• Directed by Kevin Connor
• Written by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Starring
  • Doug McClure
  • John McEnery
  • Susan Penhaligon
  • Bobby Parr
• Produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff, John Dark, and Max Rosenberg

I miss Doug McClure.

We don’t have leading men like that anymore. Nowadays, your star is going to be extra handsome and dashing (at least in that WB “wimp-chic” fashion that bugs the crap out of me), or an expert martial artist or something. In other words, he’s going to be exceptional in some way, usually in some way that, should you encounter them in real life, would cause you to say, “Damn, did I just slip into Movie-World? ‘Cuz people like that just don’t walk around!” (Of course, this kind of observation applies doubly to female leads these days, but that’s not the subject under discussion, so I’m not going to go there.)

McClure dates from an earlier age, though, before movie stars were genetically engineered as a separate species from Jes’ Plain Folks. McClure was pleasant-looking, but not handsome; athletic, but not expert; genial, but not dashing. If he were in a room, you wouldn’t immediately gravitate toward him as the obvious lead; but if the discussion turned to a crisis and he started speaking, you’d probably listen to him and nod in agreement, because he seems like he’s probably on top of things. McClure was a solid and likable Everyman (more so even than Roddy Piper — dare I say that?), and we don’t see them much anymore.

“Help! We’ve fallen into the mid-Atlantic and can’t get up!”

It may seem strange that such a Likable Joe actor, without any particular genre-specific skills, should have made his biggest career impact (after a stint in Westerns) doing genre adventure flicks like The Land That Time Forgot or At the Earth’s Core or Humanoids From the Deep. But maybe there’s a message there. Maybe it isn’t just the Impossibly Beautiful People who find themselves in dangerous and exciting situations, or are able to successfully fight living fossils and mutant fishmen. McClure was one of Us, rather than one of Them. And maybe in movies so dependent on fantasy and artifice, it’s nice to have a character played by an actor who’s a real person.

In this case, McClure’s real person is Bowen Tyler, an American who has the misfortune of travelling on a British passenger ship across the Atlantic in 1916. That’s a misfortune not because of warm beer, but because this particular ship has a big bull’s-eye on the side, as far as a certain U-Boat commanded by Captain Von Schoenvorts (John McEnery) is concerned. The ship goes down, and only a handful of crewmembers survive, plus Tyler and the requisite female, Lisa Clayton (Susan Penhaligon).

Fortunately for them, the U-Boat decides to surface right about then (and also fortunately, there’s a concealing and budget-friendly fog on the ocean), and the survivors manage to get aboard, which leads to the entire first half hour of the movie being a submarine drama. First Tyler and company capture the sub and head west for six days (with the radio out thanks to a saboteur), then they discover that someone had put a wee magnet on the compass and they’ve been heading south all this time, then Von Schoenvorts retakes the sub just in time to rendez-vous with a German supply boat, then Tyler manages to get free and launch the torpedoes at the supply boat, leaving the U-Boat with dangerously low supplies and only a vague idea of where they are.

Alligator Al cops an attitude. (A nod out to my Canadian reader(s).)

Given their predicament, the warring forces call a truce and decide to drift with the current as much as possible to save fuel, hoping that they’ll end up somewhere inhabited. Alas, the ice floes the encounter aren’t encouraging. They eventually end up on the coast of a large island with forbidding, ice-encrusted cliffs, which Von Schoenvorts (yes, I do have to check the spelling each time that name comes up) surmises is the “lost continent” of Caprona, mentioned in passing two centuries earlier by an Italian sea captain. To their surprise, they discover warm, fresh water flowing out of a tunnel from the interior. Gee, it’s a good thing they’ve got a submarine!

Wending their way through the subterranean river, they end up in the lush interior, surrounded by greenery, steam, and thunderstorms. (Naturally, the climate is attributed to volcanic forces. Boy, where would lost worlds be without the magic of volcanic craters?) Oh, and dinosaurs. Big ‘uns. All well and good when they’re just looking at stiff marionette pterodactyls wheeling in the sky, or distant diplodoci atop a cliff, but when a big rubbery plesiosaur eats an inattentive crewmember, well, things get a little hairier. But at least the plesiosaur makes for good eating. (“Tastes like chicken!”)

The water, though, is a little too microbe-laden for drinking (and no one ever thinks of boiling it — duh!), so a party ranges inland for fresher water. Von Schoenvorts opines that every era of geologic time is represented by the landscape, which is a little big for me to swallow, considering its, you know, a volcanic crater. Along with fauna such as allosauri, they also discover/are discovered by a local tribe of beetlebrowed cavemen, who act all aggressive until a few too many of them under up downwind of the crew’s firesticks.

