ERBzine 8303: LAND THAT TIME FORGOT

I’m just going to come right out and say it, this movie is bonkers on every single level. The original story that the movie is based on is a 1918 novella by Edgar Rice Burroughs, it was popular enough that he made it into a trilogy, following it up with The People that Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss. It is also bonkers on pretty much every level. Seriously bonkers.

The movie actually follows the novella pretty closely, incorporating the off the wall, what the hell comes next, approach to storytelling. Every page is an exercise in “Wait!!! What???”

Let me just jump in and show you why. The whole thing starts off more or less normally, with a bottle thrown into the ocean, mysterious voice over, and so forth, a tale told as a flashback. Okay, sure.

Then the real movie opens up, in a WWI German U-Boat. The Sub-Mariners have their sights on an enemy ship, they line up on it. You’re thinking, okay, this is the cast. The movie is going to be about these guys.

It turns out there are survivors in a lifeboat, this is where we meet the actual hero of the story, Tyler Bowen, played by Doug McClure. Somehow, they fight their way on board the U-Boat and take it over. Okay, so that’s the move.
Nope.

A British warship comes along and starts shooting at the U-Boat, so they have to submerge and run away, trying to make it to a neutral port.

But then, the Germans sabotage the escape, sending the submarine off course into the south Atlantic, and take back their submarine, so they can rendezvous with a supply ship

But then Tyler Bowen and the survivors of the British crew rise up and take it back from the Germans, AGAIN, sinking the supply ship. Out of fuel and out of food, the submarine drifts into Antarctic waters, among the ice bergs.

The Antarctic current takes the submarine past icebergs through this undersea passage, into an incongruous landscape, a mysterious tropical island in the middle of the South Polar sea. The submarine surfaces. One of the men goes up top to look around...

What the hell. They’re in the middle of the lagoon, water all around, clear lines of sight? Where’s a dinosaur going to jump out of? Nowhere! It’s actually shocking. You’d think standing on the surface of a submarine in the middle of a lagoon, nothing close by, you’d be safe as houses. But nope! A dinosaur got him!

It’s just out of the blue and completely random, and it has nothing to do at all with any of the plot we’ve seen so far, the hijinks between the Germans and the British. What has been up to this point a straightforward and very plausible war story set on and around a U-Boat, has just gone completely mental. Suddenly, with no real warning, random dinosaurs are eating the crew! Everything we’ve done before, everything that has gone before, all the expectations we’ve been lulled into, all that is out the window, and we’re suddenly in a different movie!

Decades later, film makers would make a fetish about creating and subverting expectations, but here they do it in an explosive way. And yeah, the title, the poster, the trailers all kind of give away the surprise.

Anyway, now we’re in a different kind of movie altogether, and it’s a Dinosaur-fest. We’ve got Pterodactyls in the sky flying around, we’ve got Brontosaurs in the lagoon, giant Alligator-thingies. The creature that ate the crewman turns out to be a long necked critter with a big head and triangular jaws, that stretches its neck up over the U-boat and plucks the crewman from above. So... a Plesiosaur?

And another U-turn. Usually in movies like this, the monster shows up, kicks ass to show it’s tough, and then for one reason or another, backs off to give the survivors time to crap their pants and realize how much trouble they’re in. Nope, not this time, they just up and killed it. Take that.

Okay, you thought you were in one kind of movie, then you were in another kind of movie, but that movie hasn’t gone the way it’s supposed to, and now they’re doing gags? It’s just one left turn after the other. You literally cannot predict what’s going to happen next. You get the feeling Edgar Rice Burroughs back in 1914, and these guys in 1974, they’re just making it all up as they go along, that everyone’s making the movie unfiltered as the script pages come out of the typewriters.

All right, fast forward a bit - okay, there are dinosaurs. But our heroes, all of them, have an armoured submarine, and more guns than you can shake a stick at, so they’re okay. Their big problem is that the submarine is out of fuel. But hey, they find petroleum that they can refine. So the two factions, the Germans sailors, the German officers, the British sailors, the American and his British Girlfriend, all agree to work together, so that they can collectively refuel and get the hell out of there.

