Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (1977)

directed by Junji Kurata

Japan

92 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I'm rating this 2 stars with a caveat: last week I rewatched this at Flicker Theatre as the English-dubbed version, and although the original movie is still a pretty decent 2 stars, the dub took it up to a solid 4. It's not the worst dub I've ever seen, but something about its inherent goofiness combined with how absolutely dead serious the movie takes itself made for an extremely fun viewing experience, especially in a room full of maybe slightly drunk folks.

Although Toei is certainly no stranger to tokusatsu, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds came late in the 1970s, when the kaiju and hero boom had given way to something new: the disaster movie boom. Our wonderful host at Flicker mentioned in his intro that this movie should be thought of more in the framework of things like Jaws and Orca and other nature- and animal-sploitation films than as a kaiju movie. Viewing it that way (along with, as I said, the goofy dub) helped me to be a lot more lenient this time, because I came to it with the understanding that it wasn't trying to be a kaiju movie and failing, it was trying to be a disaster movie and showing us some cool dinosaurs as a bonus, so shouldn't we all be grateful? Well, your mileage may vary on that last point.

The plot: Tsunehiko Watase plays Se-[coughs]Ashizawa, a geologist who gets wind of mysterious deaths and earthquakes in the area around Mt. Fuji that are rumored to be related to the dragon that, according to legend, lives in Lake Sai. Ashizawa comes to the village around Lake Sai to investigate and happens upon large tracks that look like they could belong to a dinosaur - just what his father studied, and no one believed him. Sightings of strange creatures mount and tension ramps up as more and more people and animals turn up dead, but the characters remain unaware of the plesiosaur for a relatively long time even as us viewers are treated to some weirdly sensual scenes of it killing various women who try to enter the lake.

The characters are fine. The first time I watched this I made a note that I really disliked Ashizawa, but this time, I can't say that I cared about him enough to have an opinion. Watase plays him with a kind of slick, slightly bastardy '70s dudeman vibe, which fits with the overall tone of the movie. I hope it doesn't say too much about me as a viewer that the part where he slaps his girlfriend didn't phase me because I've come to expect that kind of thing out of '70s movies. His girlfriend Akiko is played by yakuza movie actress Yōko Koizumi, and unfortunately aside from at the climax of the film (which looked like it was absolutely brutal to film) she doesn't get to do much acting, since there's a man present to shove her out of the way and get stuff done himself.

Throughout the whole movie I kept thinking how weird it was to watch a kaiju movie (okay, a "kaiju" movie) that was shot like a yakuza movie. All of the actors (note also Hiroshi Nawa, another Toei regular) are familiar from yakuza stuff. The insanely funky soundtrack could easily have been transplanted into any other gritty '70s crime flick. The director apparently worked exclusively in jidaigeki - especially films about ninjas - save for this film, which gives me the feeling that Toei just needed a guy and Kurata was the most convenient option. It's a weird thing, this movie, and it's kind of great.

Arguably, the film should be called Legend of Dinosaur and Monster Bird, singular. (And, I mean, in Japanese, it kind of is.) The film's two creatures are a plesiosaur and a rhamphorhyncus, portrayed (I think) with puppets rather than suitmation. Maybe it's just me, but I had no problems with the quality of the effects when it came to the dinosaurs; it they had been the most startlingly realistic dinosaurs ever put to film, it wouldn't fit with the movie's overall vibe. I really enjoy long-necked dinosaur-like creatures in tokusatsu, so I was rooting for the plesiosaur, but the smaller, more agile rhamphorhyncus won the day. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, because Mt. Fuji begins erupting and all is forgotten.

I'll end this review by talking about the thing I really, genuinely like about this movie: its sense of a global catastrophe starting to churn up, a paradigm shifting gradually as humans go about their business, singing honky-tonk cowboy songs and doing silly little science things, none of which amount to anything in the face of the awe-inspiring power of Mother Earth. If you really tune in to what the movie is saying and ignore the funk music and annoying protagonist, it's a solid disaster movie. It's one of those things where the portents of doom - Mt. Fuji blowing steam, ground subsidence, legendary monsters appearing - feel like they exist entirely separate from the human story at first, and when the human characters finally do become drawn irreversibly into their proper place in the natural order of things, all civilization falls by the wayside.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

directed by Freddie Francis

UK

94 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I initially opened this review by saying something about how I usually have trouble reviewing Hammer horror movies because even though I like them they're just not that deep, but then I realized that this wasn't a Hammer movie. Well, it certainly has vibes like one. In any case, I rewatched The Creeping Flesh last night, and I found enough in it that I want to get some thoughts down. I'm going to be a bit negative in this review, which I feel okay about doing because I like this movie a lot.

