climax.

There’s also an apocryphal story that’s been circulating for years that there was also supposed to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the film, but the elder Carreras ordered Guest and Danforth to remove it because he felt its ‘posture’ imitated the stereotypical posture of a homosexual. I’ve only been able to track this factoid to only one source. And so, without corroboration, take it as you will.

Of course, as time and money ran out, mention should also be made of the use of some stock footage inserts from Irwin Allen’s remake of The Lost World (1960), where a couple of real life reptiles with fake horns and fins glued onto them were thrown together to simulate some Jurassic combat to help punch up a few scenes. The results? Well…

Now, people tend to forget that these same cost saving measures were employed on Harryhausen’s film for Hammer, too. Remember, the first “dinosaurs” we see in One Million Years B.C. are a superimposed iguana and a microbus-sized tarantula munching on a cricket before the Brontosaurus drive-by. And we don’t get any real dino-action until the giant turtle and the Allosaurus show up.

All told it took Danforth and his crew a little over a year to complete the FX, which officially put When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth in the can on February 17, 1970. The film was then turned over to editor Peter Curran to splice it all together with composer Mario Nascimbene, another holdover from One Million Years B.C., attempting to provide some glue with his soundtrack. And given the abundance of skin and violence, the film essentially breezed through the usually recalcitrant British censor.

And with that, after blowing its original release date, and desperately needing a hit, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was at long last released in Britain in October of 1970. It then made its American debut in late February, 1971 (where, again, the MPAA had all the nudity removed but left the violence in), where critical reaction was mostly positive but lacked any real enthusiasm.

The Grand Island Independent (April 1, 1971).

“When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is a top quality film in its area, as they come with special effects by Jim Danforth that are as spectacular as those of Ray Harryhausen’s Dynamation,” said The Syracuse Herald-Journal’s Joan Vadeboncoeur (April 3, 1971). “The script is as intelligent as possible under the limited possibilities and, for the most part, the actors manage to convince the movie goer they believe in what they’re doing. And that is no easy task.”

Meanwhile, Nick Lamberto of The Des Moines Tribune (March 18, 1971) felt “the least anyone can say about When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is that it’s different. For one thing, during the 90 minutes of the movie of what things were like in prehistoric times, there isn’t one word of intelligible dialogue. (Maybe that’s not so different after all.) Despite a feeling the whole thing is nothing except a broad spoof, you may find yourself following the chases and battle with horrible creatures in more than casual fashion.”

 The Cleveland Plain Dealer (May 31, 1970).

“Obviously, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is designed for the well-known 12-year-old mentality,” said Kevin Thomas for his write up in the Los Angeles Times (May 5, 1971) “But it has plenty of panache, supplied by respected British writer-director Val Guest who never condescends to the genre and tells his story well without the aid of dialog -- everybody utters nonsense words -- but with a strong assist from Mario Nascimbene’s score.”

But other reviewers, like Ebert, were obviously more interested in what the cavewomen were wearing than any dino-action, like Dick Wooten of The Cleveland Press.

The Los Angeles Times (March 4, 1971).

“Any red-blooded American male who watches a movie called When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth will find such creatures as pterodactyls and triceratops a big bother,” said Wooten (February 18, 1971). “The plot is pure harmless hookum. These monsters take up a lot of room on the screen when it’s obvious that the whole reason this movie was made was to display beautiful women in scanty bikinis. [Thus] the movie keeps the viewer busy ogling well-endowed girls and trying to figure out the lingo.”

Meanwhile, “Women’s Lib is nothing new if you want to take When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth seriously. They had it back in prehistoric times and you really have to see it to believe it,” said Sam Hoffman for The Springfield Republican (March 19, 1971). “As a motion picture (and its content), this attraction shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It’s harmless yet it has enough in its favor to keep young audiences’ attention. Special effects are good and for the kiddies the show will serve to whet their hungry appetites. The prehistoric monsters look good and they act like monsters should.”

The Goldsboro News-Argus (January 31, 1971). 

But some reviewers couldn’t quite get over the anachronistic hump, like Sharon Cohen of The Tampa Tribune (April 27, 1971), saying, “When dinosaurs ruled the earth there weren’t too many people around. But this fact didn’t seem to bother director and screenwriter Val Guest when he put together When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, a little monster film complete with bikini-clad cave girls. The film also features the usual pagan worship, monster fights and idle chatter about the weather. The dinosaur sequences are unusually well done, the women look good in their bikinis and the film is tolerably interesting. What more could you ask of a brontosaurus?”

