MOVIE REVIEW: Creatures the World Forgot (1971)

In the mid-20th Century, the Western film industry stumbled forward on new and progressive ideas, trying to make movies that would capture the imagination of the viewing public without depending on the same old gimmicks of horror monsters and established heroes like the cowboy and the soldier. Instead, they moved on more shocking fare: titillating sex and violence. With a mostly Euro-centric cast to satisfy the need of the target audience to use proxies for the adventures on screen, we ended up with Nordic cavemen in a fantasy prehistoric world shot in Apartheid-era South Africa with the Hammer Films production Creatures The World Forgot.

WHITE MASKS: Kala (Julie Ege) is taken captive by a tribe with too much free time.

A multi-generational story without a single spoken word of intelligible dialogue (as intended, because cavemen didn’t have language as we know it), the narrative follows a group of dark-haired and tanned cavemen — we’ll call them the Brunettes — as they pass on the mantle of chieftain due to a hunting accident and again by duel. The primitives move on, possibly north given their resulting encounter — a group of fair-haired and fair-skinned primitives we shall call the Nords. The Nords seem to have greater craftsmanship skills and access to the ocean given how many seashells decorated their bodies; the ocean is never seen or heard. The tribes intermingled, and the witch-woman of the Brunettes witnessed three notable births: a pair of fraternal twin boys (she marked the blonde one), and a girl born on the sign of an omen — a bush struck by lightning in a cloudless sky. The children grew big and exhibited traits people of the mid-20th Century associated with hair color, meaning the blonde would be our hero and the brunette our villain.

MAN VS. NATURE: Toomak (Tony Bonner) fight against a random boa constrictor to save Kala (Julie Ege).

Enter the blonde, now a man called Toomak (Tony Bonner, Quigley Down Under, “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” [TV-ABC]). Keep in mind the character names I use come from the Wikipedia article and not from the movie: there was no dialogue or names spoken. He is opposed by his darker-haired brother Rool (Robin John, El Topo, Crossplot). The attempted rape Rool tried on the girl born by the sign, grown to a woman both ginger and mute (Marcia Fox, Au Pair Girls, Old Dracula), causes the beginning of encounters with other tribes, leading to meeting the main draw of the film: Norwegian beauty Julie Ege (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Rentadick).

UNGA BUNGA: Cavemen invented language just to describe the beauty of Julie Ege.

Continuing a Hammer tradition begun with Playboy Playmates Raquel Welch in One Million B.C. (1966) and Victoria Vetri in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), Julie Ege is built to please with a killer smile to boot. She plays Kala — a female survivor of one of the previous tribes encountered we’ll call the Darkhearts. Kala and Toomak get along famously, and due to a disagreement between our male leads, she leaves the joint Brunette-Nords tribe when Toomak leaves. The new tribe finds ever greener pastures, but Rool won’t stand to see Toomak succeed and chases after them. Rool’s people encounter the White Masks — a tribe wearing big mud masks and coating themselves in white chalk. The White Masks leader likes to poke people’s eyes out with sharp sticks. It takes a combined effort between the New tribe and the Brunette-Nords tribe to stop the White masks, but Rool wants more than his life. He wants Toomak dead and Kala for himself. They fight fight fight to the top of a mountain and Rool dies — not by the hand of Kala or Toomak, but the mute ginger Rool tried to rape earlier. The ending leaves a whole lot to be desired, and that’s all I can say about that — the movie wasn’t all that great.

TRIAL BY FIRE: To save Kala, Toomak uses a flaming brand to hold Rool (Robin John) at bay.

CHOICE CUTS:

• This movie was filmed in the Namib Desert, on the southwestern borders between South Africa and Namibia. It’s also the same filming location for 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
• This movie was filmed in 1970~71, during South Africa’s Apartheid years). Let that sink in. Google “apartheid” if you have to. Then compare and contrast the content of this film.
• Stop-motion dinosaurs were left out of the movie, which is probably why no one knows about this movie.
• Several animals were killed during the making of this movie: some were mutilated and skinned, and many more were mistreated. The special effects used on the corpses of the cave-men and -women were pretty good with notable mistakes towards the end, and I’ll be surprised if the same techniques were used to emulate dead animals.

SEASHELLS BY THE SEASHORE: I know the Namib Desert’s western edge is just South Atlantic Ocean shoreline, but you never see or hear it in this film. Did the Nords bring the shells with them?

• The Nords had shells in their clothing, and the Nord chieftain had a sawfish-nose spear. Yet the ocean or sufficiently large body of water where they can get sea shells is never shown or heard. WHERE IS THE OCEAN? CAN WE JUST HEAR IT PLEASE?
• Looks like everyone making the movie was either dehydrated or stoned, especially the women. Then again, they made a cave-man movie in the African wilderness.
• I sincerely hope the babies used in the film were made up with fake umbilical cords, otherwise that was BAD for the babies on every level at their relative age.
• The restraint device at the end of the movie was far too complicated for a cave-man to whip up in the span of 10 minutes of rock climbing with a writhing captive.

— previously pubished 12/10/2016 on Facebook Notes —