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.

Stone Age Highway

'The Ridgeway' is a short tourist information film which was broadcast constantly on television up until the late eighties. A 5,000 year old man made thoroughfare which once stretched from Dorset to the Wash in North Norfolk, the 87 miles of The Ridgeway which weave between Avebury in Wiltshire and Tring in Buckinghamshire was opened as a protected national trail in 1973, and the promotional film was made shortly afterwards.

It's usual for films like this to place a strong emphasis on the echoes of history, but here the ghosts are shown literally, long dead figures which fade in and out of vision, but are indelibly recorded on the landscape.

I wasn't going to post the whole film (all two and a half minutes of it), but, now I think about it, it seems mean not to, so here it is.

Oh, and if you do have any queries, please don't write to the Countryside Commission as they ceased to exist in 1999 and their offices in Cambridge Gate have been converted to flats, albeit flats that cost £8,000,000 each.