one million years b.c.

One Million Years B.C. is a 1966 (released in the United States in 1967) adventure film/fantasy film starring Raquel Welch set – loosely – in the time of cavemen. The film was made by UK’s Hammer Film Productions, and was a remake of the 1940 Hollywood film One Million B.C., and it re-creates many of the scenes of that film (such as an allosaurus attacking a tree full of children). It is marketed with the taglines “Travel back through time and space to the edge of man’s beginnings…discover a savage world whose only law was lust!” and “This is the way it was.”

Like the original film, this remake is largely ahistorical. It portrays dinosaurs and humans living together, whereas, according to the Geologic time scale the last dinosaurs became extinct roughly 65 million years BC, and homo sapiens (modern humans) did not exist until about 200,000 years BC. Harryhausen has stated in a commentary of the unfinished film, Creation, shown on the King Kong 1933 DVD, that he did not make One Million Years B.C. for “professors” who in his opinion “probably don’t go to see these kinds of movies anyway.”

raquel welch

Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

Trivia:

  • As the Shell People are attacked by a giant turtle, the women call it “Achelon” which is the real scientific name for the animal.
  • Robert Brown (Akhoba) wears makeup identical to that worn by Lon Chaney Jr. wore in the same role in the 1940 version (One Million B.C. (1940)).
  • The exterior scenes were filmed in the Canary Islands in the middle of winter.
  • This was Hammer’s 100th production.
  • Raquel Welch was dubbed by Nikki Van der Zyl.

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    Filed under: Hammer Films

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