I haven’t seen the original LAND OF THE LOST kids’ program since I was a kid, but I have fond memories of it being one of my favorite Sid and Marty Krofft production. But it’s been so long I can’t really say if it’s something worthy of a big screen adaptation. But what I know is that it certainly deserved a better adaption than this crude debacle.
Dr. Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell, ANCHORMAN) goes on TV and tells Matt Lauer that he needs millions of dollars in government grants to study time warps. This cocky blowhard is humiliated and relegated to teaching elementary school science classes. But graduate student Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel, TV’s PUSHING DAISIES) believes in his theories and encourages him to complete his tachyon amplifier and exploit a nearby time warp, which is located at a rundown roadside attraction run by Will Stanton (Danny McBride, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS). There the trio is warped into a lost land where artifacts from all over time and space are sucked in.
In the lost land, they meet the Cro-Magnon-like creature Chaka (Jorma Taccone, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE), who Marshall treats like his slave. As the group tries to locate the tachyon amplifier, they have run-ins with T-rexes and lizard men called Sleestaks. An outcast Sleestak named Enik (John Boylan, 2005’s FEVER PITCH) tells them that the Sleestak Zarn (Leonard Nimoy, STAR TREK) is trying to take over the universe with the tachyon amplifier.
This isn’t a family film at all. It’s not just the rampant scatological humor, but the pervasive adult content including sexual jokes and drug references. Stanton jokes with Chaka about Holly’s breasts and later about masturbation. Marshall, Stanton and Chaka bond over drug-like fruit. For inexplicable reasons, Marshall dumps dinosaur urine all over himself and of course swallows some. I’m not trying to be a prude about these kinds of things, but just warning viewers that this isn’t the innocent 1970s TV show LAND OF THE LOST.
Some might see some of the material as a subversive satire of family entertainment, but none of the humor is good enough to attain that lofty goal. I mean this film has a Polish joke in it for goodness sake. The humor is for those who still find their friends farting hilarious. To be fair, the film gets in a great poke at cliché romantic conflicts at the climax of family films, but it comes little too late and is followed by more of the same gross gags.
In addition to the juvenile tone, Ferrell’s Dr. Marshall is a thoroughly unlikeable character. He’s supposed to be a ridiculously arrogant scientist who looks down on all the stupid people around him. The main problem is that he’s right. So his cockiness isn’t ironic, because he’s really a fool; he’s just a jerk, who continues to be a jerk to the very end.
Will Ferrell has knack for pushing bad material so far that it ends up making you laugh in the end. But here, the material is so bad that when he pushes, the viewer wants to push back, screaming uncle, uncle, uncle. The film made me wish time warps were really real so that I could go back in time and switch this remake for a remake of THE BUGALOOS.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
