At the Earth's Core

Edgar Rice Burroughs is probably best remembered for his Tarzan stories, and then for his Mars stories. Recently, I came across a movie based on one of his stories that I hadn't heard of before: At the Earth's Core. Obviously, with a title like that, you can imagine what you're getting, and that's a premise that sounds interesting enough, so I watched it.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing in the early part of the 20th century, with the period just before World War I being a time when combining adventure with scientific and technical advances was apopular theme. In this case, British scientist Dr. Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) is working on a drilling machine to get deep into the earth's crust, where one can imagine that there are all sorts of minerals and oil to be had. But the difference in this drilling machine is that it's designed to have somebody in it, operating it at that ridiculous depth. And there's room for more than one person. So Dr. Perry is accompanied by his financial backer, American David Innes (Doug McClure).

Somehow, however, the machine goes off course, presumably because they reach a hollow part of the earth and there's not really anything to drill through. At this point, our two intrepid men make the bizarre decision to step out of the machine, not knowing what the atmosphere outside is like, and all the science about gravity be damned. In the story, it turns out there is a world under the world we know.

But it's a dangerous one, with various sorts of creatures attacking our two men. Of note are the bird-like creatures made with horrendously bad special effects. But those aren't the only things in this world, called Pellucidar. There's also a race of human-like beings who are being enslaved by another, different race of human-like beings, much like the Morlocks enslaving the Eloi in The Time Machine. And those bird creatures use some sort of telepathy on both races. Or maybe it's mind control, as Dr. Perry has the fairly hilarious line, "You can't mesmerize me! I'm British. Ah, the era of British chauvinism in adventure stories.

Naturally, our two heroes get captured and thrown in with the more human-like of the two races, which counts among its number the lovely Dia (Caroline Munro) to serve as a love interest, and a quisling named Hoojah (Sean Lynch) whom you can expect to betray everybody. Can our heroes from the earth's surface save the humans below and free them from their captivity?

The plot is a mess and the special effects are, as I said, terrible. But At the Earth's Core is the sort of movie that I can see being charming for younger boy viewers who aren't old enough to know better and who naturally gravitate to this sort of adventure. A generation earlier, it would have been an ultra-cheap one-hour movie shown at the Saturday matinee. But it was released in 1976, long after the Saturday Matinee era, and had pretentions of being bigger than a Saturday B movie.

If you can watch At the Earth's Core for what it should have been, it's not that bad a movie. If you try to take it seriously, however, do so at your own peril.