The backbone of the plot is that a scientist, Emmanuel (Peter Cushing), believes that evil is a physical force that can be isolated and visually observed like any other part of the human body, and that a weird skeleton he found on an island somewhere is the key to unlocking this physical component of evil and, therefore, inoculating against it. He has personal investment in this idea because his wife - who dies early on in the film - had some form of mental illness which he fears she may have passed down to their daughter. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the skeleton has the annoying habit of continually trying to re-flesh itself, and must be kept dry at all times, since water has the effect of making it regenerate through vaguely supernatural, under-explained means.

I think we're all adults here and know enough to avoid falling victim to the idea that just because a movie depicts something, that means the movie endorses that thing. But The Creeping Flesh has such incredibly dated and racist ideas that it's hard to tell if said ideas come from 1973 or the late 1890s, when the film was set. I do tend to give it a little leeway because it feels so genuinely like the latter; the theories it presents about mental illness, women's propriety, and racial superiority/inferiority are so thoroughly entrenched in 19th-century eugenics that at times it feels like the film cannot but be attempting to cement itself inside the era during which it is set. It does add an air of authenticity that the narrative does not attempt to question these things, kind of like how The VVitch manages to be scary and intense specifically because it doesn't seek to subvert the idea that some accused witches weren't innocent.

But it also sucks.

We're shown a montage of Emmanuel's wife Marguerite "going insane", and what the movie defines as "going insane" is "being a slut". Having an affair with multiple other men while you're married is immoral, yes, but not insane. While Marguerite is in an asylum. eventually to die there, Emmanuel keeps the truth of her situation from his daughter Penelope, sheltering her into an immature naivete that ultimately backfires because by keeping Penelope from finding out she may have a hereditary mental illness she is also kept from, you know, tools and support that she may need to cope with said mental illness, giving her essentially no choice but to spiral down into self-destructive behaviors with no way to help herself. Her turn to insanity is, of course, also marked by slutty behavior and seeking casual sex - the perennial middle-aged man's worst nightmare of what could befall his precious daughter.

The issues with race need hardly to be addressed because the film itself lays them so bare in its synopsis: when you read that there's a skeleton of a "primitive man" brought back from New Guinea and supposed to hold mysterious secrets unknown to modern science, you know it's gonna get a little gross. Again, though, things were different 52 years ago than they were 130 years ago, and I want to give this movie the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it knows how gross it sounds when it talks about how "primitive" New Guineans will reach "a level of scientific sophistication that rivals ours" given 2,000 years' time.

Let's move on to the characters, because I think this is where the movie becomes really interesting. The wonderfully annoying thing about this (I say "wonderful" because I like when a movie makes you question where your sympathies should lie, even if this is unintentionally done) is that Emmanuel is framed as essentially blameless and victimized at the end of the film when the brunt of what happens is entirely his fault. Trying to mold his daughter into what he thinks a pure, upstanding woman should be at the cost of her own identity robs her of her freedom. Doing stupid racist science costs many people their lives. And it's only fitting that the film should end on him being confined to a narrow, secluded existence inside a mental asylum by someone who has power over him (his half-brother, played by a particularly Mephistophelean Christopher Lee).

All this and a nasty murderous reanimated skeleton too. The set dressing is unusually beautiful and intricate, and the film is confident enough to have multiple wordless stretches filled out with nothing but messing with various test tubes and beakers, which lends it a kind of artful feel. Lorna Heilbron does a great job as Penelope even if she's playing a laughable and dated idea of "insanity". The horror here is mellow and supplemented by interpersonal tensions and hubris rather than the in-your-face certainty of a vampire going around killing buxom women. It's a movie with a lot of flaws and I really enjoy all of them.

Do YOU want to hear all about a highly obscure 71-year-old Toho movie?

I've completed the project I was working on that caused me to miss a weekly post: here it is.

I've done a full (very amateur) fan translation of an early draft script for Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari, a Toho movie released in 1954 that has no surviving full prints. In 2010 someone reached out to Toho directly about screening it at a film festival and received a shortened, 38-minute re-release version, which has since been screened a whopping 3 times, the last one being in 2016. But that leaves over half of the movie that is lost to time.

...unless?

Like I said, it's an early draft (it may even be the first draft, judging by how many revisions the script contains), so it doesn't reflect the finished film 1:1, but if you like rakugo or '50s Toho movies, it may be of some interest. Navigate over to the tag I've created for the film on my other blog to hear me talk about it - there are more posts about it forthcoming.

