CAST:
Patrick Wayne
(Ben MacBride), Sarah Douglas (Charly), Thorley Walters (Professor
Edmund Norfolk), Dana Gillespie (Ajor), Doug McClure (Bowen Tyler),
Shane Rimmer (Hogan)
PRODUCTION:
Director –
Kevin Connor, Screenplay – Patrick Tilley, Based on the Novel by Edgar
Rice Burroughs, Producer – John Dark, Photography – Alan Hume, Aerial
Photography – Peter Allwork & John Harris, Music – John Scott,
Process Photography – Charles Staffell, Special Effects – John
Richardson & Ian Wingrove, Makeup – Robin Grantham, Production
Design – Maurice Carter. Production Company – AIP.
SYNOPSIS:
The log of
Bowen Tyler’s discovery of the continent of Caprona, a land that still
exists in the Cretaceous, has been found. An expedition to rescue Tyler
has been mounted aboard the Polar Queen by Tyler’s old friend Ben
MacBride. The rescue team fly over the wall of Antarctic ice and into
the humid interior of the continent in a biplane. After crash-landing,
they must brave dinosaurs, hostile tribes and an exploding volcano in
order to rescue Tyler.
COMMENTARY:
England’s Amicus Productions had a reasonable success with the prehistoric lost world film The Land That Time Forgot
(1974), directed by Kevin Connor, produced by John Dark, starring Doug
McClure and adapted from the novel by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice
Burroughs. With that success in mind, Amicus and all the abovementioned
went onto adapt a further Edgar Rice Burroughs novel with At the Earth’s Core
(1976). Amicus, a modest company that had success with a number of
horror films during the 1960s and early 70s, particularly their horror
anthologies, folded shop shortly after that. However, Connor, Dark and
McClure regrouped at the English division of American International
Pictures (AIP) to make The People That Time Forgot. They would all subsequently go onto make Warlords of Atlantis
(1978) for EMI/British Lion, which was not adapted from Edgar Rice
Burroughs, but could well have been in that it assembled the same lost
world and prehistoric monster elements that were a central element of
the other three films.
The Land That Time Forgot
(1918) was the first in a trilogy of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs set
on the prehistoric continent of Caprona and so for the sequel Dark,
Connor et al turned to the second of the books in the trilogy, The People That Time Forgot (1918). (The third and final book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Caprona series, Out of Time’s Abyss
(1918), remains unfilmed). This time Dark and Connor did not retain the
services of celebrated sf/fantasy Michael Moorcock who had adapted The Land That Time Forgot and turned to Patrick Tilley, a minor British science-fiction writer best known for the post-holocaust Amtrak Wars
series. Tilley follows Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book reasonably well,
although substantially reduces the number of primitive tribes and much
of the running around on Caprona.
The majority
of John Dark and Kevin Connor’s lost world films are better than many
genre viewers are often prepared to give them. The main problem that
Dark and Connor had was that the imagination on display was often in
excess of what the special effects department could deliver. The People That Time Forgot
notedly opens with a wonderfully imaginative sequence where the
explorers fly up over the wall of Antarctic ice in a biplane, only to
face a pterodactyl that starts trying to chew up the wings and they have
to shoot it down with a Vickers machine-gun. The sequence teeters
between soaring with a genuine imagination and failing through seeing a
pterodactyl that only has clunky hinged-jaw movements. The same problem
extends elsewhere throughout the film – the stegosaurus that the
explorers encounter is painfully clearly only an immobile model with
legs that make mechanical back and forth movements as it is winched
along behind some rocks. I could not help but break into unintentional
titters during the sequence where the party try to traverse a cave
passage as snake heads keep popping out, which kept reminding me of the
old Frogger arcade game.
The filmmakers
went to shoot in Santa Cruz de la Palma in Spain, which makes for a
convincingly primordial and untouched prehistoric landscape. The show
moves along colourfully – one particularly liked the journey to a city
on a mountainside that has been constructed as a giant skull. However,
the adventures concerning dinosaurs, giant snakes, being captured and
nearly sacrificed in a volcano by tribes are routine. Everything goes up
in the predictable exploding volcano cliche climax where the special
effects team set off what would surely have to be a record number of
explosions in a film.
The film has
an interesting cast. The lead actor is Patrick Wayne, the son of John
Wayne. Patrick Wayne had a minor career as an actor, which hit a peak in
1977 when he appeared as a leading man in both The People That Time Forgot and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
(1977). Patrick has the handsome certainty of a classic matinee idol –
the great mystery is why he almost entirely vanished off the radar after
1977. Sarah Douglas appears in one of her first performances before she
found fame as a super-villainness in Superman (1978) and particularly Superman II (1980) and then went onto uber-bitch roles in Falcon Crest
(1981-90) and a good number of B movies. Here she walks through the
film, radiating a good deal of confident, sexy, upper-class breeding.
There is also the bewitchingly lovely Dana Gillespie, who makes a
jaw-dropping appearance as a primitive girl, even if the film promptly
provides her with nothing else to do throughout other than show off her
undeniably impressive cleavage.
IMAGES: Marcus Brooks
Dana Gillespie Website:HERE