And we’ll end with a dissenting opinion from Jerry Renninger, who wrote in The Palm Beach Post (April 26, 1971), “There’s a remarkable bit of nonsense in town masquerading as a movie called When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. It is remarkable for several reasons. The actors speak only in a 27-word prehistoric language, the camera work is frequently out of focus, and the plot could not capture the attention of a ten-year-old. The budding adolescents might receive some thrills from all the visible flesh but they won’t get any charge out of the plot. It’s boring, at best.”

The Cincinnati Enquirer (February 24, 1971). 

When the film was finally released, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth actually did pretty well at the box-office both in Britain and the States, where it earned about $2.5 million. It just didn’t do near the numbers of One Million Years B.C.

Not helping matters was the release was hampered by another regime change at Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. After two short years, Eliot Hyman soon grew tired of butting heads with Jack Warner and sold off his stake in the studio to Kinney National Service Corporation and officially retired. Ted Ashely took over the studio, lopped off the Seven Arts tag, and returned it to just plain old Warner Bros. And Ashley wasn’t all that interested in promoting Hyman’s dinosaur picture after he left.

Still, Hammer would keep on (re)making this kind of anachronistic Stone Age pictures with the likes of Prehistoric Women (1967) and Creatures the World Forgot (1971) with one notable exception in their line-item budgets. Having learned their lesson, Hammer eschewed the expense of any stop-motion dinosaurs for in-camera creatures and stuntmen in bear suits, which was too bad because both of those films desperately could’ve used a dinosaur punch-up.

And with the too little, too late returns on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and the total cratering of Moon Zero Two -- an oddball space western that I actually kinda dug, Ashley cut ties with Hammer, leaving them to flounder as they entered the 1970s, where the once famed studio never really recovered and quickly became a shell of its former self until it all ended in liquidation in 1979.

Perhaps Young provided the perfect epitaph for Hammer Studios. “We were a family,” she said (TBEHP, 1995). “We worked so hard, and we worked long hours; and we cared so much; and we all helped one another. You learned how to make films on a shoestring; and we learnt how to make films under all kinds of conditions. Everything that we did was on the screen. There were no extraneous expenses; there were no huge big cars and everybody -- Michael Carreras, Tony Hinds, everybody -- we all worked together. There was no ‘them and us.’ It was just like a family. I mean it was just terrific and the quality of the films was wonderful. We used the best designers, the best technicians, it was just wonderful.”

Young wasn’t the first producer or the last producer to deal with Hammer’s tight purse strings. And to her credit, despite all the difficulties, she produced a very entertaining prehistoric romp. Hands of the Ripper (1971) would be her last film for Hammer. And after producing two spin-off comedies, Steptoe and Son (1972) and Steptoe and Son Ride Again (1973), she transitioned into television.

Val Guest was also done with Hammer after this sour production, and would spend most of the rest of his career – sans the softcore interlude -- directing episodic television. “It was not my favorite picture by any means,” said Guest (Kinsey, 2007). “I wasn’t happy with that one at all. I wasn’t happy on it, or after it.”

I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the cataclysmic birth of the moon was one of the few remnants of Ballard’s original treatment to survive in the finished picture. Either way, it feels a little too big and a little too intricate of a plot device to make this kind of cavegirl picture go – and I wouldn’t blame viewers if they failed to make the connection.

Beyond that, the only really interesting plot twist was Sanna accidentally getting adopted by a family of dinosaurs, making for one of the most delightful brute squads ever committed on film.

But even these elements weren’t enough to carry the plot or give it a sense of significance, leaving us with nothing more than a nonsensical tale of boobs and dinosaurs. Would that prove enough? Luckily, the production had plenty of both.

“Actually, I imagine Raquel got tired of being compared to Ursula Andress. And I kind of feel sorry for whoever comes along next and is compared to me,” said Vetri during the press tour for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 2, 1971). Sadly, Vetri needn’t have worried as her career kinda stalled out after the film’s release and she never reached the height of fame as her fellow cavewomen.