Lost World of Sinbad (1963)

directed by Senkichi Taniguchi

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Every time I rewatch this, I'm surprised by how much I like it. I had a generally poor opinion of it the first go-around, possibly because I watched it in a stretched-out aspect ratio and terrible image quality and I had read a lot of many negative reviews. But now I genuinely love this movie. It's a blast. I don't understand why there seems to be a consensus of mediocrity among reviewers.

Toshirō Mifune plays Sukezaemon (or Sukeza) Luzon, a random guy who escapes being burnt at the stake for piracy and decides to become a pirate for real to spite his accusers. Our introduction to Mifune's character and the sequence that sets him on the path he'll follow for the rest of the film is very brief, almost comedically so; within the span of maybe ten minutes Luzon has gotten himself a big cartoony treasure chest full of jewels, engaged in naval warfare against a rival pirate (Makoto Satō, delivering the evilest evil cackles of his career), seemingly been punished by the gods for his hubris with a terrible storm, and washed up in a random unspecified country where everybody is surprised that he is Japanese but also, at the same time, all speak Japanese themselves. Mifune is of course eminently watchable and I'm tempted to say that he carries the whole film, but this works so well as an ensemble piece that that wouldn't really be fair to everybody else in it.

Luzon quickly finds that all is not well in the kingdom. The king is slowly being poisoned while a shifty chancellor attempts to seize power for himself and marry the princess. The chancellor's interim government demands tribute in the form of local young women who are taken to the castle and forced into slavery, and there are other generally oppressive measures leading the people in the kingdom towards mounting a revolt. But it'll take more than just a peasant uprising - it'll take some dude who isn't from around here and almost drowned a couple of days ago to gather enough strength to storm the castle and fight the Black Pirate and the chancellor's supporters.

The really fun thing about this movie is how many distinct characters make up the cast, and how every single one of them brings something new to the plot. It is a story about justice vs. injustice when you get right down to it, but there's such a broad range of actors involved in how the story unfolds. Some of them are somewhat opportunistic and switch sides according to their own whims (Jun Tazaki, for example, who looks absolutely lethal dual-wielding sai). Some are not very bright but side with Luzon for the craic. Two of my favorite characters really have no investment in the faction-vs-faction fight at all and have their own rivalry going on in the background, secondary to what Luzon is doing; these are Granny the witch (played by Hideyo Amamoto technically in drag but not really committed to it) and the hermit who got kicked out of heaven for being too horny (Ichirō Arashima). The panoply of personalities all contribute to why this movie moves at such a fast clip and avoids ever slipping into a lull at any point.

Whenever I try to think of which movie I'd recommend first between Sinbad and its "sister film" Adventure in Kigan Castle, I always have a hard time. Kigan Castle is objectively the better film, its production is far more elaborate and it has better pacing, but Sinbad is, in my opinion, way more fun. Although the scope is not as grand as Kigan Castle, which was shot partially on location in Iran, Sinbad still has some remarkable practical effects and the same feeling of "doesn't matter if the technology isn't there yet, we're gonna do it anyway" that all Showa tokusatsu is imbued with. I could probably rewatch this a bunch more times without getting tired of it, and if my tokusatsu film screening series doesn't crash and burn this year, it might make it into the roster at some point.

No review this week because I am busy.

I've been working on something big and I just need to focus all of my energy on it until it gets done. This is the only time I've ever missed a week, and probably the only time I ever will. I don't feel good about it at all, but I just did not manage to find the time to sit down and give anything a proper review this week. I promise the project I'm working on is worth it.

We'll be back in business next week. In the meantime, can I offer you a Varan?

Let's Go See A Movie

I originally wrote this post to celebrate having had my other blog for a year. I worked really hard on it, but then I decided it was extremely silly and not a good fit for that blog. So I'm shunting it over here instead.

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I've been running this blog for a year now. I must admit I've poured a considerable amount of money and an even more considerable amount of time into it. So it's only appropriate that for my one-year anniversary post, I've done something that involves both money and time: I've bought us a time machine!

"Where'd you get it?" What do you mean, where'd I get it? Yahoo! Auctions, of course, that's where I get everything.

Anyway, you and me are going to go back to 1959 and catch a showing of The Mysterians stateside. Yes, the dub is bad, but we're witnessing history here. We're going to San Francisco's Metro Theatre, because I like San Francisco. It's way too expensive these days, but in 1959 we'll be paying about a dollar for our tickets. We can sneak out before the movie they're double-billing it with comes on.

