Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Incredible Petrified World (1957)

Genre: Science Fiction, Exploration

 Source: My Own Collection

  Grade: D

  Well it was a foggy morning and I was in a real mood to watch a old science fiction movie, and conveniently I had just picked up a 50 pack of horror movies called Legends Of Horror the other day, and for some reason this science fiction movie as well as a couple others like Christopher Lees END OF THE WORLD (which really was a poorly done movie anyways, but that's a topic for another day) was thrown in with all the horror movies. anyways I picked this movie out of the lot saw it starred the legendary John Carradine and it had a super cool theritical poster on its page on Wikipedia. so what could go wrong?

Well everything did, the writing lagged logic and was random, It completely lacked all adventure and the thrill you'd expect from a science fiction movie, the intro was random as heck, and John Carradines role was very minimal. So it was a complete disappointment, and was utterly dull. So starting with the movies Intro it was a random stock footage documentary talking about fish bone structure, which really had nothing to do with the movie at all. And then the interesting thing was this movie had a great plot,"a group of scientists get lost under the sea and end up in a strange world" that was the movies synopsis,and now your probably thinking ''not bad, this guy just doesn't appreciate sci-fi ", but really the great plot is ruined with horrible writing, seriously this movie is completely void of any adventure what so ever. even when there in the "petrified world" all it is a cave and a crazy guy living there. No dinosaurs, no giant squids, no savages, no anything awesome. Just a bunch of bland characters arguing and a annoying girl on her period apparently almost getting raped by the crazy bearded guy who lives there, and his reason for being there lacks logic and completely contradicts the story(they are miles under the ocean,and this guy some how got here from a shipwreck, on a raft?). And John Carradines character is basically a oceanographer who plans everything a the exploration, the equipment, and all the engineering stuff, he just doesn't participate in it, so he lacks a lot of screen time.

The overall cast was so-so other than John Carradine they all seemed a Little bland and uninteresting. I have a feeling though this had something to do to the movies minimal budget, this probably had a budget with the equivalent of a Ed Wood movie. So overall this movie turned out to be a huge disappointment and rather dull affair. I really don't recommend this to anyone unless their a John Carradine enthusiast or a big time 50s sci-fi movie fan, but don't go expecting it to be a 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA or anything remotely as good.

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