Creatures the World Forgot Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Creatures the World Forgot Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman December 22, 2020

Creatures the World Forgot is currently available in the twenty film Hammer Ultimate Collection.

The film begins with an enticing, and engrossing, story of a handful of cavemen who hunt an animal, consume it, and bury one of their own who was killed in a scuffle with another animal. The film offers depictions of the prehistoric family unit and the hunter-gatherer way of life. The story is crude but captures the essence of danger and survival these individuals faced on a daily basis, most mundanely on the hunt for food but also, as the opening minutes depict, when they must flee from an erupting volcano. Many are killed in the chaos. Seeking a new home, they encounter a new tribe. The lost tribe’s leader is given a new wife who bears him twin sons. The film follows their growth to young adulthood and the various trials they, and their people, face in life.

This is a peculiar, but effective, film. Dialogue is replaced with grunts and groans and gestures. The story dynamics unfold as unspoken conflicts often become bloodletting feuds. Much of the interest comes in the film’s ability to transmit what life may have really been like for these people, who possessed such limited knowledge yet were able to carve out a way of life without the benefit of a wider understanding of their environment, one another, even themselves. They know what they experience and it is experience alone they can pass onto their children. They can only communicate that experience through example, not speech. The film is well performed and feels authentic, even if the audience has no clue how historically accurate the film may be. It effortlessly draws the viewer into a familiar yet distinctive world populated by characters who are as close to alien as can be while still identifiable, and authentically (if not crudely) human.

Creatures the World Forgot Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The 1080p picture quality is adequate. The film is presented at a larger format aspect ratio rather than the more cinematic 2.35:1, allowing for a greater sense of intimacy and immersion into the world rather than a greater expansive view of it. It's an effective choice and the Blu-ray handles the material with serviceable clarity, vital for getting a lay of the land and exploring the barren terrain – there's nothing but rocks and dirt here, mostly – and the complexities of the prehistoric human face where dense facial hair is as common as caked-on dirt and grime. Colors are standard to the earthen locations, most scenes depicting a series of beiges and browns and little more. Some red blood, exploding fires at the eruption, and a smattering of greenery here and there offer some color variations, but no real sense of thorough saturation or vitality. It's a flat palette but more or less effective in conveying the world essentials. The print is free of major spot and speckle outbursts. A few stray vertical lines appear throughout. There are no serious encode issues to report.

Creatures the World Forgot Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Creatures the World Forgot grunts and groans onto Blu-ray with a serviceable, albeit center-dense, DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack. The track finds a modest sense of stage command when a volcano erupts and the earth breaks apart at the 13 minute mark, filling the stage with crude, but at least loud and intense, depth. Detail is lacking but the combination of explosions, action music, and screaming and scrambling people make for an effectively balanced din that struggles to escape the front-center imaged area. Various tribal beats – a scene at the 34-minute mark – are loud and impressively detailed for a track with no LFE channel and no serious spread from the center. It's at least an aggressive experience in total which masks – albeit slightly – the lack of refinement. Character grunts and groans are adequately detailed and center imaged.

Creatures the World Forgot Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplemental content is included.

Creatures the World Forgot Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Creatures the World Forgot is the most intrinsically interesting film in Mill Creek's Hammer Ultimate Collection and one of the more fascinating on the wider Blu-ray spectrum. It's featureless but the video and audio presentations are largely fine. Recommended.