ONE MILLION B.C. or When Tumak met Loana, a primer for dating from back in the day, “Way back/back into time…” like 10,020 centuries. When dinosaurs and humans shared each other for snacks. Oh, wait…

A storm sends a party of hikers into a cave where they encounter an anthropologist studying prehistoric carvings. He relates what he’s deciphered about the figures on the cavern walls. It seems that once upon a (helluva long) time there was a kill-first-&-ask-questions-later ‘Rock Tribe’ (truly hard rock) led by selfish brute ‘Akhoba’ (Lon Chaney Jr., a year before he discovered post-homicide guilt as The Wolf Man). Beaten and banished from the group, his son ‘Tumak’ (Victor Mature, 27, second film) comes into contact with the peaceful ‘Shell Tribe’, who keep a clean cave, share food and sport a primordial fox in the shapely form of ‘Loana’ (Carole Landis) who polishes Tumak’s rougher edges. The brawny (yet clean-shaven) dude gets with the Shell game and the hot blonde in a goatskin miniskirt, but there are still giant creatures galore to deal with and one of those cool-looking nearby firetraps that periodically smoke our collective hash.

Co-directed by Hal Roach and his son Hal Jr., this 1940 adventure opus left critics smirking and sent despairing paleontologists to the nearest bar. But what total “Gee Whiz!” FUN this must’ve been to kids of the FDR Age, with its parade of deadly out-sized ancient creatures and a volcanic explosion complete with unstoppable molten lava.

Father & son Roach’s had extensive initial input from silent era titan D.W. Griffith, who went uncredited as a producer and while the script is tacked to Mickell Novack, George Baker and Joseph Frickert word-around-the-cave grunts that Roach the father was the real author. Someone came up with the early example of blind date chat—TUMAK: “Tumak!”   LOANA: “Tumak?”   TUMAK: “Tumak!”   LOANA: “Loana.”   TUMAK: “Loana?”   LOANA: “Loana!   “TUMAK: “Loana? Tumak!”  LOANA: “Tumak.”

He/they went democratic and gave supporting players ‘prehistoric’ monickers such as ‘Peytow’, ‘Nupondi’, ‘Ataf’ and my personal fave ‘Skakana’. Speaking of tags, 21-year old va-voomette Carole Landis was nicknamed ‘The Ping Girl’ and ‘The Chest’ (take a guess and meet me in the commissary); in three years she’d appeared in 28 pictures, unbilled. This made her a star and she became one of the most popular pinups of WW2.

On the man-chest front, this is your chance to see Victor Mature wrestle a triceratops (okay, a baby triceratops, still the size of a pig, which it was under its costuming) and gawk as legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt earns keep bulldogging a steer disguised as an irked wooly mammoth. The mastodons—Asian elephants were festooned with tusks and fur—are actually pretty effective. Not so convincing is the man-in-suit Allosaurus, possibly goofier than those guys garbed as Ceratosaurs in the 1948 (A.D.) hoot Unknown Island.

You mean I can’t take my head off for lunch?

Eon-mismatched critters abound. Vic & Carole/Tumak & Loana get chased up a tree by a Glyptodon (quite obviously a hapless armadillo with rubber horns stuck to its uncomprehending noggin) and several types of lizard are magnified into dino-size. Animal abuse is a factor as the moviemakers saw fit to pit some of their involuntary subjects into death matches. A coatimundi gobbles a snake, some lizards are subjected to fire during the volcano business and there is a blood-pulsing battle between an alligator (with a Dimetrodon ‘sail’ attached) and an Argentine giant tegu. This ‘gimmick’ was repeated, albeit less grisly, for the 1960 version of The Lost World.

The volcano is excitingly done, and that dame caught by the lava—yeesh! The effects footage from this oldie was used dozens of times in B-pictures all the way up into the mid-1960s, and accounted for an Oscar nomination. Another went to the splendid symphonic score composed by Werner R. Heymann.

A gross of $800,000 (figure from Cogerson) put it 182nd in 1940, where fantasy outings were few and far between. Disneys’ Fantasia and Pinocchio led the small pack, although their box office totals came partly thru reissues. There was the sterling The Thief Of Bagdad , the weird Dr. Cyclops and the first return of ‘Kharis’ in The Mummy’s Hand.

Also speaking cave talk ala Roach in One Million B.C. are Conrad Nagel, John Hubbard, Mamo Clark, Inez Palangd and Harry Wilson. Remade, as every fan of suchlike knows, in 1966 as One Million Years B.C., with stoned-age pinup goddess Raquel Welch.

Your cave, my cave: look, we’ll work it out.