She returned to television mostly, appearing in guest spots on Land of the Giants (1968-1970) and Mission: Impossible (1966-1973) and starred in the telefilms The Pigeon (1969) and Incident in San Francisco (1971). She would appear in her last two features in 1973, the sex comedy Group Marriage (1973) and the cult classic Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), before retiring from acting in 1975.

Vetri would appear in Playboy again in 1984. But by 1986 she was working as a waitress in a cafe, where she got into a relationship with the cook, Bruce Rathgeb, who was also a musician on the side. The couple would be married that same year but things were volatile from the jump and it only got worse from there over the next 25, substance abuse-tinged years that ultimately ended in an act of violence.

Now, to truly understand what happened, we have to first go back to 1968. During the filming of Rosemary's Baby (1968), Vetri became close friends with Roman Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate. She was at the mansion on Cielo Drive visiting Tate when an unkempt Charles Manson first showed up, looking for Terry Melcher, who used to live there. And while Tate talked to him, Vetri claimed she commented on what a creep she thought Manson appeared to be, perhaps a little too loudly, she would later think.

See, Vetri was also supposed to be with Tate on the night of August 8, 1969, but begged off sick. This, of course, was the night Manson came back to Cielo Drive in the form of his minions, who brutally murdered Tate and her other house guests. Racked with survivor’s guilt, and fearing she might’ve been the one to set Manson off after overhearing her derogatory comments, Vetri felt responsible for the death of her dear friend and never forgave herself.

And not only did she blame herself for what happened, she feared Manson was still after her -- even after he was caught, convicted, and sent to prison. Vetri would become so paranoid over this, Polanski would give her one of his handguns for protection; a Walther PPK. And it was this very same gun that Vetri used to shoot her estranged husband in 2010. "There is no doubt about it," Rathgeb told The Daily Mail (February 3, 2018). "I took the bullet meant for Charles Manson." He even heard her say, "No more, Charlie. No more," after she shot him.

The Des Moines Tribune (March 18, 1971). 

Vetri would plead no contest on charges of attempted voluntary manslaughter and would serve nine years in prison. She was released in 2018 after serving her sentence, moved to Arizona, and started to put her life back together. At last check, she was making a living attending vintage car shows with her beloved hot pink AMC AMX.

Honestly, I think Vetri deserved better. She was pretty good in both When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Invasion of the Bee Girls. Cute as a button, too, and she had a certain kind of spunk that I have always found endearing. There was a mini-press blitz around mid-1970, but the film didn't come out for nearly 8 months due to the production delays, so whatever sizzle there was had fizzled when it finally hit theaters.

But if we’re speaking honestly, what really saved When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth’s cinematic hash was the dinosaurs and the outstanding efforts of Danforth and his crew – but, again, it wasn’t easy and this consternation of a hostile work environment essentially soured the whole experience for Danforth.

According to Luigi Cozzi’s book Hammer: La fabbrica dei mostri (alias Hammer. The Monster Factory), he claimed when things finally reached a boiling point there was a violent confrontation between Danforth and Michael Carerras, who fired him off the picture for taking so long and that’s why those missing scenes were ultimately cut from the film or replaced with stock footage. Again, unsure if this was a physical altercation or just a shouting match. 

Either way, I couldn't find much corroboration on this incident, just a quote translated from Italian into English. Either way, this was all too bad, because the end results were absolutely staggering. And it may be a bit blasphemous among the B-Movie Brethren, but I think Danforth’s animated creatures come off better than Harryhausen’s; smoother, and more fluid.

“There was a lot to be said for some of the creatures in that film, but Danforth had the rhythm in him,” said Johnson (Kinsey, 1997). “He was constantly viewing things from different angles and he imagined every step of the creature as a freeze frame of the full motion and for days on end he would go through this one action, over and over again in his mind. He knew what had gone before and he knew what had to come next. In his own way I suppose he was a bit like a musician, in that he had to have some sort of beat to work to, although it was such a slow one, but he still thought of it happening in real time.”

It makes sense logically, just as Harryhausen improved on Willis O’Brien’s technique, Danforth improved on Harryhausen’s. And Danforth’s efforts on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth would be rewarded with another Oscar nomination, though he would lose to Disney again with Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1970).

