Amicus was a British company best known for making horror films in the shadow of Hammer but their 70s output was far better than Hammer’s – it included a series of adventure tales starring Doug McClure directed by Kevin Connor of which this was the first.
The structure is reminiscent of The Birds – it takes a while to get to the big attraction (35 minutes before arriving in weirdo land) but until then there is plenty of fun with a different genre – The Birds had romantic comedy this one has a war film, with Doug McClure and a boat load of survivors from a U boat attack in taking over that U boat (the film is set in World War I). While in the Land things occasionally drag – there are a few too many unmotivated expeditions, and the film could have used a decent subplot about squabbling Germans vs Englanders, or a romance, or getting involved with a local tribal battles; I mean, this stuff is there but it isn’t developed, and you need it to be because otherwise it’s episodic dealing with monsters and missing link cavemen.
Some of the special effects are a little dodgy – there’s a laughable pterodactyl – but the photography and art direction is pretty good, and there is plenty of action (including the ever reliable climactic volcanic explosion). You need to approach it in the right spirit but if you do this is fun. McClure’s beefy muscular-ness is dead right for this sort of movie and Susan Penhaligon is very pretty as the lone woman in the group (she happens to be a biologist, which is useful – why no love triangle in the script, though?). The acting is fairly decent; that “bad German” was totally within his rights to want to leave before finding out what happened to McClure and Penhaligon – I don’t blame him. The ending is quite romantic in it’s lost, evocative way.
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