The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Prehistory is any period before the advent of human civilisation and what we generally consider recorded history. This can range from the epochs when Dinosaurs roamed the Earth to those dealing with the lives of Cavemen.
Since the silent era, there have been a number of prehistoric dramas featuring cavemen coexisting with dinosaurs despite the fact that there was 64 million years separating both species in reality. From the 1980s onwards, films have opted for greater anthropological realism in this regard.
There is also a body of films from tv’s The Flintstones (1960-6) onwards that treat the prehistoric world with comic silliness. There are also a number of animated films about the lives of dinosaurs, cavepeople or prehistoric talking animals.
This also includes a number of works where people Time Travel from the present day to the prehistoric past. For films in which cavemen and dinosaurs are revived in the present day see Prehistoric Revivals.
A bizarre directorial debut from actor Steve Oram that takes place in an alternate world of sorts that operates on pre-verbal grunts and ape-like displays of dominance behaviour
A bizarre Italian film that recounts the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and then follows on from their banishment from Eden and into the wilderness where they encounter dinosaurs, cavemen and wild beasts
Feeble and shabbily made kid’s film in which children are transported inside the world of their favourite dinosaur tv show. Featuring some terrible dinosaur effects
A mockbuster from The Asylum that sets out to copy Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit such that Jackson and co sued, forcing The Asylum to change the title in several territories
The prehistoric film seems a bit dated and hoary on screen these days. Albert Hughes solves the problem of revitalising the genre a series of jaw-droppingly kinetic action moves and stunning hyper-real landscapes
Second in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations starring Doug McClure. This opens with the fabulous invention of the drilling mole but the arrival at the earth’s core look cheap and tatty
Delightful and completely charming Rene Clair comedy about a daydreamer. A much better version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty than either of the official film adaptations
Witless and inane comedy in which nerdy high school student Daniel Roebuck is thrown back in time to the Stone Age where he romances cavegirl Cindy Ann Thompson
A comedy spoof of One Million Years B.C. and the whole sub-genre of caveman vs dinosaurs films This proves amiably goofy where Ringo Starr seems perfectly cast as the lead caveman
An oddly unconvincing adaptation of the first of Jean M Auel’s best-selling prehistoric books featuring Darryl Hannah as a more advanced Cro-Magnon cavewoman Ayla living among a Neanderthal tribe
The fourth and final of Hammer Films’ cycle of prehistoric adventure films, this far less interestingly throws out stop-motion animated dinosaurs and opts for relative anthropological realism
What gives the expectation of being a formulaic animated film about a prehistoric cave family instead comes with a fresh and naturalistic sense of humour that proves oddly appealing
The sequel to DreamWorks’ animated prehistoric film. For a very low expectation effort – the modern animated sequel – this emerges as far more colourful and entertaining than one expects
The first full computer animated film from Disney. It feels like someone decided to give the Jurassic Park dinosaurs their own film, mixed up with the plot of The Land Before Time
The very first film from stop-motion animator Willis O’Brien, the creator of King Kong. A rather slight piece about the comic shenanigans among a group of cave people but it was the first film to ever depict a dinosaur on screen.
The movie parodies of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, which consist of crude, witless gags run over replication of scenes from films of the last twelve months, are painfully unfunny. This doesn’t even spoof the disaster movie
Claymation film from Aardman Animations that is in effect a prehistoric comedy like The Flintstones or The Croods mixed up with a sports film, but is Aardman’s slightest work so far
The best animated film Disney ever made, created as a work of art with animation set to classical music. The segments vary between abstraction, comic eccentricity and evocations of nightmare. The results are magical.
The first in what later became a fad for replicating cartoon tv series as big-budget live-action films, this does an exacting live-action version of the Hanna-Barbera series
Sequel to the live-action The Flintstones film. Whether we asked for it or not, this offers up a Flintstones origin story where we see familiar elements of the series fall into place
An early film from Willis O’Brien, the creator of King Kong, where a man finds a telescope that offers a view of the prehistoric past
Pixar have never been the same since they slipped into the easy familiarity of sequelitis. This is essentially a boy and his dog story but played out with a dinosaur and a caveboy, but also an alternate history tale
A unique experimental film from Robert Zemeckis where the camera sits in a single spot in a room and tells is story, covers across history from the dinosaurs to the present day. Based on an acclaimed graphic novel
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
Film from Z-budget filmmaker Al Adamson. Most of this is reissued from a Filipino caveman film, along with a handful of filler scenes slung together from odds of Adamson’s other half-finished films
This begat an interminable number of tedious sequels. However, the original is a still likeable and appealing animated film about a group of prehistoric talking animals migrating with the onset of an Ice Age
The first in a series of interminable sequels to Blue Sky Studios’ animated prehistoric adventure. Everything has a tediousness that feels as though it is created by a script generating computer
Another of Blue Sky Studios’ interminable animated sequels to its likeable original about prehistoric talking animals. This has little substance beyond a kinetic rush from one gag to the next
This is not a film, it is a money-making machine in the guise of a film aimed squarely at undiscerning family audiences that plays to familiar characters and comic routines and has minimal difference to the preceding three Ice Age films
I hate the Ice Age films and their tediously extruded adventures. The opening sequence here and its ignorance of even basic science is the most inane thing in the entire series
Former Pixar director Andrew Stanton, known for Finding Nemo, Wall-E and John Carter, makes a cross-historical work in the vein of Cloud Atlas that takes place between prehistory, the present and the future
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people from the hollow core of the Earth could go wrong but this is a disappointment
