The Land that Time Forgot

In the spring of 2025, TCM ran a spotlight of movies based on pulp literature. Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known for Tarzan in that vein, but he wrote any number of non-Tarzan books. One adaptation that TCM ran as part of the spotlight was The Land that Time Forgot.

The movie starts off with a different way of getting to the flashback: on a cliff on what looks like it could be the island of northern Scotland but isn't, somebody throws a bottle off the cliff into the sea. Eventually that bottle makes it to land some ways away, and a British sailor finds it, and that there's a message in the bottle. Reading the message leads us to the main action of the movie....

Head back to World War I. American Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure) is a passenger on a British ship, along with Lisa Clayton (Susan Penhaligon). This being the middle of the war, it's not surprising that there are German U-boats in the area, and that eventually one of them torpedoes the British ship. There are a couple of British Navy survivors along with the Americans, and they're piced up by the U-boat cpatain, Friedrich von Schoenvorts (John McEnery). Since some of the men are British officers, it's not surprising that con Schoenvorts makes the prisoners of war. It's also not surprising that the British and Tyler want to fight back against the Germans and try to take over control of the U-boat.

However, in a series of fights for control of the U-boat, the radio and compass get broken, so the people don't know quite where they're going, even though you'd think with a sextant and working watch they'd have some reasonably close idea of their latitude and longitude. Lost and nearly out of fuel, they suddenly spot a land mass that shouldn't be there, or maybe it's just a giant iceberg. Their working theory is that this is the mythical island of Caprona that was supposedly sighted by the first set of Antarctic explorers in the explorations of 150 years earlier. And there seems to be an undersea passage through the ice, how convenient.

So they go through the passage with the hope of putting in to work on repairs to the U-boat or some such. But their jaunt is rudely interrupted by creatures that look like dinosaurs. And then, later, they're attacked by hominids, but hominids of a fairly primitive species. On the bright side, the prohibited land of fire that the one hominid who sort of befriends them, being of a different tribe from the one attacking them, leads them to, is actually oil! Perhaps the 20th century humans can figure out a way to use that oil to get out of their predicament if they work together. But they're in a race against time. After all, there are hominids on the island who are more than willing to attack them, while at the same time if the underground oil catches fire it could cause catastrophic problems.

In reading the reviews for The Land that Time Forgot, I see a running theme of a lot of people who first saw the movie as young boys, loved it then, and then watched it again as an adult and can see that the movie definitely has the flaws you can imagine a lower-budget movie based on a pulp novel would have. I'd mostly agree with that assessment, although I'd add that the movie is also full of the sort of plot hole you really have to overlook considering that these are fantasy movies at heart. Taking that into account, The Land that Time Forgot is a fun enough movie, although certainly not great by any measure. Sit back on a rainy day, especially if you have a young son to watch it with.