En el corazón de la tierra

Hi! I'm Doug McClure. You may remember me from such other cheesy adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs works as, The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot.

This movie is hysterical. Even allowing when it was made, the monsters are just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad! All rubber suited things with people inside. There's even a fire-breathing beastie, but don't look at it's mouth too close or you'll see the flame-thrower nozzle poking out. Couple that with Peter Cushing's wonderfully useless "old professor" routine and Doug's stoic hero performance and you'll laugh the whole way through. Carolyn Monroe plays Dougies love interest, though I did wonder where she got cosmetics from, living deep in the Earth. Perhaps the Avon lady calls there.

The flying monsters at the end are particularly silly. They have all the aerodynamic properties (and believability) of a concrete block. Just a bunch of fat blokes in rubber suits. All they do is sit on a ledge and hypnotise 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.

Total B-Movie delight. Watch it and be amused. Be very amused.

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.

Generally speaking, this movie has awful production values. Flying rubber pterodactyl creatures ruling the underworld. Piggish humanoid servants of said pterodactyls. A vapid, vacant-eyed Caroline Munro. An oh-so-macho leading man who, when you really look at him, doesn't look all that tough.

Still, At the Earth's Core has a charming innocence about it that gives it a bit of appeal. Best viewed by 10 year old boys on rainy Saturday afternoons, it's all in good fun.

Funny, I'd read most of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantasy adventure novels by the time I saw this movie, and knew that this wasn't Pellucidar: where were the vast, open spaces of the hollow earth, the blazing sun, the endless forests and lakes and mountains? Where were the friggin' tarags and thipdars?? And yet, this cheesy movie has managed to stick with me over the years. I love the cramped, fake-looking sets, the dazed actors playing slaves, the hyperactive Sagoths acting like Japanese prison camp guards in some WWII flick. And best of all are the dinosaurs, looking more like something from a medieval bestiary than actual prehistoric animals. They seem to combine aspects of human, rhino, frog, titanothere, you name it. All this, and cave princess Caroline Munro running around screaming, shooting smoky glances at Doug McClure from her sexy, kohl-rimmed eyes. It was TOO MUCH.

I can't help it. At the Earth's Core is one of my all-time great guilty pleasures. I only wish I could see it properly in a movie theater with an audience some day before I die.

Man, what isn't there to like about this movie? Sure the SFX are kinda low-budget and some of the actors sort of ham it up, but imagine if this film was made today with CG and bland actors whom take everything seriously, it just would not be the same movie.

The movie follows, well, two scientists whom drill beneath the Earth's core, run into bizarre monsters (whom looked like they were kicked out of Daiei's Gamera films BTW), become slaves, and explore the strange world and so on. I don't remember the novel very well, but I sure know that this movie is one of those "so cheesy and wild, it's hard to forget" type of movies.

BTW, check out the part with Jubal the Ugly one! PRICELESS!

Way back in the 70s, when I was kid, we didn't have fancy CGI effects in our monster movies: if we were lucky, the film featured stop motion work, but often they would rely on men in shonky rubber suits, made to look enormous through dodgy matte work or back projection.

Case in point: At The Earth's Core, a ropey adaptation of an Edgar Rice Burroughs story (which I caught on its original release in '76) that presents creatures so pathetic that I'm surprised that any of the actors in the film managed to keep a straight face. To their credit, though, B-movie hunk Doug McClure and horror legend Peter Cushing do manage to hold back the laughter, playing a couple of Victorian explorers who travel under the Earth's crust in a mechanical 'mole', only to discover lost civilisations and prehistoric monsters.

Even as an 8 year old kid, I remember being distinctly unimpressed with this pretty poor effort from director Kevin Connor, finding not only the effects to be laughably bad, but also the acting to be of a pretty poor standard (Cushing, in particular, gives an amazingly hammy performance that still makes me cringe to watch). Nowadays, however, I find this whole sorry affair just about watchable thanks to the gorgeous Caroline Munro, a major hottie of the 70s who spends this film prancing around in a skimpy outfit that reveals her ample cleavage, and the unintentional laughs that can be had from the awful dialogue, bargain basement visuals, and general atmosphere of cheesiness.