Journey to the Center of the Earth

Some reviewers felt this mess was fun. Jeez. Their taste is in their mouth. This bore about boring to the center of the earth must have had Jules Verne spinning wildly in his grave. I found it at Wal-Mart and would love to get my $5 back. It is doubled with 100 Million BC, also with Greg Evigan. I enjoyed some of the '50s-60s schlock. They were fun. This was a ripoff. Less than 5 minutes of looking at a sick dinosaur with vocal cords, and a few minutes of a spider with gland problems, both phonier than Ma Bell. One more thing, the music was an outright steal from Phillip Glass. Action? None. It was talk-talk-talk, and stupid talk-talk-talk at that. The picture on the box has this really mean looking dinosaur. Evidently, he was cut out of the movie. Fred Flintstone's Dino was far more convincing. It is advertised as a Maximum Movie Experience. They should be sued for false advertising. The girls were good looking and a couple of them could be classified as actresses. Appearing in this piece of junk is no way to further a career. Does Michelle have any words of advice for her sister --- like----keep away from this tripe? You get the picture. Don't get this picture.

I don't usually post... but had to on this one. I'm guessing the marketing pitch went something like this, "Okay... we release this piece of roughly cobbled together footage from the cut-room floor from an old sci-fi flick that was killed for good reason 20 years ago at the exact same time as Brenden Frazier's 'Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3-D', call it by the exact same name and hope nobody notices. Who wants in?!" My wife kept jokingly asking, "Is this a 'Sweded' version of a 'real' movie?" (see "Be Kind, Rewind" for concept of "Sweding"). Honestly. An all female combat unit who is neither on a combat mission nor behave like soldiers. Poor whip-cams and badly edited cut scenes. Special "ship effects" that have repeat-cells (remember Scooby-Doo cartoons? Remember how the background kept "repeating" when the gang would run down a hallway). Horrific dialogue, audio mixing (it was like watching old Kung-Fu movies... lip flaps don't match the dialogue... crap, the Japanese Anime we watch does a better job than THIS movie did!), acting, direction, photography...honestly, the only thing even remotely redeeming was the lame attempt to give Homage to Aliens (pirated dialogue "Hey... you look just like i feel...", an easily identifiable "Hudson", and even a gratuitous "chest bursting" concept), which would have been mildly funny if it wasn't attempting to take itself seriously.

Even below the typical level of Sci-Fi channel stuff. Most of these movies you can laugh at, but this thing barely achieves even camp-level status. It has next to nothing to do with the Jules Verne work, only rips off and defames the title. In fact, everything in this movie is ripped off from somebody else's ideas.

The $7 budget used in this film was only enough to hire some Drama 101 students from a local middle-school. A rag-tag group of Xena-wanna-be's are supposed to go to Germany in a covert mission, using some sort of teleportation device. Would you believe it doesn't work right? Well, they don't materialize inside of solid rock like this movie's writers did; instead, they end up in a south Pacific tropical island paradise. It's the home to a few CGI dinosaurs that actually appear occasionally, usually to roar. There's other Skull island type grotesque creatures scaring our heroines, too.

The group of stereotypes--I mean soldiers include Vilma Dinkley. She examines a pebble, and immediately knows they're 600 kilometers below the surface, under magma. You heard that right: under magma. There's a bully cat-fighter girl, a Barbie cutout doll, and their Camp Fire girls troop leader--I mean, captain. They all look like refugees from an Annette and Frankie beach musical. Scenes involving the tunneling vehicle are even sillier. The scientist and the army guy ride around through magma like they do it every day, making one-liners. The machine emerges from a magma chamber into the Hawaiian set, and shows no signs of even being warm. No smoke, ash, discoloration--nothing.

If somebody sells the DVD of this at a yard sale for 25 cents, it's price gouging.

By every account this is a terribly bad movie. Why do I give it so many stars (well, 4 out 10)? Because the cheese factor kind of works in it's favor ... for me. It's got some sort of sick charm that appeals to 1 out of every 50 people and I guess I'm that 1 person.

Given that in 2008, 2 other Journey to the Center of the Earth movies were made (one Theatrical, one for the Hallmark TV channel) ... what spin could this one take? An all-female cast for starters (well, there is one slightly older middle-aged guy present, but he doesn't count), and teleportation to add a little novelty.

Here's the setup: a military team of women are using a relatively new teleportation machine to zip over to Germany. Their path takes them through the center of the Earth (well, only 600km deep) ... and something goes wrong and they get stuck in said location. The hot female scientist who designed the machine is now just finished work on a nuclear-powered, laser-blasting deep digging machine. This is what's used to rescue the lost women.

Part of the cheese factor for me is that in spite of a low budget, ridiculous cast and idea and clear special effects goofs (I don't think we're meant to see clouds underground) ... everyone in the movie tries to be serious. The result is a kind of offbeat amusement. In fact, I'm actually pretty impressed that the film makers didn't go the "T&A" route; the girl with the lip-ring in the beginning almost gets you thinking otherwise.

Anyway, I do not recommend watching this movie. However, if you believe that you may happen to like knucklehead adaptations of "Journey to the ..." movies, then by all means check it out. I kind of liked it.

The 'science' in this movie would have been okay in the 1960s. I wonder if they actually had any technical advisors.

The only good thing about this movie was the fact that it passed the Bechdel Test , which is difficult to find, especially in Sci-fi. Pity it was so badly done.