July 21, 2009
Return to the Land That Time Forgot
One of the first dinosaur movies I ever saw was The Land That Time Forgot. Based upon the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of the same name, the film followed a mixed group of British and German World War I sailors stranded in a dinosaur-infested lost world. I did not care very much about the human characters; it was the dinosaurs, brought to life via puppetry, that enthralled me. (Indeed, one of the saddest scenes in the film is when the sailors slow-blast apart a pair of oversized Styracosaurus, a kind of herbivorous horned dinosaur.)
Now The Land That Time Forgot has been adapted for film again, but this time in a direct-to-video production due out on July 28th by the American film studio The Asylum.
It is not a by-the-books retelling of Burroughs’ story or a re-make of the original film, but rather a new story that draws from both. The plot centers on a charter boat carrying a bevy of newlyweds that becomes stranded on a mysterious Caribbean island. The hapless tourists quickly find that the island is not deserted, though, and they have to find a way to escape the lost land’s prehistoric inhabitants.
According to the film’s Wikipedia entry, this new adaptation will feature a much wider array of creatures than the 1975 film. Along with old standbys like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops will be more recently-discovered dinosaurs like Carnotaurus and Therizinosaurus. The addition of extra dinosaurs does not necessarily mean that this b-movie will be good, but it couldn’t be worse than Aztec Rex, right?
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One of my favorite classic dino movies (and a book worth reading, too), this would have made a thrilling and engaging remake if done right. The trailer disappoints: standard Sci-Fi-Channel-type fare with bad acting and bad CGI. Having nothing to do with its namesake aside from the basic plot makes one wonder why they couldn’t have called it anything else rather than sullying the name of a classic. The variety of dinosaur types intrigues me; however after “100 Million BC” I think I’ve learned my lesson about these kinds of movies.
Going by The Asylum’s track record this film should be dreadful, just like all their other films.
Unfortunately they don’t even fit into the “so bad it’s good” category.
[...] of the 1970s; it seems that a spare dinosaur from another Asylum film, a loose adaptation of the Land That Time Forgot, was plopped into the Sherlock Holmes film. Personally, I would have found it much more interesting [...]