An Early Look at Land of the Lost
Posted 05.07.09 by reelz
The clips aren't on line yet, but a review of five scenes from Land of the Lost screened by a reporter at Hit Fix provides one of the most detailed looks yet at the movie adaptation of the campy '70s TV series. There's a lot of CGI, of course, and plausible-looking dinosaurs -- something the bargain-basement original clearly lacked. But in most of the clips he describes, what really stands out is the movie's kaleidoscopic disrespect for time and place, and its trippy brand of humor.
One representative scene takes place at a motel pool that has somehow found its way intact (and full of water) into the middle of a surreal desert. The band of intrepid travelers drinks a strange concoction. Then their ape-boy guide Chaka (Jorma Taccone) treats them to exponentially more and more dire translations of what exactly they have ingested -- what starts out as "joyful lightness" is soon revised to "howling loneliness" then to something that makes your bowels feel like they are "being pierced by a ghost serpent" and then into the zombie beyond. "It might be narcotic," he adds, almost as an afterthought. Cue "All Along the Watchtower."
Pretty good evidence, it seems, for the reviewer's conclusion that weird is in this movie's DNA.