Wait! Stop! The British Girflfriend. This is Susan Penhaligon playing Lisa Clayton, the sole female human in the cast. I think 'Clayton' may be a reference to Lord John Clayton, aka Tarzan. Writers were always sneaking these little in-jokes. She's basically there to be a certificate of heterosexuality - a proof that women exist in this world.

Penhaligon was a working actress, she's got 73 IMBD credits from 1971 to 20126. And to be really fair, she gets actual lines, even a voice of her own, and she's a participant in events. The production doesn't abuse her as a cheesecake opportunity, it's quite chaste actually. So it’s not as bad as it could be.

But let's face it: The only woman in the cast? She's practically there as a special effect herself. Literally. I mean, in this move, Dinosaurs outnumber women by something like thirty to one.

Anyway, trapped on the Island, forced to cooperate in order to refine petroleum into fuel to get off, and menaced by prehistoric nightmares and cavemen at every turn, the German Sailors and British Sailors can’t help but fight it out. Not constantly, but it simmers there and eventually boils over. There’s actually a continuing tension between the Germans and the British sailors, forced to rise above their grievances but unable to quite manage that keeps things on their toes.

Of course, the German officers turn out to be treacherous, they’re Germans after all. That might be harsh, after a bad start, they’re mostly likable and cooperative, but in the end they’re Germans The officers make bad decisions and revert to type..

It all ends badly, the Germans try to make a break for it, the submarine gets wrecked, most of the British sailors die, and the next thing you know its Tyler and his girlfriend throwing a bottle into the sea relating their adventure and asking for help.

To begin with, there are more Dinosaurs than you can shake a stick at, and they all want their time on stage. Neanderthals show up and attack, because... why not! Then a T-Rex comes by so they shoot it full of holes. Then they molest a captured Neanderthal, a Ga-Lu, then they encounter more advanced humans, Bo-Lu. Then they watch a Triceratops guarding its eggs fight a Ceratosaur (basically an Allosaur with a horn on its nose), the fight has absolutely nothing to do with the plot that, but its dino action so who cares? Then there’s a pair of Styracosaurs who are going ‘listen man, we don’t want to trouble you stay on your side and we’ll stay -‘ before they get blown up by the artillery on the U-boat. There's a scene where, they're all sitting on a dinosaur they just killed, looking through a microscope.

But it’s actually nice to see organization and competence. These are all trained soldiers and sailors, people with skills, committed to working together as a unit, so of course they’re going to take names and chew bubble gum, they’re there to get things done.

It’s a refreshing change from teenagers who decide to split up to look for clues, or millennials who go to pieces and have ‘feelings’ when things get out of hand. We have too many movies where the plot hangs on characters being clueless and out of their very shallow depth.

Do I sound like an old guy? Never mind - a running theme of all of these movies is that Monstrous wildlife is regularly getting harassed, badgered, bullied or outright waxed. The Dinosaurs are no match for these guys.

More monsters: There’s a Stegosaurus, an Allosaur, another Styracosaurs, more Pterodactyls, they’re literally just being wedged in gratuitously, but at least they don’t get shot to pieces. There’s more caveman attacks, German/British enmity, then a volcano blows up, because why not, and there’s fire everywhere.

It’s all really well done. There’s a lot of location shooting outdoors in forests and bush, meadows and river banks, so there’s a lot green and a lot of natural light, you’ve got depth of field. This in turn is integrated very well into the dinosaur sequences mostly, and the dinosaurs, despite being suit-mation monsters, actually look good and move well in their shots, with the surroundings and foliage giving them enough cover for them to carry it off.

Just the sheer overwhelming number of dinosaurs and the overwhelming greenery of natural landscape integrated with sets and mattes beat you down into accepting that this is an authentic feeling prehistoric ecology.

Compare that to some of the sequel movies in the series, starting with At The Earth’s Core which also has plentiful monsters, but some of them are shot so plainly and nakedly that you can literally see the zippers, and their movements are sometimes awkward. The People that Time Forgot nearly forgets to have any dinosaurs and barely manages a story, and finally, Warlords of Atlantis where it just seems like they gave up.

