A Victorian era scientist and his assistant take a test run in their
Iron Mole drilling machine and end up in a strange underground labyrinth
ruled by a species of giant telepathic bird and full of prehistoric
monsters and cavemen.
It was directed by Kevin Connor and starred Doug McClure, Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro. It was filmed in Technicolor, and based on the fantasy novel At the Earth's Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first book of his Pellucidar series.
A Victorian scientist and his young American backer set off in their new earth-boring machine with a short test on a Welsh mountain. Unfortunately the thing is rather more powerful than expected and they end up in an enormous cavern at the centre of the earth. Here they find a race of humans enslaved to evil oversized prehistoric birds with extra-sensory abilities. The travelers decide they can be some help, the more so as at least one of the slaves is very eye-catching.
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| They're in it DEEP now! |
Make no mistake, this is a very silly movie. Peter Cushing knew it; he
gives one of his most over-the-top, ham it up performances. And I don't care that this movie ended up on MST3000. It's still pretty fun. Or maybe I just have fond memories because as a kid I actually went to see this movie in 1976 at the Fort Hill Drive In. Some of the
special effects are painfully bad but what a lot of folks overlook
about it is that it's actually quite fun, which is very important in my
book.
The flying monsters at the end are particularly silly. They have all the
aerodynamic properties of a concrete block. Just a bunch
of fat blokes in rubber suits. All they do is sit on a ledge and hypnotize
people. It's only when that fails, or it's feeding time, that they "swoop"
down to attack. And when I say swoop, I mean someone prods the rubber thingy
in the back and it swings down on a cable.
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| Take the Most Terrifying Journey of Your Life ! |
Doug McClure, Peter Cushing and Caroline Monroe are perfectly cast in
the roles of David Innes, Abner Perry and Dian the Beautiful. I
could have watched many Pellucidar sequels with these actors. McClure
is the perfect actor for any cheesy lost world adventure. Nobody - and
I mean nobody - fights lame-o monsters like Doug McClure. The guy is
brilliant. Check out the arena scene, where he faces off against a lame
saber-toothed hippo thing. McClure swings, he grits, he staggers and
strains. I love how he jukes the monster off balance to retrieve the
spear head from underneath it. Yeah! What other actor would have put so
much into that scene? Peter Cushing is certainly a far better actor
than this movie deserves, and yet he gives a surprising and outrageous
performance. Don't critique him too much for hamming it up, some of his
lines are right out of the book, and the character calls for a
goofball. Caroline Monroe looks like she just stepped out of a Frank
Frazetta painting. Too bad her role is limited to being a mere
one-dimensional love interest.
Let's talk about these fucking monsters. The first one we see walks upright, has the head of
a bird and a long tail. Then we see two fighting. I can't make out what
those are suppose to be. Then we are introduced to the rather unfriendly
Pterodactyl like creatures which seem to control the Mahar. These explode
at the end when they are killed. We also see a fire breathing dinosaur,
which gets blown up after Cushing fires some arrows at it and McClure has a
fight with another strange looking beast, a cross between a dinosaur and a
hippo (a similar creature turned up in The People That Time Forgot a year
later in 1977, possibly the same one used here). We also see some
man-eating plants.
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| SEE: The giant BOS, lizard-like behemoths with poison fangs. |
So is the film worth seeing? Well, yes AND no. No if you happen to want
to watch a good film! But yes if you could use a good laugh and can
turn off your brain and enjoy all the silliness--and there is plenty to
go round in this one! By the way, this is the last film of Amicus
Productions--and considering the quality of "At the Earth's Core", I
can see why.
Trivia:
Actor/stuntman Bobby Parr lost a finger during a fight sequence with Doug McClure that went wrong.
The Movie takes place on Pellucidar. Pellucidar is a fictional Hollow
Earth invented by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs for a series of
action adventure stories.
The last film produced by Amicus, Hammer's chief rival during the 1960's and 70's. Filmed January 20-March 1976, on the heels of Hammer's final horror feature "To the Devil a Daughter."
The film opened on Edgar Rice Burroughs's birthday, 1 Sep, in theaters and drive-ins throughout Southern California.
This popular film became the 18th most profitable British film of 1976.
German Import DVD has Super-8mm version (English Audio), as a special feature.
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| 4,000 miles to the center of the Earth to a world within a world |
