EDITOR’S NOTE: One Million Years BC was on USA Up All Night on December 6, 1996 and September 27, 1997. 

Don Chaffey also directed Pete’s Dragon and Jason and the Argonauts, as well as Persecution AKA The Graveyard. Shot in Lanzarote and Tenerife in the Canary Islands as well as Elstree Studios, the real star of this movie is the image of Racquel Welch wearing a bikini that predates so much of our world’s history.

A remake of the 1940 movie One Million B.C., this movie is only sixty million years or so off from humans and dinosaurs living together. Then again, Ray Harryhausen, who did the stop motion effects, said that he wasn’t making this movie for professors who probably don’t go to see these kinds of movies anyway.

It starts with these words: “This is a story of long, long ago, when the world was just beginning… A young world, a world early in the morning of time. A hard, unfriendly world. Creatures who sit and wait. Creatures who must kill to live. And man, superior to the creatures only in his cunning. There are not many men yet. Just a few tribes scattered across the wilderness. Never venturing far, unaware that other tribes exist even. Too busy with their own lives to be curious. Too frightened of the unknown to wander. Their laws are simple: the strong take everything.”

We first meet the Rock tribe and Chief Akhoba (Robert Brown), who has two sons at one another’s throats, Tumak (John Richardson) and Sakana (Percy Herbert). Actually, everyone fights everyone as Tumak even goes after his dad over the fair share of the meat of a warthog. He gets banished into the wild lands filled with prehistoric beasts and nearly dies before being saved — and saving — Loana (Welch) of the Shell tribe.

However, Tumak is always trouble and when he fights for his spear, he is kicked out of the Shell tribe. Loana follows him home, where his brother has replaced his father who is a broken man. This is a movie filled with battles between dinosaurs — a Triceratops versus a Ceratosaurus made me go crazy as a kid and those same miniatures are in The Valley of Gwangi — but adult me is more interested in Welch and Martine Beswick going hand to hand.

Then a volcano made of wallpaper paste, oatmeal, dry ice and red dye kills nearly the entire task and forces the Rock and Shell people to stop fighting and become one tribe.

I dig what Harryhausen was going for here, using real animals in some scenes, including a vulture, a python, a green iguana, the warthog mentioned above, a Loaghtan (a type of sheep) and a tarantula. He thought that if people saw some real animals, they may think that everything was an actual animal.