Here’s a tip for all you monster makers: Always dress your monsters up, give them some scenery to belong to, some landscape to be part of. The more isolated they are, standing alone with no background and no surroundings, the harder it is to make them work.

The movie has an energy to it. The Land that Time Forgot was the best of the Amicus lost world series, visually, and enough random stuff keeps happening that you’re never sure what’s coming next. There’s a genuine fascination to it’s breakneck pace. This doesn’t resemble a conventional story in any meaningful way. But there’s a sheer kinetic energy that won’t let you go.

Finally, for me there’s best part - the secret of Caprona. Okay, it’s a spoiler, a big revelation, the whole plot point that the movie revolves around. On the other hand, this is a movie from 1974 based an old story from 1918. So these are fifty or a hundred-plus year old spoilers. Anyway: On Caprona, evolution is personal, not political. You see, on Caprona, every life form evolves. You start off as an amoeba at one side of the Island, and as you make your way up the evolutionary ladder, you evolve into more complex life forms. So the amoeba becomes a fish, which evolves into an amphibian, and then a lizard, climbs up to dinosaur, becomes bigger, more complicated and more advanced dinosaurs, and then presumably different kinds of mammals, eventually Neanderthals and then Cro-Magnon, and then people. Or something like that.

I’m not clear on all of it - I don’t see how a T-Rex turns into a Saber Tooth Tiger for instance. Or why some lizards apparently turned into rats that turned into Neanderthals, rather than just went straight for being dinosaurs.

It's... it's... BRILLIANT! It's bonkers, it's mental, it's right around the bend, it's so over the top it comes back at you from the other side. It makes no sense whatsoever, there's something like a million objections and problems with it. Doesn’t matter, it's absolutely cool. It's the sort of thing, the kind of pulp audaciousness that you have to just stand back and applaud, because it's so loopily original.

Look, often these movies end up being utterly conventional. Giant monsters? Oh, obviously some lost valley somewhere, where they've been playing shuffleboard, maybe a cave, a subterranean world, time machine gone wrong, DNA got hinky, a time warp opened up, something like that.

It's all been done to death, the explanation is utterly formulaic and boring, it's simply a vehicle to get your critters chasing your teenagers. There's not a drop of imagination to it.

But this? This inspired, demented lunacy. To have that as your MacGuffin, and then make it a plot or subplot for the movie, to explain your lost world that way. There's a level of crazy that's breathtaking. It's like waking up one morning and deciding to have your penis surgically replaced with a shaved live weasel, only to discover that it can talk too.

Someone drops their trousers and shows you that... you're speechless. It's so far beyond comprehension, so far beyond crazy, that you can only gaze in wonder going "Well, I didn't see that coming."

Credit due, this is the lunatic idea Edgar Rice Burroughs had, that life on Caprona would individually go through evolutionary progressions as it journeyed across the Island, and in the People that Time Forgot novella, he even gives it some emotional heft.

Seriously, there's a scene where his heroes meet one of the Caspakians who has ascended to the next level of hominid, and he's talking about what it feels like to be transformed, to suddenly be different, larger, more expanded psychologically, and how he pines for his woman who has not yet ascended, and there's this genuine sense of poignancy, of revelation but loss and sadness but hope a profound longing. Insane, totally insane, but you got to admire a writer that can pull it off.

The movie apparently cost about $250,000 to make (roughly $1.7 million in today’s dollars), which was pretty small even for that era, and you have to give credit to the inventiveness up on the screen. It went on to make $1.5 million to $2.5 million (or $10 to $17 million), which is a huge return on investment, which is probably why Amicus kept going back to that well, even as their company was falling apart.

Apart from Edgar Rice Burroughs, famed British Sci Fi and Fantasy writer, Michael Moorcock is credited with the script, alongside James Cawthorn, a writer, artist and occasional collaborator with Moorcock.

Doug McLure starred, of course and would go on to appear in the first four movies of the trilogy, including At The Earths Core, The People that Time Forgot and Warlords of Atlantis.

Director Kenneth Connor and producer John Dark, collaborated on all five movies in the trilogy, including, the final one, Arabian Adventure,, carrying on the demented B-movie sensibility.