A little too close for comfort?

Tyler manages to take one captive while unconscious, and once he wakes up, he effectively becomes their lapdog. As well as he can, he identifies himself as Ahm (Bobby Parr) and his people as “Bo-Lu,” while the interlopers are “Ga-Lu.” (He’s got a vocabulary of maybe a dozen words, and it looks like fully half of them are descriptive of a caste system? How human.) He also proves useful when one of the men lights a pipe, and rather than running scared from the burning matchstick, he gestures that he normally sees flame like that rising from the ground. The men quickly surmise that, aside from the dead obvious hypothesis that Ahm has previously seen volcanic activity, he may also be referring to natural gas or oil — oil which could be refined enough to refuel the ship and get them back to civilization. (Petroleum deposits inside the crater of a semi-active volcano? Just run with it, I guess.)

Their trek to find the oil reveals some other strange things about Caprona — namely, that as they move northward, there are progressively more advanced breeds of humans (the next one up being “Sto-Lu”), and that Ahm believes that he will move up in the ranks until he becomes a Ga-Lu. Not just his people, mind you, or that he’ll be reincarnated at the next level up, but that he personally will advance forward.

It’s been many a year since I read Burroughs’ novel, but I recall that this progressive evolutionary scheme was one of the centerpoints of the original. It’s also completely wonky (and none too clearly explained in the movie), but not too surprising given the racist background of much of Burroughs’ work.

“Von Schoenvorts, this is the last double date I let you set up!”

Which is a statement that damn well requires some explication, so let’s get into it: Burroughs was a racist. A century ago, everyone was a racist. Western society was a racist society, and thus its citizens were mainstream racists. That’s not meant as an accusation or an indictment, but a simple statement of fact. It’s a natural assumption that differing races of people would be “superior” or “inferior” to one another; given the ingrained idea of the “Great Chain of Being,” which positions organisms from lowest to highest on an assumed scale. Even the very word “evolution” shows the assumption of a hierarchical ranking (which is why so many people try to deliberately use the alternative term “descent with modification” to avoid any connotation of qualitative progress). And it’s just as natural that European types, being the most dominant at the time, would assume that, if there were a hierarchical ranking among the races of humanity, that white folks were at the top. That’s exactly why Tarzan, the orphaned white child, was able to become “lord of the jungle,” thus demonstrating himself superior to the native cultures which had resided in the jungle for generations. I’m not defending racism then, and I’m certainly not justifying it today, when the notions upon which the assumption was based have been thoroughly and publicly debunked; I’m just saying that the simple idea that one race or breed of humanity is “superior” is not an inherently evil one, only incorrect. And since the entire idea of evolution in the early days of the 20th century was pretty much misunderstood by everyone, it comes as no surprise that Burroughs could posit evolutionary progress as an inexorable force of destiny. (On the other hand, there’s just plain no excuse for scientific illiteracy when contemporary episodes of Star Trek shows as shallow an understanding of the concept of evolution… but I digress.)

Anyway. Having discovered the oil deposits, the submariners immediately set up a MacGyvered refinery inside a stockade, hoping to leave before the tensions between the two crew populations erupts, or any of the tribes decide to try more determinedly to wipe them out, or they get et by the local fauna.

There’s really no point in me telling you all about the ending, because I’ve already mentioned the volcano several times, and when have you ever seen a movie with a volcano that didn’t feature an eruption? The last twenty minutes features various tribal attacks, judicious stock footage to fill out various explosions and smoke bombs, boiled plesiosaur going belly up in the lake, a big break in German/British relations, and a general good time for all.

Ah. The sweet smell of progress. (Cough.)

I’d like to make particular mention of the dinosaurs, because the damned kids of today won’t appreciate ‘em. Sure, they looked fake. After all, they were fake, having come from the era of cinema (basically anything before the last ten years) in which a moviegoer couldn’t and didn’t expect fake things in movies to look real. However, as fake dinosaurs go, they’re pretty good. Sure, they plod along, but not so clumsily that they incite laughter. (And remember, when this was made, we all believed that the real dinosaurs were also plodding, clumsy beasts.) Not only that, but the dinosaurs aren’t stingy in their appearances; several show up in throwaway shots, just to give a fuller, more textured feel to the setting. (Although the pterosaurs are pretty lame, being completely stiff kites with mouths that scissor open and shut.)

In the Big Picture, the movie makes very little sense, but when has that ever been a problem? We’ve got reasonable dinosaurs, cavemen, Germans, and a volcanic eruption. That works for me.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 29
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 38
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Doctor Who: 10