User Reviews

There can't be many films sillier than "Slave Girls" (a.k.a "Prehistoric Women"). This absurd farrago from the folks at Hammer is an attempt by them to wring a few extra profits out of the sets and costumes from their earlier hit "One Million Years B.C." Scripted, produced and directed by Michael Carreras, "Slave Girls" is a film that invites derision wherever it is seen – Maltin refers to it as "idiotic", while Halliwell calls it "feebly preposterous". What neither of them remembers to mention is that the film retreats so far into its own outlandish unreality that it somehow rises above – (or should that be sinks below?) – criticism on normal terms. The film exists in two versions – the British cut running for approximately 74 minutes, and the longer 90 minute American version. This is a review of the American cut.

In Africa, a game hunter called David Marchant (Michael Latimer) is organising a leopard hunt for his safari party. Unfortunately, the leopard is injured but not killed by an over-eager member of the party, so Marchant feels obliged to follow the animal into dangerous tribal territory to perform its mercy killing. He is discovered by the tribe whose territory he has trespassed into and they take him away to be killed in front of their idol, the White Rhinoceros. During the sacrificial ritual, a strange lightning bolt opens a crack in the cave wall and Marchant escapes through it. However, his problems have only just begun, for he finds himself going through some kind of time warp into a past dimension. Here, a tribe of dark-haired women have total control of the region and keep fair-haired women as slaves for their personal gratification. The leader of the dark-hairs is the cruel and treacherous Queen Kari (Martine Beswick). She wants Marchant to be her mate and even offers to share power with him if he accepts, but he is appalled by her tyranny and refuses. One of the blonde slaves, the beautiful Saria (Edina Ronay), senses that Marchant might be able to liberate the enslaved fair-hairs from Queen Kari's terrible rule, so she sets about persuading him to join them in their struggle for freedom.

"Slave Girls" has a cult following, and from a brief description of its plot it's not hard to see why. Films like this don't get made very often!?! The most incredible thing about the film is that it is so deadly serious – not a single tongue to be found in a single cheek despite the sheer lunacy on display. Latimer as the hero is hopelessly wooden, but the two central female parts are played with admirable gusto by Beswick and Ronay. If they feel any sense of embarrassment in performing their roles – and surely they must – they hide it with remarkable courage, and enter fully into the spirit of things. The photography is technically quite good, and Carlo Martelli's melodramatic music adds an earnest sense of drama to the ridiculous proceedings. "Slave Girls" is an almost impossible film to review because it bears all the hallmarks of a 1-out-of-10 bomb, yet to rate it so lowly seems grossly unfair. It deserves two stars for sheer courage, another for its leading female performances, and one more for technical proficiency. Awful it might be, but at least it's ENJOYABLY awful!

This Hammer film from '67 isn't typical of the Hammer films you'll know or expect. It's known by two titles; "Slave Girls" and "Prehistoric Women", I watched the later variant. While on a hunting party one of jungle guide David Marchand's (Michael Latimer) party shoots and wounds a leopard. Rather than leave it to suffer the decision is taken to hunt it down and kill it properly. Marchand eventually finds the wounded beast and kills it but in doing so he has encroached on sacred land and is captured by natives who worship a white rhino. He is taken to the tribal leaders who advise he must be killed as he has angered the white rhino God. Just before being executed time stops and a hole in time/space appears. Stepping through it Marchand is in a long forgotten time where he encounters a blonde woman (Saria, played by Edina Ronay) fleeing for her life. He discovers she is fleeing from the brunette women - Queen Kari (Martine Beswick, the sort of Bond girl who briefly appeared in "From Russia with Love" and "Thunderball") who rules the area and has enslaved blonde's and the local populous of men. In this place the brunette woman rule and anybody else is either a slave or just a masked shadow hiding in the trees. It's up to Marchand to assist with the revolution and help the enslaved people rise up against their oppressors. While helping he becomes close to the initial blonde slave, Saria, he encountered. Unfortunately after the revolution he'll have to return to his own time-line but as fate would have it, changing the future means he'll get another crack as Saria again.

This film is pretty poor, it's predictable from the start and pretty flimsy. The plot has been done before many times and the script of this doesn't make it stand above any of the other films. The cast features mainly unknown stars so don't expect a polished quality performance. You'd think as a hot blooded male I'd revel in the sight of fur-bikini clad women running around but it looks too dated and against the backdrop it looks unconvincing. The special effects and scenery within the film are poor at best but that's what you get when you try to make an outdoor film completely indoors. As well as the rubbish jungle there's the papier-mâché rhino which keeps appearing. There is a lot of dancing and singing but I was put off when I noticed that any time there was it was plainly obvious that nobody on screen had their mouth open to suggest they were singing.

While watching this film did pass away a few hours on a quiet Sunday it's certainly not a film I'll be in a rush to watch again or recommend to anyone. Sorry, I can only give this 3 out of 10.

Robert Raglen was such a huge success on TV from 1946 through 1983, we tend to forget that he also made quite a few movies. This is not one of his better ones. All the same, as written, produced and directed by Michael Carreras (take no notice of the names you actually see on the screen – they are merely pseudonyms), it's an enjoyable enough romp, featuring a bevy of gorgeous blondes and a cohort of seductive brunettes. And it certainly can't be alleged against Major Carreras that he fails to extract all the excitement possible from the intriguing screenplay he hashed up under his Henry Younger alias. The color camera-work by Michael Reed is first class. So are the sets and costumes. And as for the girls, they can dance for us any time they please!

There is not a lot to be said about this film except that it really is one of the very worst films I have ever seen.

Hammer had made some terrific films from the mid fifties until the mid sixties but by 1967 they were running out of steam and this cheap rubbish with a D List cast is one of their lowest points.

The plot concerns some English hunter (Michael Latimer) who is on an expedition to the African Jungle who stumbles into some prehistoric time when this part of the world was run by a tribe of Brunette women in loin cloths - led by the redoubtable Martine Beswick. The Brunettes don't seem to do much except keep men slaves and watch loin cloth clad Blonde slaves dancing. This latter point might hint at some sort of sapphic sexiness but of that , perhaps mercifully, there is none and really there can be few films that achieve the dubious distinction of being able to make a film in which some very attractive women - including the lovely Edina Ronay and one time maid in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner Stephanie Randall- wear few clothes as sexy as my dirty shoes.

In the end Latimer returns to the real world after some shenanigans with a white rhinoceros and is , in a twist everybody watching would have guessed, reunited with Ronay who is by now a fully dressed 'gal' on safari.

There are some films which are so bad they can be quite funny- the Brides of Fu Manchu being one such- but this is a film that has no real redeeming features and it is hard to imagine anybody being satisfied by it on any level and stereotype black male characters are pretty borderline racially offensive.

Still if rubbish is your thing this is the movie for you.