No Man Could Conquer...

‘The Viking Queen’ is more ‘Carry On Cleo’ than anything else (it also occasionally resembles Michael Bentine’s ‘Potty Time’) but then, if you want historical accuracy, going to Hammer is like asking Bill Wyman to look after your  teenage daughter. I’ve never managed to spot the extra apparently wearing a watch (the scourge of every historical pot boiler) but I did notice this about the film:

1.    The queen is played by Finnish actress Carita who is so inexpressive that the film could easily have been retitled ‘The Wooden Ruler’. She appears to have never worked again.

2.     I briefly fell asleep during the chariot race which, to be frank, is the opposite reaction one would expect from a chariot race.

3.   The poster says 'MILLIONS followed her into battle'. The population of the whole of Britain at the time was only just over a million, so that doesn't work.  

4.     There aren’t ANY Vikings in the film, they won’t be around for at least another 700 years. 

5.     Actually, the whole thing is ridiculous. It’s unfair to continue.

An ‘interesting’ change of direction for Hammer (who made a Robin Hood film at about the same time) ‘The Viking Queen’ is fairly negligible but, although it should not be used to settle academic arguments about Ancient Britain, it is not entirely without merit, not least because it’s a bloody good laugh.

Patrick Troughton’s in it, which is nice;  dear old, drunk old Wilfred Lawson jogs up as a super-annuated and short-lived King and Andrew Keir plays a shouty Centurion, which perhaps explains the pairing of ‘The Viking Queen’ with his other Hammer film of 1967, the infinitely superior ‘Quatermass and The Pit,’ as an unlikely double bill in some territories.  

Occasionally quite smutty, and with some nice pagan ritual and sacrifice sequences, it's very loosely based on the story of Boudicca, in much the same way that crappy postcard from yesterday was, but to far more entertaining effect.   

The Viking Queen

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.

Creatures The World Forgot