Here we are, and there's a line out the door! Everybody's scrambling to see The Mysterians and American movie critics in the '50s have a ton of respect for Japanese films and don't think they're a joke in the slightest.^{[citation needed]}

The lobby is nice and air-conditioned, but San Francisco in late spring isn't too hot in the first place. We're here in the last week or two of May, just after the film opened on the 15th. If you look closely, you can see a poster in the back advertising another upcoming imported feature - it's The H-Man, set to release on the 28th! Don't worry, there's enough juice in the time machine for a second trip.

Because I have a guy on the inside, we've got an original pressbook to look through while we're waiting in line. (We may be a bit early; time machine calibration is not an exact science.)

Let's see how they're trying to sell this one to theater owners across the nation:

• "Invaders from space coming to steal our women" is probably the #1 selling point across all the U.S. advertising materials.
• The color and scope are also highly emphasized, but this gets my goat a little, because it's shilled all over as a CinemaScope picture that utilizes Eastmancolor - it's not, it's TohoScope, but we wouldn't know that since the American cut removes the TohoScope logo. The technical specifications of TohoScope are almost identical to CinemaScope, I admit, but... it's just not, okay? 
• Space is cool! Everyone loves space! The Mysterians fit in quite well with the mania for atomic/science/space-themed sci-fi films in the 1950s.
• You can order 4,000 "heralds" (small two-page folded pamphlets) for $28.75 - that's about $313 in today's money. (I have of course ordered these to be sent to your house when you get back from our trip.)
• Moguera is hyped up in promotional materials but seen as a bit of a joke by critics, as we'll see shortly.

If we turned on the radio - we do have a radio inside the time machine - we might be able to catch an announcement advertising the film. There were eight different varieties of these for broadcasters to choose from. In the interest of space I won't duplicate every single one here, just the longest (which I've had to reconstruct a bit since the pamphlet I'm looking at is cut off on one side):

"From behind the moon they come - to invade the Earth - to abduct our women and [level] our cities!! They are THE MYSTERIANS... demons from behind the moon, who top our every top secret! MGM now [presents] an enthralling motion picture about a master race that smashed the atom before we even saw the light of day - THE MYSTERIANS! [Aliens] who abduct Earth's women so that they themselves [can breed]... super-sonic war erupts from out of space before your very eyes! [A giant robot]... sheathed in heavy metal... fifty times the size [of a man]! [Crushing every] human being in its path with the dreadful searing rays [from its eyes] - see it all in THE MYSTERIANS! A terrifying, fantastic [feature presented in] giant CinemaScope and Color! THE MYSTERIANS!"

And the shortest:

"MGM presents a first in terror - THE MYSTERIANS - a master race that smashed the atom before we were born! See electronic war erupt from outer space! See THE MYSTERIANS - in Giant Cinemascope and Color!"

Our theater has chosen to spring for all possible advertisement. We're beset by many different sizes of lobby cards, most of which feature lovely (although maybe not quite screen-accurate) original illustrations by Lt. Colonel Robert B. Rigg. 

I ask the guy behind the counter selling tickets so nicely if I can buy this one off him but he won't let me:

This is actually meant for advertising in newspapers and so probably wouldn't be on display in a theater. Also god damn

We might even see some kids playing around with a Mysterian trading card from Nu-Card, featuring a tremendously bad pun.

Speaking of kids, we also have evidence that the movie was marketed deliberately to children; see this newspaper clipping featuring some of the advertising we just looked at above.

How did all this advertising pay off? Pretty well - the film grossed $975,000 in the American box office. Adjusted for inflation that is $10,607,092. Unfortunately 1959 is also the year that Ben-Hur came out, grossing $74,432,704 in the North American (U.S. and Canada) box office, which, adjusted for inflation, is $809,758,520. That's insane money. I could buy at least two DVDs off YesAsia with that. Still! Almost a million dollars for an imported Japanese feature means the people do like The Mysterians.

And enough about us, who already know and love this movie. What do the critics say? Before I picked you up in this time machine I went to a couple newsstands and grabbed some old papers and periodicals. Here's the May 23 issue of Harrison's Reports:

"From the production point of view, this Japanese-made science-fiction thriller, which is enhanced by CinemaScope and Eastmancolor, is far better than most America-made pictures of its type." Wow! That's much nicer than what most American critics of Japanese films had to say. 

Now let's look at Boxoffice. Dear reader - I mean, time machine companion - I hate this one.

