Why was I reminded of One Million BC?

I bought a cheap box set of Columbia sci-fi films from the 1950s and 1960s a while back, and still having a pair of movies on it that I hadn't watched before, popped in one of the DVDs to watch a new to me movie, Valley of the Dragons.

The movie is based on a story by Jules Verne, and a narration at the beginning of the movie even tells us of that, before going to Algeria in 1881. There, Frenchman Hector Servadac (Cesare Danova) and Irishman Michael Denning (Sean McClory) are about to take part in a duel because they hate each other for having a disagreement over some woman who plays no other part in the movie other for the two of them to mention the disagreement later in the movie. Suffice it to say that the most important thing is that these two men are at each other's throats.

Well, that's about to become the second most important thing. During the duel, it looks like the sun is acting the same way as in that climactic scene from The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, except that it isn't really the sun. There's an earthquake and other phenomena that threaten to wipe everybody literally off the face of the earth. Servadac and Denning seem to be the only two left in the area after everything quiets down.

So the two begin to walk back to civilization, wary of each other since they were still thinking about shooting each other. That is, until they realize they don't recognize any of the landscape and that there are some supersized animals around in what looked to me like the producers were trying to channel the original version of One Million BC. Of course, these animals are dangerous, and the two men are going to have to put their differences aside and work together to survive.

Hector eventually comes to the conclusion that what happened is that a comet passed by during the duel, and that comet picked up a pocket of the earth's atmosphere as well as the two duelists. And it's a comet with periodicity, which means that it's passed right by the earth before, which is why they found animals. These are the descendants of animals that would have roamed the earth 100,000 years earlier. (Never mind that a passing comet of that size would have had severe gravitational effects long before the duel.)

And not only are there animals on this comet, there are other humanoids, both neanderthals and descendants of Homo sapiens who have not evolved beyond the stone age the way the species did on good old Mother Earth. Through gestures, both men are able to find women, Hector winding up with Deena (Joan Staley) and Michael with Nateeta (Danielle De Metz) respectively. There's even a fairly racy by the standards of the day swimming scene showing a shocking amount of cleavage.

But there are multiple tribes on the planet, and that threatens to become full-scale war. Will our two earthling heroes be able to survive it all?

Valley of the Dragons is pretty silly stuff, and as I said, it made me think of One Million BC. What I didn't realize until after watching the movie and then looking for information on it is that the producers actually held the rights to One Million BC and liberally used footage from that movie. It doesn't help much, as they had to blow up the footage to fit the new aspect ratio.

Combine that with the poor story and no dragons in spite of the title, and you get a movie that probably deserves to be panned, but is so dumb that it winds up being a bit of fun, like a lot of those other cheapie sci-fi movies that second-tier production companies were making in those days. You could find a lot worse ways to spend 80 minutes than to sit down with some friends and enjoy Valley of the Dragons.