The Land that Time Forgot is a likeably goofy and well-directed B movie with a few oddities to keep you watching despite uneven production. I recorded its 92 minutes off the MGM cable channel in 2012, nearly 4 decades after seeing it in the mid-1970s in Piedmont North Carolina at the Graham Theater, which stayed open long after most downtown theaters had fallen to mall-plexes but remained limited to movies of this middling character. I talked some family and friends into going with me. Seeing the title on the way in my little sister announced she thought we had been going to see "The Ram that Tom Forgot."
A different title wouldn't make much difference for this film's reception, but no one gave me a hard time even though I probably liked it more than anyone. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote excellent action sequences, and the initial capture of the submarine by a rowboat is well-imagined and well–executed. As other reviewers point out, the film's direction is fast-paced. The talky parts are helped by a good cast—7 or 8 years earlier John McEnery had played an electric Mercutio in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet; Susan Penhaligon was both babely and convincing as a femme paleontologist; Doug McClure was born for two-fisted roles; and the remaining cast took acting seriously like good Brits do. The submarine scenes were all convincing enough, especially the exterior shots of the sub entering the Land that Time Forgot via an underground river. Every reviewer justifiably gripes about the puppet-dinosaurs and the board-stiff pterodactyls, but the very first dinosaur shown, the water-dwelling diplodocus hashing on aquatic vegetation, is the best special effect of the whole movie, perhaps because water provided cover for the dino-puppet's manipulations.
The science fiction theme, however preposterous, worked for me. Odds are that half the folks reading this note think humans appeared by divine magic in the fairly recent past, but a great gift of being born in the past century or so is that humans can begin to understand evolution, which like God is a mystery to be learned one's whole life through. As I recall, Burroughs's variation on evolution was that, in the Land that Time Forgot, every organism makes a complete evolution from micro-organism to higher mammal, in contrast to normal evolution through a species' genetic variation across generations. When that likable native is captured early in the movie, for instance, he seems to be approximately Cro-Magnon, but by the end of the film he looks and talks (and fights) as homo sapiens—a cool counter-factual thought experiment leading us closer to knowing how things really work, enlivened by action sequences and fair-enough acting on the way.
A different title wouldn't make much difference for this film's reception, but no one gave me a hard time even though I probably liked it more than anyone. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote excellent action sequences, and the initial capture of the submarine by a rowboat is well-imagined and well–executed. As other reviewers point out, the film's direction is fast-paced. The talky parts are helped by a good cast—7 or 8 years earlier John McEnery had played an electric Mercutio in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet; Susan Penhaligon was both babely and convincing as a femme paleontologist; Doug McClure was born for two-fisted roles; and the remaining cast took acting seriously like good Brits do. The submarine scenes were all convincing enough, especially the exterior shots of the sub entering the Land that Time Forgot via an underground river. Every reviewer justifiably gripes about the puppet-dinosaurs and the board-stiff pterodactyls, but the very first dinosaur shown, the water-dwelling diplodocus hashing on aquatic vegetation, is the best special effect of the whole movie, perhaps because water provided cover for the dino-puppet's manipulations.
The science fiction theme, however preposterous, worked for me. Odds are that half the folks reading this note think humans appeared by divine magic in the fairly recent past, but a great gift of being born in the past century or so is that humans can begin to understand evolution, which like God is a mystery to be learned one's whole life through. As I recall, Burroughs's variation on evolution was that, in the Land that Time Forgot, every organism makes a complete evolution from micro-organism to higher mammal, in contrast to normal evolution through a species' genetic variation across generations. When that likable native is captured early in the movie, for instance, he seems to be approximately Cro-Magnon, but by the end of the film he looks and talks (and fights) as homo sapiens—a cool counter-factual thought experiment leading us closer to knowing how things really work, enlivened by action sequences and fair-enough acting on the way.