I have raved elsewhere about the extraordinary live-action/animated films of Karel Zeman. This is one of his earlier efforts wherein four boys journey through prehistory. Not the equal of Zeman’s later work, it feels more like an illustrated museum tour than a dramatic film
Cheaply made film (actually a remake of The Time Travelers) about a research laboratory propelled through time. Most of the historical scenes are represented by stock footage
Likeable but lightweight talking dinosaur film from animator Don Bluth. Aims to be a prehistoric Bambi but never quite finds the depth. Mostly remembered for producing a large number of video-released sequels
Third of The Land Before Time animated films about talking dinosaurs, made for very young children
Fourth of The Land Before Time animated films about talking dinosaurs, made for very young children
Fifth of The Land Before Time animated films about talking dinosaurs, made for very young children
Big screen revival of the children’s lost world tv series that is now turned into a loud and excruciating Will Ferrell vehicle that reduces the original into lowbrow farce. A majorly unfunny bomb on every level
The first in a trilogy of prehistoric lost world adventures based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels and all starring Doug McClure. The variability of the effects aside, this is a well-made adventure with a strong script
1950s B movie about the discovery of a prehistoric lost world in the Antarctic that unfortunately befalls shoddy effects
A typical example among the mini-genre of prehistoric lost world films, this concerns a team of explorers finding a humid world at the Arctic where dinosaurs and cavemen still roam. The men in rubber suit effects are adequate, although the film itself is on the slow side
The sixth and last of the Sharknado films, this has the usual crew fighting sharknados throughout history with the recognition there is nowhere more ridiculous and over-the-top for the series to go
Luc Besson returns to direct the type of hyper-adrenalised action film where he made his name with a preposterously entertaining piece about drug mule Scarlett Johansson becoming superhuman – sort of if you imagine Limitless having been reconceived as an action film
Sequel to the Jason Statham starring killer shark film. The surprise is seeing cult director Ben Wheatley deliberately making a big, dumb film
The incomprehensibly manic antics of the Minions have a cuteness appeal that has overspilled the Despicable Me films and seemed like it is in danger of taking over pop culture in the last couple of years; here they get a film all to themselves with amiably lightweight results
Jaco Van Dormael film that reaches for epic ideas in a story about multiple life pathways and a babble of ideas taken from physics but fails to assemble them in a way that makes much sense
An Asylum mockbuster released at the same time as Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., this involves time travel mission into the prehistoric past that accidentally brings a dinosaur back to the present
Classic caveman vs dinosaurs prehistoric drama later to be remade as the more famous version with Raquel Welch. This plays as fairly creaky today but gains an undeniable vividness with the raw ferocity of its dinosaur scenes (played by optically enlarged lizards)
Cult stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen made this classic caveman vs dinosaurs film in collaboration with Hammer Films. The work that brought Raquel Welch to prominence as an actress
The third in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations with Doug McClure. This has much imagination despite the special effects often not being up to the task
Laughable prehistoric drama about cave women searching for mates – too cheap to afford stop-motion animated dinosaurs and filled with ridiculous dialogue howlers
A surprisingly good animated film about the relationship between a caveman and a dinosaur, all without a line of dialogue. From the director of the Hotel Transylvania films
Beautifully shot directorial debut from Jean-Jacques Annaud that sets out to dispel all the cinematic cliches about cavemen and dinosaurs and offers up an anthropologically realistic prehistoric film
This seemed to have a lot of promise in its set-up of Adam Driver crashlanded in Earth’s prehistoric past fighting off dinosaurs
One of a handful of prehistoric adventure films made by Hammer Studios. This eschews the stop-motion animated dinosaurs of their earlier One Million Years B.C. but does give the stage to Martine Beswick who injects a sizzling dose of sexuality and camps a silly plot up by playing to the hilt
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have become one of the most underrated indie genre voices. Here they make a film where Anthony Mackie discovers a drug that causes people to travel through time
Roger Corman film that sets out to exploit the teenage themed fad of the late 1950s, offering up a caveman drama that comes with a surprise SF twist
Roland Emmerich leaves epic mass destruction behind to make a prehistoric film, one that soon collapses into a remarkable silliness
The first of Michael Bay’s Transformers sequels has even better effects and more copious mass destruction to the point it washes over you without any effect
Terrence Malick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe the best work yet about the great Lost American Childhood yet – a film that doesn’t seem to be about anything but has far more to say than almost all other multiplex films
Time travel, Nazis in UFOs and a Nazi-ruled alternate timeline, giant robot spiders – ok, I’m sold. A surprisingly good little film where the fact that this is also made on a low budget and with a good deal of conceptual constraint makes it all the more creative an effort
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology, groundbreaking in a number of ways,
Among the 1950s/60s spate of Jules Verne films, this was an adaptation of one of Vernr’s lesser-known works Hector Servadac/Off on a Comet. That said, all the but the notion of people swept up on a comet is thrown out and the rest played as a prehistoric lost world adventure
Walking With Dinosaurs was an amazing documentary series that recreated prehistoric life with CGI animation. By contrast. the film spinoff is a cutsie animated film with talking dinosaurs. It is a film that is killed by the decision to let the dinosaurs talk with smartass one-liners and contemporary in-jokes
After the success of their earlier caveman vs stop-motion animated dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C., Hammer made several other prehistoric films, including this effort that purportedly had a script by an uncredited J.G. Ballard
Likeable puppet animated film about a time-travelling boy and his monkey companion
Not very funny comedy from Harold Ramis and Judd Apatow where Jack Black and Michael Cera are cavemen who stumble through many incidents from the Old Testament