Americans in the 1950s would go see a Japanese movie and be like "aw man there's Japanese people in this"

Emphasizing that "the cast means nothing" not once but twice within a one-paragraph review, describing Kenji Sahara and Yumi Shirakawa as having "only a slightly Oriental cast of features and [almost resembling] American teenagers"... oh boy. I forgot we were still in the 1950s for a moment.

Let's move on to Variety. Oh, it doesn't look good already. "As corny as it is furious, The Mysterians is red-blooded phantasmagoria - made in Japan and dedicated to those undiscerning enough to be taken in by its hokum."

"The cast - from Kenji Sahara to Minosuke Yamada - isn't intended to sell many Yankee tickets." Okay?

I've got a review from the New York Times as well, but I won't repeat it here since it's much of the same wisecracking and actually goes so far as to refer to it as a "mess". I do appreciate this quote, however: "It has to do with a huge, globular fortress that plops to earth 'from the fifth planet' (wherever that is), envelops a group of glamour girls and is finally destroyed by a brave young Galahad."

Hmm. Well, while the critics seem intent on dismissing the Japanese cast altogether, the people in the Metro with us today who have more "highbrow" tastes will definitely recognize Takashi Shimura from the Kurosawa films that have been playing stateside since Rashomon in the early '50s. People have also seen Yoshio Tsuchiya if they've seen Seven Samurai, but they probably wouldn't recognize him here, as his face is covered in The Mysterians and he is dubbed over. Anybody who's seen Godzilla, King of the Monsters! will (theoretically) recognize both Momoko Kōchi and Akihiko Hirata, and a very select few might have seen Hirata in other things - possibly one of Inagaki's Samurai films, or even Itsuko and Her Mother, although the chances of that being the thing they know him from are vanishingly slim since, as far as I know, that film only screened in Hawaii. And, of course, anybody here who's seen Rodan could recognize him, Kenji Sahara, and Yumi Shirakawa. We'll be seeing them all again quite soon in The H-Man as well.

So the cast means nothing to Americans, huh? It's debatable how much anybody actually cared, but to say that none of the cast of The Mysterians would have been familiar to American audiences is just not true.

I'll leave this alone in a minute, I promise, but stick with me a little longer here. I've always been curious about how much American audiences were actually paying attention to the cast of the imported Japanese films they were watching. I looked up Variety's review of The H-Man, which is credited to the same person who reviewed The Mysterians, and...

...this critic appears to have mixed up Kenji Sahara and Akihiko Hirata's roles in the film, which means he presumably was not recognizing people who were in the same movie he'd just watched a week or two prior (or at least not bothering to put names to faces). So the answer to "how much did Americans care?" is probably not very much.

Alright, the movie's about to start. We're in our seats, and you've endured me lecturing you for this long, time to get down to business. For a more extensive overview of how the American cut differs from the Japanese original, I'll turn it over to our friend Brian Culver at The History Vortex. One of the more notable losses in the American cut - which is fairly good as far as these things go - is Ifukube's formidable score, which appears to have been distorted into something more like the eerie, theremin-soaked sci-fi soundtracks Americans were used to. The second Moguera is also cut out entirely, which is a shame, because I screened The Mysterians to a small audience myself back in the present day and that moment got some big laughs.

The Metro is a stadium-style theater that has only one single screen but a massive seating capacity - 856 seats by the time of its closure, but probably a bit less when we're here. We're sitting in the front row, naturally. Can you see us? We're right down there.

85 minutes later (the U.S. cut shaves down some special effects scenes, removing three minutes of runtime), we're ready to get out of here before Watusi starts and go back home.

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. I'm not talking about the time machine anymore, I'm talking about this blog. It's a lonely business running a fansite for an actor who most people in the English-speaking world only know for one role, but I genuinely enjoy writing these posts very much. I think it is worth doing and I hope you think it is worth reading.

Even if you don't, there will still be more posts.

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Note:

In this post I've embellished a few details to give a fictionalized idea of what it would be like to sit down and see The Mysterians in a U.S. theater during its initial run. While I have no proof that The Mysterians ever played at the Metro Theater specifically, it very well could have. However, everything else is factual and is taken from reliable primary sources. The photo of the theater interior I've used is not the Metro Theater but the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon; I've chosen it for its ambiance and the size of its screen. You can find more information about the Metro Theater here.

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Image credits:

Metro Theater exterior: from Jack Tillmany collection

Metro Theater lobby: photo by Ted Newman, from Jack Tillmany collection

Bagdad Theater interior: photo by Kathleen Nyman

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.