Land of the Lost

June 4, 2009

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 93 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Land of the Lost has Will Ferrell with dinosaurs. Based (loosely) on the 1970s Saturday morning live-action show from psychedelic showmakers Sid and Marty Krofft, it involves disgraced scientist Rick Marshall, his graduate student assistant Holly (Anna Friel, from the tv show Pushing Daisies), and redneck Will (Danny McBride, from The Foot Fist Way) thrown through a hole in the space-time whatzit to a land of dinosaurs.

Beyond the dinosaurs, this does incorporate a lot of atmosphere from the original series. In this version, Marshall, Will, and Holly are not related, and are all adults, so we get a lot of jokes about groping Holly’s boobs. But there are still cliff landscapes, jungles, lost cities, and the lizard-men Sleestaks, along with semi-evolved primate Cha-Ka.

But what it mostly is, is Will Ferrell doing some crude, sometimes gross, and generally pretty funny schtick in dinosaur lands – sometimes Laugh Out Loud funny.

It’s not really much of a parody of the old show – oddly enough, the Sleestaks are played pretty straight. And I’m not sure how much of this really needed to be in The Land of the Lost… pretty much the same jokes would have worked with any time-machine-throws-us-back-in-time story.

But, probably a lot of people seeing it have never heard of the original show.

Quite a lot of the movie takes place in a sort of desert Sargasso Sea of time; where artifacts from our world seem to have dropped in willy-nilly. I don’t remember that in the old show, but maybe that was in the 2nd or 3rd season.

The movie seems a little confused at times as to what kind of farce it wants to be. Still, Will Ferrell dumping dinosaur pee on himself, that’s entertainment!

Popularity: 36% [?]

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 3 Stars, Anna Friel, Comedy, Danny McBride, SciFi, Theatrical, Will Ferrell