Slave Girls (1967)

Let's be realistic.

A Major Disappointment

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I was not impressed. I enjoy Amazon themed films and what guy doesn't enjoy watching dozens of nubile young blondes dancing around a campfire? But in this case the film lacks any substance whatsoever. The lead character is a guy named David (Michael Latimer) who is supposed to be an African big game hunter but instead he is the one who gets caught by a tribe of hot lusty women.So boy meets girl, or should I say boy meets two girls. One blonde slave girl, and one brunette princess who wants to shag our male hero David. There is absolutely no good action or thriller scenes in this film. I thought the amount of time wasted on a variety of tribal dance scenes that went on way too long wasted almost one third of the entire film which made the film even more boring if that was even possible.I give it a higher than deserved 3 out of 10 rating because of the blonde slave girls who were hot and abundant, but other than that you could get the same thrill out of scanning through a few pages of some old National Geographic magazines.

Michael Carreras directed this campy prehistoric film that stars Michael Latimer as African big game hunter David Marchant who is captured by a hostile tribe and taken to a temple guarded by a white rhino. A lightning bolt hits the temple, splitting a wall, which David runs through and into the past, where two rival, warring(and beautiful!) all-female tribes(one blonde, the other brunette) vie for his attentions, though the brunette Queen Kari(played by Martine Beswick) is particularly ruthless, and will stop at nothing to either possess David, or kill him... Silly film is nonetheless semi-watchable, and almost works as a guilty pleasure, though not a minute of it rings true!

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!

What "Prehistoric Women" lacks above all is conviction: the backdrops look painted, the hairlines are too neat, the speech is too modern-sounding, the sets look stagy. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense (how exactly the "legend of the white rhinoceros" is tied to the rest of the story is never made entirely clear), Michael Latimer is a bland lead and the pace is padded with lots of tribal dancing. The new DVD version presents the movie in widescreen: you do win extra "information" on the sides of the picture, but on the other hand you lose what appear to be (in the full-screen trailers for the movie) some juicy closeups of Beswick's and Ronay's abs. (**)