Return to the Land That Time Forgot

One of the first dinosaur movies I ever saw was The Land That Time Forgot. Based upon the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of the same name, the film followed a mixed group of British and German World War I sailors stranded in a dinosaur-infested lost world. I did not care very much about the human characters; it was the dinosaurs, brought to life via puppetry, that enthralled me. (Indeed, one of the saddest scenes in the film is when the sailors slow-blast apart a pair of oversized Styracosaurus, a kind of herbivorous horned dinosaur.)

Now The Land That Time Forgot has been adapted for film again, but this time in a direct-to-video production due out on July 28th by the American film studio The Asylum.

The Land That Time Forgot - Trailer by dreadcentral

It is not a by-the-books retelling of Burroughs' story or a re-make of the original film, but rather a new story that draws from both. The plot centers on a charter boat carrying a bevy of newlyweds that becomes stranded on a mysterious Caribbean island. The hapless tourists quickly find that the island is not deserted, though, and they have to find a way to escape the lost land's prehistoric inhabitants.

According to the film's Wikipedia entry, this new adaptation will feature a much wider array of creatures than the 1975 film. Along with old standbys like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops will be more recently-discovered dinosaurs like Carnotaurus and Therizinosaurus. The addition of extra dinosaurs does not necessarily mean that this b-movie will be good, but it couldn't be worse than Aztec Rex, right?

Riley Black | | READ MORE

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.