Saturday 1 September 2012

Unimaginable Savagery


‘Creatures The World Forgot’ is one of the most startingly surreal films in British cinema history. Yes, I know that sounds like hyberbolic hyperbollocks, but ‘tis true. The last of Hammer’s patchy ‘cave man’ quadrilogy (is that even a word?) it manages to fashion a compelling narrative with only a faint semblance of plot, no coherent dialogue and without the cheap thrills of a single magnified lizard or stop-go dinosaur.
A grim, decidedly unglamorous film about Stone Age survival (despite starring Julie Ege, there’s very little in the way of fur bikinied eye candy), it utilises some amazing landscapes and natural phenomena (it was filmed in Namibia) to give a kind of hopped up sort of facsimile of life at the dawn of the dawn of civilisation, with all its savagery, danger and excessive facial hair. You might think I’m joking when I say it's great – but I am not – it’s great.
The one thing I did find amusing about the film was the legend ‘any similarity to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental’, presumably there just in case a 3 million year old cave man mounted a legal challenge.

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