At the Earth's Core (1976)

directed by Kevin Connor

UK/USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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At the Earth's Core is honestly the most I've felt like I was watching tokusatsu during any single movie made outside of Japan. The dichotomy between how Japanese practical effects films were/are perceived - especially in the '70s - and how Western ones are perceived means that no one would acknowledge it (Japan makes the goofy rubber-suit-and-cardboard-city movies, the US and UK make Art™, or so popular opinion goes), but there really is not much aesthetic difference between the suitmation in this and something like, say, Ultraman Taro.

We get little introduction to the lead characters: the first time we see them is pretty much as soon as they set off on their underground voyage, and instead of stopping to give us backstory at any point, the film remains firmly focused on the present, having them react to challenges in front of them as if they came into existence when the film started. As our two leads we've got a guy named David who is the most unremarkable man in the world, and his sidekick, Dr. Perry, played with extreme Britishness by Peter Cushing. If there's any aspect of this film I solidly disliked, it was David, and really by extension all characters except for Perry; I would have accepted a version of this movie that was just him down there getting into random situations. But the two do play off of each other very well. David is the kind of bland protagonist that exists in a lot of adventure novels where he has such a lack of personality that the reader is given to map their own thoughts and feelings onto him, but to me that seems like it works much better in a book than on film. This movie has a lot of issues that any given book-to-film adaptation usually has (namely, that a lot of things feel unearned due to having spent less time with the characters than we would if we'd been reading a book), but it's also awesome and I love it.

The majority of what happens once the digging machine - which is the Gotengo, by the way, it is so perfectly the Gotengo - reaches the center of the Earth is generic male fantasy stuff. David commits a social faux pas by being nice to a girl, which turns out to be a no-no in this society of cartoon barbarians, and then spends the rest of the film fighting monsters and other guys for the right to marry her. To her credit she ultimately refuses him at the end but it's out of some weird sense of racial pride, that her lot in life is to stay down in the underground with her own people, which... yeah, we're gonna get into the race stuff in a minute, but it's not handled very well, although from what I know about the source material, the racism is actually toned WAY down here.

But my god, dude, the monster suits. The foggy, neon-lit soundstage jungle. The rear projection which is so obviously rear projection but you're too immersed in it to really care. It's one of those movies where you can see the zippers and the wires and imagine the boundaries of the set, but instead of looking cheaper for it, it's all the more impressive how much the film attempts to do. There are multiple types of weird creatures: shouty monkey guys herding humans into chain gangs to do their bidding, telepathic birdmen who control the monkey guys, hippopotamus-like dinosaurs who shoot fire, other dinosaurs, living plants, giant Venus flytraps... there's an entire ecosystem presented to us in glorious suitmation, and honestly, I love every minute of it. And if you like worldbuilding, this is Burroughs we're talking about - the film doesn't even scratch the surface, but it's an admirable attempt.

Now, the first time I watched this, I didn't pay too much attention to the whole idea of multiple human tribes existing in Pellucidar who were constantly at odds with each other, because what the movie does to depict these tribes is give all the non-white actors the same really bad curly wig. I didn't catch that these were meant to be members of a different "tribe" the first time around because I just assumed they had bad wigs for no reason other than somebody in costuming thought it was a good idea. It's not really a huge part of the story, but another deed our savior David does on his journey through Pellucidar is unify the tribes, which is shown as a big celebration with much dancing and music - but, again, the word here is "unearned". If there was real-world commentary intended here, it's not fleshed out enough to be anything other than awkward and poorly done.

On the whole, the movie is frequently cheesy, extremely unserious, a bit of a mess, and has a few flaws, but I do still think it's one of the more unique things I've seen. The Isao Tomita score (not really, but that's what it sounds like) and multitude of strange beasts that all seem to explode instantly upon death, the wide-eyed ten-year-old boy fantasy vibe, the occasionally groan-worthy humor... there's so much going on in this movie's 90 minutes. For better or worse, this kind of thing could only exist in 1976, and even if it's a critical failure, I'm glad people made this movie so I can keep rewatching it and going back to its hypnotic, hallucinatory, out-of-time fantasy world.