"The Land That Time Forgot" is arguably the most underrated dinosaur action movie of the 1970s. Good B-movie fun for the kids (and adults) in the family that can't resist dinosaur fare.
This Doug McClure vehicle about British sailors who capture a German U-Boat that sunk their ship, then get stranded on a prehistoric island (think King Kong's Skull Island), only to be picked off one-by-one by ravenous dinosaurs and cave men, has pretty high value special effects for a 1970s flick. It is an instant classic, like "Logan's Run," which also featured some of the top special effects the time could muster - until Star Wars changed the whole game. (Of course, I am excluding 1968's "2001" here, a Kubrick film so far ahead of its time that it stands in a special category of its own.)
Caprona actually has a plot (unlike the Jurassic Park sequels, for instance), good actors in a fabulous ensemble cast, character development, and a great set-up (Germans and British who want to kill one another, instead have to band together to survive ravaging dinosaurs).
The special effects of course are not up to modern CGI, but they are awesome in their palpable physicality: glider planes disguised as pterodactyls that pick up a real actor in their teeth by swooping down; ichthyosaurs that shoot out of the water next to the U-Boat to feed on human prey; prehistoric men that will bash your head in with an ax, but also make dearest friends and love the Edison phonograph music; tar pits bubbling and shooting natural gas flames. We must forgive a scene where two allosaurs (still standing upright and tails down as was the posing custom in 1970s paleontology) have strings attached. Puppetry still beats stop motion, but take the kids to "Dark Crystal" if you want to see it done really well.
The band of men and women is eventually defeated by their own infighting. The simple moral is that Nature will get us if we don't work together and get over our differences. As the U- Boat goes down in flames, the viewer actually feels sorry for the doomed characters, and equally sorry for the lone couple that was left on shore to deal with the prehistoric mayhem.
This film is good enough to deserve a remake, but also good enough that it doesn't really need one. One the other hand, many modern remakes were made from movies NOT good enough to need a remake, or even to have been made in the first place.
This Doug McClure vehicle about British sailors who capture a German U-Boat that sunk their ship, then get stranded on a prehistoric island (think King Kong's Skull Island), only to be picked off one-by-one by ravenous dinosaurs and cave men, has pretty high value special effects for a 1970s flick. It is an instant classic, like "Logan's Run," which also featured some of the top special effects the time could muster - until Star Wars changed the whole game. (Of course, I am excluding 1968's "2001" here, a Kubrick film so far ahead of its time that it stands in a special category of its own.)
Caprona actually has a plot (unlike the Jurassic Park sequels, for instance), good actors in a fabulous ensemble cast, character development, and a great set-up (Germans and British who want to kill one another, instead have to band together to survive ravaging dinosaurs).
The special effects of course are not up to modern CGI, but they are awesome in their palpable physicality: glider planes disguised as pterodactyls that pick up a real actor in their teeth by swooping down; ichthyosaurs that shoot out of the water next to the U-Boat to feed on human prey; prehistoric men that will bash your head in with an ax, but also make dearest friends and love the Edison phonograph music; tar pits bubbling and shooting natural gas flames. We must forgive a scene where two allosaurs (still standing upright and tails down as was the posing custom in 1970s paleontology) have strings attached. Puppetry still beats stop motion, but take the kids to "Dark Crystal" if you want to see it done really well.
The band of men and women is eventually defeated by their own infighting. The simple moral is that Nature will get us if we don't work together and get over our differences. As the U- Boat goes down in flames, the viewer actually feels sorry for the doomed characters, and equally sorry for the lone couple that was left on shore to deal with the prehistoric mayhem.
This film is good enough to deserve a remake, but also good enough that it doesn't really need one. One the other hand, many modern remakes were made from movies NOT good enough to need a remake, or even to have been made in the first place.