Review: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
Warner Archive has delivered another beautiful Blu-ray and DVD from their vast catalog. This time we're treated to dinosaurs, a sixties Playmate, and lots of surf and sand, courtesy of the Canary Islands. What more could a movie fan ask for? Well, a lot, actually. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is a 1970 cult film (I hesitate to use the word "classic") from Hammer Films, the same studio that brought us Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and Dr. Frankenstein. They're an icon of the horror movie landscape for giving film audiences the kind of scares, gore, and titillating situations that other major studios shied away from during the fifties. Fast forward a decade: long after Hammer had run their core Dracula and Frankenstein franchises into the ground, they produced a spate of prehistoric-themed movies, kick-started by the now-iconic 1966 movie One Million Years, B.C. , starring Raquel Welch. That movie felt fresh and engaging, not j