Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
6/7/09
I'm
pretty sure I watched an episode or two of Sid and Marty Croft's Saturday
Morning Magnum Opus Land of the Lost back in the day, but since
I was all of five years old by the time it left the air in 1977, I don't
feel particularly guilty to admit that I don't remember them other than
the vague sense that the Sleestaks were really scary. But I do know
that it couldn't have taken a more different approach to its' subject (three
people thrown into a strange parallel world) than Brad Silberling's new
film version. Rather than square-jawed low-budget earnestness, this
Will Ferrell vehicle goes bananas on comedy and camp, producing a goofball
cinematic acid trip I happened to find hilarious. But then I'm a
huge fan of filtering genre cliches through the prism of camp craziness
(witness my 4-star review of DOA: Dead
or Alive). Make no mistake: Land of the Lost is
very much a Ferrell comedy with dinosaurs and is in no way a family film.
But if you're picking up what they're putting down, this is a delightfully
silly lark.
Dr.
Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell) has spent 50 million taxpayer dollars studying
time warps in hopes that they can be harnessed to provide unlimited free
energy. Confronted by Matt Lauer (as himself) on The Today Show,
the “temporal paleontologist” goes crazy and is so discredited he ends
up teaching a grade school science class. He needs a boost and gets
it from grad student Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel), who shows up with a fossil
containing the impression of a cigarette lighter: the very one Dr.
Marshall has in his pocket. He's inspired to complete his dream project,
a machine that would allow for inter-dimensional travel, and the two of
them hit the road for a field test at a location registering high levels
of the time-traveling particles tachyons. The location they find
is The Devil's Cave, a tourist trap run by trashy Will Stanton (Danny McBride).
He takes them on a boat tour through the Cave, and once Marshall's machine
is activated, it pulls them down a giant waterfall into The Land of the
Lost, a dimensional dumping ground where items past (dinosaurs), present
(themselves) and future (a flying saucer, lizard-alien Sleestaks) gather
together in a forbidding desert and jungle landscape. There, a T-Rex
they dub Grumpy develops a grudge against Marshall, they meet a primitive
man name Cha-Ka (Jorma Taccone), who becomes their sidekick, and a Sleestak
named Enik (John Boylan) asks for their help to stop an invasion of Earth
by his enemy The Zarn (voice of Leonard Nimoy). It all comes down
to who can find that missing machine.
It's
easy enough to follow its' trail, because one of the spare parts with which
Dr. Marshall built it was a computer hard drive that keeps playing selections
from the Chorus Line soundtrack. It's that kind of movie:
the more random the better, and I really liked the way the pompous Professor
persona fits Ferrell's comic skills. After all, he originally made
a name for himself on Saturday Night Live mastering authoritarian
blowhards like Alex Tebek and George W. Bush. Marshall is as egomaniacal
as any of them, and while he's obviously a genius of a kind, he's also
a self-absorbed idiot of the highest order, quick to panic and just as
quick to insist he's right about pretty much everything. Ferrell
gets some truly inspired bits, explaining his post-disgrace food addiction,
making a Blair Witch-style video about how if push comes to shove,
the group will have to eat Cha-Ka, and demonstrating his plan to evade
the dinosaurs by covering himself in urine. McBride also takes what
could have been a grating character and makes him fun, processing this
strange new world with the same awe he'd show a flame-shooting monster
truck. Friel makes an excellent straight-woman, pulling off the neat
trick of seeming to think these guys are even halfway normal. Between
the makeup department and Taccone's nimble performance, it's easy to forget
that Cha-Ka is a person.
Lost's
look is awesome, skillfully combining epic production design (the desert
junked up with everything from a Viking ship to the Golden Gate Bridge)
with intentional cheesiness (the Sleestak costumes look like just that,
and a bit with Dr. Marshall and Will “incognito” in shed skins is priceless).
Grumpy is an inspired FX/comic creation, with a whole lot of personality
and a really big chip on his shoulder. The way the movie crafts a
rivalry between the pompous scientist and the angry dinosaur is delightful.
The plot is solid enough to serve as a clothesline for the comic setpieces,
which have a great deal of fun with the notion of dropping idiots into
the middle of a sci-fi blockbuster.
The
problem a movie like Land of the Lost faces is that it's likely
to draw a whole lot of viewers who're not going to like this kind of movie.
My Wikipedia research confirms that the movie uses all the names from the
original series, but is just riffing on them like a Mad Magazine spoof,
and anyone who regards Land of the Lost as a sci-fi classic might
be unamused. And don't let the fact that the original aired on Saturday
mornings make you think this is a kid's movie: sex and drugs are
the topic of at least half the jokes that DON'T involve urine. But
it's important not to spend so much time pouring over the box office charts
that we criticize a movie for being the wrong kind of product. This
is the kind of off-the-beam comedy that's ordinarily made on a low budget
before it sneaks onto cable to attract a small cult following, and I was
really happy to see it done on such a large scale. Was it a smart
investment for Universal Studios? Probably not, but that's not my
problem, now is it?
Silberling
directs with a reckless abandon that makes one feel like even the special
effects are improvising, and gets a nice assist from Michael Giacchino's
spunky, campy score. Credit writers Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas
for their willingness to go crazy, and Ferrell and McBride for their usual
inspired improv skills.
Land
of the Lost will get hammered in the press for being a bad product,
and I'll no doubt have to argue with untold numbers of people about how
great it was while they slam me for having no taste. But I went through
this same process with Hudson Hawk back in the day, and I'm not
ashamed to champion the cause of a demented comic blockbuster when it delivers
the laughs. If you've found yourself in the same boat, run, don't
walk to see Land of the Lost. Because it probably won't be
out long. |
