French officer Hector Servadac (Cesare Danova) and Irish soldier of fortune Michael Denning (Sean McClory) are about to duel to the death when a comet sweeps them up. On it’s last trip around the sun the comet had picked up prehistoric animals, leaving the two modern men in a world of stock footage and hot cave-babes. They vow to stay together, but a mammoth has other ideas and knocks Hector into the river. He’s rescued by the hottest of the hot cave-babes (Playmate Joan Staley) and ends up in the shell tribe. Michael ends up with the rock tribe and his own hot cave-babe (Danielle De Metz). Both become important members of their tribe, due to their greater knowledge, but more due to introducing necking, which the cave-babes are very excited about.
Some films are stupid. Some films are far too dim to be stupid. Then there’s Valley of the Dragons, which has looped around so that stupidity is a virtue. You can’t get annoyed at something not making sense when nothing makes sense. And there are so many head-scratchers here. Why do our heroes throw away their clothing instead of adding furs on top? Why is the first thing Hector does when in a safe spot is shave? Why does the Frenchmen teach the hot cave-babe English instead of French, or instead attempting to learn her language? Where do they get fuses from? Where did the morlocks come from? Why does the title refer to dragons? And I’m ignoring everything about the comet as once we’re in the lost world, the film ignores it too.
The barest of concepts comes from Jules Verne’s novel, but that didn’t have cave people or dinosaurs. However sticking the name Verne on a movie poster could sell some tickets in 1961, or that was the hope. The story actually is derived from whatever could be used to stitch together stock footage. Over half the film is re-used segments from earlier pictures, mostly One Million B.C. (1940), but also from Rodan (1956).
Yes, seriously, Rodan.
So our dinosaurs are lizards with fins pasted on and there is a supersonic diakaiju flying around. Our lead actors only appear in close and medium shots, running about on a very thin sound stage. Wide shots are from One Million B.C. and have different actors; no doubt casting for the supporting roles in this film was based on if an actor was a close enough match to one in the older film. Valley of the Dragons had to be shot in B&W because One Million B.C. was, but I doubt the makers of this film minded using cheaper film stock. This isn’t the first film to pull this trick; at least ten other films have plundered One Million B.C., but this was the last.
So it’s all been done before and it is dumb as a rock, but then you don’t go watch a cavemen movie to advance your scholarly pursuits. It’s dumb, but it’s dumb fun, and outside of the animal cruelty in the reused footage (for which I’m comfortable blaming the earlier picture), it’s inoffensive.