LAND OF THE LOST

Reviewed by Sam Hatch

As if the Seventies weren't weird enough, an entire generation of kids had live-action Saturday morning TV pioneers Sid and Marty Krofft to deliver regular doses of acid trip visuals to their soft, evolving brains. I should know. I was one of them. Between H.R. Pufnstuf and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (and even occasional repeats of The Bugaloos), I watched them all and freaked out over the wealth of freakishly large, puppet-headed protagonists.

However, my favorite was always Land of the Lost, an epic, energetic dimension-hopping adventure saga that I now realize was essentially a quick regurgitation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Still, it was oddly ambitious and featured the writing of a number of science fiction luminaries. All I knew was that Grumpy the Tyrannosaurus Rex scared the bejeezus out of me, and that the scaly lizard men known as Sleestaks weren't much more comforting. Even so, I watched just about every episode in spite of this ongoing terror.

And now the time has come for the second big screen adaptation of a Sid & Marty Krofft show (the first being 1970's Pufnstuf). It should come as no surprise that yet another vintage television show has been reborn as a big-budget action-comedy parody. Will Ferrell is no stranger to this template (see Bewitched, or better yet - don't), and he doesn't invest much more in his portrayal of tachyon-meddling scientist Dr. Rick Marshall than doing "Ron Burgundy Goes Back In Time".

Or across time, as the unwitting adventurers on this "routine expedition" find themselves in a world where the past and the present are inherently mashed together. Dr. Marshall may be a laughing stock to most of the scientific community (and also his nemesis, the Today Show's Matt Lauer), but the plucky, ever-optimistic Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel of TV's Pushing Daisies) convinces the washed up La Brea Tar Pits classroom “quantum” paleontologist that his greatest discovery has been wrongfully maligned.

This segment of the film feels slightly rushed, as if the entire cast and crew are as eager to get to the good stuff as we kids were back in the day. Rick and Holly quickly make the acquaintance of firework-obsessed survivalist Will Stanton (Danny McBride, playing into type again) and get sucked into a Bermuda Triangle-esque portal once the Doc's show-tune emitting tachyon amplification device (it plays numbers from A Chorus Line while it does its thing) is enabled.

All of the show's staples are more or less faithfully reproduced, from the aforementioned T-rex with an attitude problem and those slimy, malicious Sleestaks to the helpful young ape-creature Cha-Ka (SNL alum Jorma Taccone). Though don't let your childhood memories convince you that this film is something for all ages. There is a metric ton of sexual material, swearing and even a bit of otherworldly drug use. The film is clearly aimed at those who were kids when the original aired, but their own kids should probably sit this one out.

Perhaps the most interesting facet of this Land of the Lost is that its creators seem to be purposefully imbuing it with a heightened element of low-budget cool. Director Brad Silberling has proven his mettle as a widescreen director (see his City of Angels, and then immediately check out the superior source film Wings of Desire), yet he goes out of his way to deliver tightly framed images that could be comfortably displayed on a bulky old square console television.

Even the modern computer effects are reined in when necessary. Grumpy and his fellow dinos are unsurprisingly rendered photo realistic, yet simple process shots of the cast at a cave entrance come off as delightfully amateurish. The same goes for the character prosthetics. Cha-ka and the Sleestaks are a marked improvement over the originals (the latter now featuring a nasty looking set of teeth within teeth), yet never come across as anything other than guys in rubber suits.

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