This loss didn’t come as a surprise to Danforth, who felt it was a foregone conclusion because Warners was more interested in getting their home-brewed film Zeppelin (1971) a win in that category. Said Danforth (NZPete, 2012), “I remember thinking the effects looked good [in Zeppelin]. My frustration was that the editor at Warner’s didn’t want to cut the When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth reel for submission, because Warner’s wanted Zeppelin to win. Nor did Warner’s do anything to promote [my film] for the award.”

As the 1970s progressed, after dabbling in a little softcore himself, providing a few animated sequences for the slapstick spoof, Flesh Gordon (1974), Danforth seemed to leave animation behind and focused mostly on matte paintings, on which he also excelled, providing backgrounds for things ranging from The Thing (1982) and Day of the Dead (1985) to Megaforce (1982) and Commando (1985).

But he didn’t leave animation behind completely, pitching in on The Crater Lake Monster (1977), where radiation from a meteor thaws out an hatches a plesiosaur egg, whose contents go on a rampage, and Planet of Dinosaurs (1977), where space travelers become marooned on a prehistoric planet, before tackling Caveman (1981), another cavemen vs dinosaur flick starring Ringo Starr, designing and directing the live-action scenes in which the dinosaurs would appear for Carl Gottleib’s comic tale of pure nonsense and zug-zug.

(L-R) Ray Harryhausen, Pegasus, Perseus, Jim Danforth.

But the actual animation was done by his old friend David Allen, along with Randy Cook and Pete Kleinow. Seems Danforth left the project early so he could come full circle, return to England, and assist Harryhausen on his last film, Clash of the Titans (1981), where he handled most of the Pegasus scenes.

I honestly feel kind of bad for Danforth, whom I believe is an unjustly forgotten man when it comes to stop-motion animation and innovations, who never gets his just due as people tend to jump from Harryhausen to Phil Tippett and Industrial Light and Magic in any kind of retrospective on the artform. It probably didn’t help that he raised such a stink over the Special Achievement Award given to the 1976 version of King Kong, which caused Danforth to resign from the Academy in protest.

From the unrealized Time Gate demo trailer. 

This is not fair, and it's not right. The guy righteously deserves his due. He just never found his Charles Schneer, which left projects like Zoo Ship, where an alien Noah’s ark crashes on Earth, or Time Gate (-- where he collaborated with Phil Tippett), a time travel safari adventure, never got any further than concept art or demo trailer reels to raise funds.

We should probably also take a second and address the notoriously lost Hammer film, Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls, whose poster and blurbs appeared very briefly in the trade magazines in the early 1970s. Apparently, while working on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, before thigns went south Danforth had pitched Hammer on a film called Raiders of the Lost Ring, which was concocted by his old Equinox pals David Allen and Dennis Muren.

“Dave was a little reluctant to part with his property -- he wanted to make the movie not just sell the rights,” said Danforth (Archer, 1990). “So Dennis and I had some struggle trying to convince Dave that he should sell those rights to Hammer.”

The problem was, Hammer was only interested in part of the script. “Well, there was a Zeppelin in the story, which was Dave’s idea,” explained Danforth. “And there was combat between the people in the Zeppelin and the Pterodactyls, who protected the island. They said, ‘You guys can still make the rest of the movie if you just sell us the rights to this [part].’ They had a poster made up and they ran it in one of the trade magazines in England. Meanwhile, nobody had made a deal with anybody.”

Of course, after the fallout over the delays on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, topped off with Allen making his own sizzle reel to make the whole picture somewhere else, the project officially died when Hammer failed to find another American distributor. Thus, another Danforth showcase was lost.

And perhaps worst of all, on top of the middling success of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Harryhausen’s The Valley of Gwangi (1969) also unjustly failed to find an audience due to the very same studio indifference and regime change. 

And then, as the 1970s progressed, moviegoers became more interested in killer sharks, high octane chases, and galaxies far, far away and dinosaurs would once more become virtually extinct, cinematically speaking, until, for better or for worse, Steven Spielberg and Jurassic Park (1993) brought them back (digitally) for good.

Originally posted on June 3, 2018, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) Hammer Films :: Warner Bros / P: Aida Young / D: Val Guest / W: Val Guest, J.G. Ballard / C: Dick Bush / E: Peter Curran / M: Mario Nascimbene/ S: Victoria Vetri, Robin Hawdon, Drewe Henley, Imogen Hassall, Patrick Allen