*For the next week or so, I’m going to add a random film the great Ray Harryhausen worked on. The legendary special effects MASTER passed away on May 7, 2013 at age 92 in London and yes, the film world has lost a true giant as well as a fine and talented gentleman…

When I was a wee bairn, I actually went to two different schools where some kids thought this 1967 film was based on actual facts and at least one really deluded kid thought it was a documentary. Seriously. My ears still spin in opposite directions thinking about that, but I digress. You’re either watching One Million Years B.C. for its faux historical value, Ray Harryhausen’s excellent dinosaur effects or Raquel Welch with a side order of Martine Beswick in that cave gal cat-fight sequence. Don’t deny it, now…

Anyway, I’ve always thought this films was pretty awful for a few reasons I’ll touch on below, but the camp value plus those always awesome looking and moving Harryhausen dinos make it very watchable and re-watchable, provided you take none of what you see at all seriously…

Sure, this is a remake of a 1940 film that’s also unintentionally campy and has some nice visual effects for the time. But I found it weird that twenty-five years and some better (but not perfect) knowledge of science still had people believing that dinosaurs and humans were sharing the same space. Well, my eyeballs were glued to the screen as a kid, so yeah, I fell for this flick and the even more awful When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth plus DINOSAURUS! and a few other “B” movies back in the day, but I also paid too much attention to those class museum trips and in science class as I got older, so my old beliefs were handed the cardboard suitcase and shown the door before I hit 20.

Still, it’s a great little time capsule and Harryhausen’s work is great as always, save for one caveat. His idea of mixing in scenes of live creatures and his stop motion work comes off as a bit weird-looking nowadays, but I can recall seeing this on TV back in the day and knowing something was up with the real and fake fantasy clashing. Still, by that time in my young film fandom, I’d seen plenty of iguanas with fake fins or really crappy stop motion that looked as if it was done by a class of ten-year old kids in non-Harryhausen flicks (Jack the Giant Killer still makes me laugh at the wrong times), so I wasn’t too upset by Ray’s technical decisions here.

Anyway, by the end of this silly but classic genre film, you may find your brain exploding from all that rewritten and straight-up made-up “history”, so I wholeheartedly recommend a double feature with Quest for Fire or maybe even a triple feature with Iceman, two much better films that do a better (but definitely not perfect) job of creating more interesting cave folk from different eras. No dinosaurs in either of these, but they’re entertaining in a more cerebral manner…