After the success of The Land That Time Forgot, Amicus continued along the family-friendly route that founder Milton Subotsky had always anted to follow with another Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation. At The Earth’s Core would reunite John Dark, Kevin Connor and Doug McClure, alongside Amicus regular Peter Cushing, for another extravagant monster mash.

Victorian scientist Dr Abner Perry (Cushing) and American financier David Innes (McClure) are testing their new ‘Iron Mole’, a drilling machine designed to burrow through mountains, only to go off course and find themselves digging deep into the earth’s core, where – of course – they discover a subterranean world populated by giant monsters and cavemen, and ruled over by psychic flying reptiles known as the Mahar, and their primitive servants the Sagoth. Inevitably, the pair are captured, and before long McClure is fighting with fellow captives, falling for slave Princess Dia (Caroline Munro) and helping organise a rebellion against the Mahar, who both use the humans as slaves and sacrificial victims.

At The Earth’s Core was a seminal film of my youth, and so I’ll always have a bit of a soft spot for it, but that doesn’t make me blind to the faults. I can ignore the hackneyed dialogue and one dimensional characters, because that fits rather nicely into the pulp fiction feel of the story, and if some of the monsters are a bit rubbish, well, never mind. There is, however, one fault that seriously damages the film – and sadly, that fault is Peter Cushing.

Now, we all know what an iconic figure Cushing is, and that - as everyone who worked with him will tell you – a lovely man. But there is a myth that he never gave a bad performance, and that’s just not true. Apart from several films where he clearly phoned it in, he also had the habit of taking a rather condescending attitude to ‘kids films’. His performance here is effectively a rehash of his Dr Who role a decade earlier, only cranked up the annoying scale several notches, and his eccentric, dotty, absent minded professor who never shuts up starts to get old very quickly. Even his fellow cast members seem irritated with him. It’s a shame, because Cushing was a great actor, but here he single-handedly wrecks the film.

So what’s good? The look of the movie certainly – the underground world of Pellucidar, bathed in a perpetual pink glow, might be a cheap set, but this actually gives it a strange, other-worldy feel that is quite effective. The Mahar are great – genuinely sinister looking, they are a rare example of a monster that is actually central, rather than incidental, to the plot. McClure, not yet bored by all this, is a solid hero, and Munro, in an outfit designed to show enough cleavage to keep the dads happy without jeapordising the PG-rating, is effortlessly sexy and gorgeous. And the odd moment of silliness – a fire-breathing monster that explodes after being turfed off a cliff – helps make the whole thing fun too.

So there is much to enjoy for undemanding viewers in this film, and much to frustrate. If Cushing had been reigned in, it could’ve been a classic. As it stands, it’s harmless monster movie fun, but in the end a mere shadow of what it might have been.

DAVID FLINT

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