Here's the review I wrote of The Land That Time Forgot remake for my movie news website. Thought some of you might enjoy it or be interested. Here you go:
It is very hard for me to write this review of the remake / revision / new version / whatever of The Land That Time Forgot. I go into a viewing of a straight-to-DVD movie with certain expectations. This one did not meet them almost at all. How dare they? How dare a reliably cheesy company like The Asylum put something out that is actually pretty decent. There was barely any of the cheese I have come to expect from Asylum films. Nowhere near the amount of bad acting that is necessary for one of these flicks. And the special effects? While not Oscar-worthy or even close to ILM or WETA standards, they actually were tolerable. And there was a story. An actual story that actually made sense. Now don't get me wrong. You still had to stretch your suspension of belief, but there was a story. All of this is absolutely inexcusable.
As stated earlier, the special effects were not flawless by any means. They still looked pretty animated. But they were no worse than what you see in those Journey to the Center of the Earth or Lost World movies you see on the SyFy Channel on Saturday nights. I guess that's good, though, since that's where these movies are going to end up after their DVD run. There were a couple good scenes of people being eaten. There's one scene of a guy getting bitten in half and it actually doesn't look too bad. There are also scenes of a German submarine that was washed up onshore that look very believable.
The acting was pretty good, too. The actors actually looked like they cared about the material and gave pretty good performances. You had Pony Boy C. Thomas Howell himself playing the lead role in a film he also directed. Then, of course there was the veteran supporting actor and relatively well-known Timothy Bottoms (The Last Picture Show, Texasville, Land of the Lost, That's My Bush!) that they always stick in these movies to drum up their viewership and "legitimacy." Mr. Bottoms did play his role at times like a drunken hippie, but it suited him just fine. Even the actors who played the Germans were relatively convincing.
Was it better than the original Amicus produced film from 1975? I would say no. That one just has a classic and epic feeling to it that I don't think this one ever will. That one also has more elements to it's story. This one, while not in a bad way, really just focuses on the characters trying to get off the island. I do have to say that Howell really did a good job directing this. You can tell he really did care about the film and did his best with what he was given budgetwise and such. If you're looking for a good time-waster on a Saturday night and you actually don't hate the SyFy original movies, you should give some thought into picking this up at the video store. Or you can wait until it's actually on SyFy. You decide. (Review by Eric Shirey)
