The surviving crew and passengers from a British ship, including the captain (Keith Barron), an American adventurer and submarine expert (Doug McClure), and a female biologist (Susan Penhaligon), take over the German sub that attacked them. Multiple events conspire to strand all of the occupants on a lost continent where dinosaurs and cavemen coexist. The Germans, led by Captain Von Schoenvorts (John McEnery, voice dubbed by Anton Diffring), and the Brits decide to work together, under the Yank, to find fuel and escape.
The ’70s was not a good decade for Giant Monster flicks. The great stop-motion animators were slowing down, the atomic monster fad was dead, the campy creatures were getting dull, and CGI was years off. No one was putting money into films about critters that could eat you and your sister simultaneously, and talent was even harder to find than cash. Into this environment came the low budget, horror, production house, Amicus, producer John Dark, director Kevin Connor, and American actor Doug McClure, with a string of movies based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I hope you weren’t expecting me to say how they bucked the trend. Nope, these are the guys who solidified it. Acting, effects, and plot—all fail to entertain or interest. The Land That Time Forgot was the first of their four collaborations, and while it is not a complete disaster, it is a ho-hum affair that is easy to forget.
Doug McClure plays Bowen Tyler, a tough, know-everything hero, that is followed by the nagging question: Why is he in this movie? You’ve got a German captain (the only multidimensional character) and a British captain, and they need to get their subordinates to work together or they’re all dead. Makes sense. Looks like a story with some potential for conflict. So what was the point of the American? In order to focus on the pointless Yank, the Brit is made into a weak-willed fool (although we’re supposed to like him and see his decisions as reasonable), who cedes command to the civilian at every opportunity. I don’t want to be picky, but aren’t military officers required to lead their forces? Of course since Tyler can do everything, including fight with guns better than soldiers and with primitive weapons better than cavemen, I guess I can see why everyone is ready to step aside when he walks into a room. I could have accepted it, in a Big Boys Book of Adventure Tales kind of way, if McClure had even a sickly echo of charisma about him, but he comes off as a drab shop steward, not Indiana Jones.
The plot is no help. There isn’t one; at least not a single arcing one. Instead were given an half hour of U-boat military combat, followed by a mishmash of oil prospecting and random encounters with dinosaurs and hostile troglodytes. The back-and-forth battles for command of the submarine are laughable, which is unfortunate as the characters take them in earnest. Since the only consequence is the ship becoming lost at sea, I can’t see the need for the Germans to retake their boat only to have it taken back. I suppose it was cheaper to shoot the footage of men on a small set finding yet another pistol than anything from the “primitive world,” and this is a movie that knows cheap. The caveman melees are more fitting for the genre, but are no more interesting than the sub footage. Weak fight choreography is accented with an over reliance on close-ups (rarely effective in an action scene). Hint to talent-low cinematographers: If you are filming a character running through a jungle, with a villain in hot pursuit, a face-on shot showing only the top of his head to mid-chest does not instill a sense of excitement.
Not that anyone would care about the human vs. human warfare if the dinosaurs looked good. No luck. The effects are uneven, ranging from moderate to something your kid brother could do with his plastic toys in the garage. The monsters are a combination of sad, stiff, full models and sock puppets, but the real problems come when they interact with humans. The monsters change scale, sometimes shifting size by ten times. That’s the stuff of comedy, not action/adventure.
Of course the science is wacky, and the characters’ understanding of how to react to what they learn is even odder (if the water is filled with microbes, why not boil it?), but those are minor criticisms. When the characters, plot, and effects are this bad, a little bit of nonsense makes no difference.
The other Dark/Connor/McClure productions are At the Earth’s Core (1976), The People That Time Forgot (1977), and Warlords of Atlantis (1978).