See, doc, I brushed every single tooth! How about a little flossing now?
The Land That Time Forgot (1975) is a lurid World War II movie in which the remnants of the crew of a merchant vessel sunk by a German U-Boat, led by Bowen Tyler, submarine maker, and biologist Lisa Clayton, manage to ambush the U-Boat and take it over, with some average plot twists and turns. Then, when the starving and fuel-short crews find a mysterious island, the movie transforms into a lurid “Hey, the dinosaur just grabbed Lassie and ran off – oh, dear.” Well, OK, not the dog, but otherwise, yes.
The submarine is low on fuel, but this now-composite crew, nourished on dino-meat and sporting a captive local, has the knowledge to find and refine their own fuel oil. The crew turns out to be a killing machine, shooting up the dinos, the local hominin tribes, and occasionally each other, all the while not shedding a tear when one of them takes it in the neck, an emotional reaction I thought a bit off-putting.
In the end, as the island’s volcano goes off (this has happened far too conveniently over the last few weeks – see here and here and here for other such volcanoes getting guest-star roles recently), Tyler and Clayton, on a hunting expedition, lose their companions to various thrown objects, and then get back to camp to discover the U-Boat is leaving, trying to escape via the mysterious underwater passage. The U-Boat’s crew shoots each other up, as some wish to wait for their leader Tyler and his cute lass, while the more resentful German members would prefer to leave him and Lisa to their fates, but in the end the U-Boat blows up before escaping, another victim of the island, before the horrified eyes of Lisa and Bowen.
Yep, you guessed it. This is noir. Dinosaur noir.
We leave the enchanting couple, now heavily bearded (I’ll leave that to your imagination), heading north on some unexplained quest to discover why the more primitive hominins lived on the south end of the island, while the northern seemed to house fewer but more advanced forms of life.
And snow. Lots of snow.
And they’re south of the equator. Maybe it was the hills they were climbing. Sure.
Nothing to really see here. A straight-ahead adventure with the corners cut off it. Traitors die, tragic figures die, red-shirts die, dinosaurs die. Bad special effects. Especially that pteranodon.
Heck, my pick for most heart-rending scene is the one where the crew shoots two Allosaurs to death. You wouldn’t think two viciously toothed killing machines that drool like Niagara Falls could evoke pathos, and yet, there I was, wondering if I could fake a tear. I couldn’t, but I think it was the emotional high point of this fairly directionless story. Hey, here’s a clip of that scene, starting at about the 3:54 mark:
It wouldn’t be unfair to say I’ve seen much worse, but in the end it still seemed like dreck.
