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The Land That Time Forgot
It's
World War I and an allied warship has just been sunk. The surviving
Englishmen with the help of a stubborn All-American protagonist Bowen
Tyler (Doug McClure) hijack a German U-boat. That is how The Land That
Time Forgot starts out. If it continued in this fashion, we would be
left with a relatively boring WW1 movie, as the German and English crews
have to learn to cooperate in an environment of mistrust and
claustrophobic conditions. The acting here is reasonable but the actors
don't have much to work with, with a rather slow, plodding plot.
Instead, the U-boat gets lost and ends up in a lost land, complete with
active volcano. This is where we turn the ludicrousness level up a
notch. This land is inhabited by dinosaurs and cavemen, or more
accurately, a whole lot of puppets, really bad models, men with hair
glued onto them, painted backdrops and archival footage.
Confronted with having to suspend disbelief during all this, the actors
resort to overacting, as they scream in terror while dodging
pterodactyls, complete with strings or as the model of their ship is
rocked by a dinosaur hand puppet.
So the special effects are terrible. It's a bit of a shame, as the
actual story isn't half bad - the Germans, English and American working
together as they discover what is really happening in this world
although the script is predictable and slow and isn't particularly well
written. It probably does the original novel (written by Edgar Rice
Burroughs) a disservice. It is all actually rather entertaining in
seeing what the actors have to work with and how they respond, with
continuity problems abound as they switch backwards and forwards between
studio and outside locations. So, unfortunately, the film isn't
particularly worth watching and there are definitely better movies that
deal with time travel or dinosaurs out there. With this in mind, I am
also willing to concede that the nostalgia value of this film coupled
with the fact that there is more reasonable action than the average
acting makesthis an average B-grade movie rather than an atrocious
disaster.
The dvd is rather bare, having mono audio with a collection of
trailers. In summary, I personally would give this a miss, but there
may be people who know what they are in for and may get some enjoyment
out of it. You have been warned. |
