The Land That Time Forgot proved popular so the same team turned to another Edgar Rice Burroughs tale, this one about an expedition to the centre of the Earth. Unlike the adventurers in Land, the explorers in this one asked for the trouble they got into – Doug McClure and Peter Cushing (with bald spot) try to drill through the earth, before winding up in a mystery land. It’s a studio created land this time (being underground), imaginatively put together by the art department, and some of the locals are humans, including a comely Carol Munro. There are also various weird creatures.
The actual plot is the standard lost world/time travel one – foreigners arrive in an exotic location, help oppressed locals throw off their tyrannical overseers (I don’t know who invented this – HG Welles in The Time Machine maybe? - but everyone uses it.)
McClure gives a broader, more comic performance than that time – for the first ten minutes after which he returns to the requisite he-man stuff. Cushing is also atypically cast, as a stuffy professor (he’s okay, but his put-on voice gets wearying very quickly and isn’t the reason you cast Cushing is to have someone play a whip-smart dude? There are lots of more appropriate actors in England to play stuffy.)
Like Land I laughed at some of this – cavemen speaking English, some of the creature effects (paper mache doesn’t look so crash hot in close up), the sex bomb performance of Munro (she’s always grinning even when her life is in danger and wears far too much make up) - but still enjoyed it. The sets are great and it had a real spirit of adventure and plenty of action; in its quiet moments (eg McClure creeping through caves) were particularly effective. Some of it was reminiscent of Return of the Jedi – McClure’s fight with a dinosaur in a dungeon, the make up of the evil creatures.
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