When I was in grade school, the Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations that AIP and Amicus were putting out had a sky-high "gotta see that!" value. My friends and I saw the ads on Saturday morning television, and some of us even got to see these in the theater. I remember seeing The Land That Time Forgot in an aging movie palace that was entirely too swanky for the film. Such thoughts didn't occur to me then; I was a precocious child, but I wasn't THAT precocious. I think I saw The People that Time Forgot on cable in the early early days of HBO. I don't remember ever seeing At the Earth's Core (1976, directed by Kevin Connor), which is today's subject, but I might have. They all blur together in my mind, an effect exaggerated by Doug McClure's presence in all three films.
I never saw any of these films as an adult. Some things probably shouldn't be revisited. At the Earth's Core is pretty bad, but it is instructive, in so far as it demonstrates the wide, wide gulf between what fantasy films looked like in 1976 and what they looked like just a couple of years later. To put this into some context: At the Earth's Core, like the other two films in the sequence, was shot by cinematographer Alan Hume, who went on to shoot The Return of the Jedi. On the one hand, you have a paper mâché kid's movie, on the other, you have a fully-realized alien world. Of course, a lot of this is down to budget. Amicus were the low budget knock-offs of Hammer Films, and if you know how cheap the Boys at Bray were, then that should be saying something. This movie was cheap, and it usually looks it, from its over-reliance on rear projection compositing to its "suit-mation" monsters to its plaster and mâché sets. Not that The Return of the Jedi was above that sort of thing--just look at Luke Skywalker's battle with the Rancor, which looks a bit like McClure's battle with the dinosaur in the pit in At the Earth's Core--but there's a world, if not a galaxy of difference between the design sensibilities and effects techniques in these movies. At the Earth's Core appears at the cusp of two filmmaking epochs, and it plays a bit like a silent film made in 1932. Curious, but dated. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Saturday morning kids shows from the same period. At the Earth's Core looks a LOT like an elaborate episode of The Land of the Lost.
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