Saturday, February 26, 2011

The Incredible Petrified World

1957
 
Directed by:  Jerry Warren
Written by:  John W. Steiner
Starring:  John Carradine, Robert Clarke and Phyllis Coates
 
From IMDB:
"Four adventurers descend to the depths of the ocean when the cable on their underwater diving bell snaps. The rest of their expedition, believing them to be lost, abandons hope of finding them. Exiting the diving bell, the party finds themselves in a network of underwater caverns. They encounter a shipwreck survivor. He tells them he has been there for 14 years and that there is no way out. The two men in the exploring party believe him only after a hike to a volcanic vent that supplies the caverns with oxygen. On the surface, Prof. Millard Wyman, the elder scientist who designed the original diving bell, decides to try again to explore the depths of the ocean. He finds out that there is another diving bell in existence that is identical to the one that was lost."
 
 
This Trailer From Hell - is far more entertaining than the movie!
 
There were the classics I grew up watching.
They set the camera on the sticks, the actors hit their marks and said their lines but I don't think this is what Anthony Hopkins had in mind when he suggested it was all you needed to do.
This one is moving a little slower than your average bear.  I'm sixteen minutes in and still nothing much has happened.
 
Women losing control and needing a good slap to bring them around.  Haha! 
John Carradine is spending a lot of time leaning in this movie - leaning and explaining.
22 minutes in and they've found the Petrified World.  Looking pretty rocky so far - it also looks like a truck load of stock footage.
I wonder if I've watched this before?  I've sure seen a lot of them but this one's not ringing any bells.
I saw in the front end credits this was all filmed at Colossal Caverns in Tucson Arizona.  I
biked by there a few years ago.  Now I'm thinking a visit might have been in order.
 
CLASSIC LINES -
One woman to the other:  "There's nothing friendly between two females. There never has been and there never will be."
 
One woman to the other:  "I don't need any help and neither do you, as long as we have two men around us."
 
I guess the real question I have to ask myself is  whether this one is worth watching?  Should I recommend it to others?  For a film like this to work, it has to be so bad it's good.
There are glimmers of that - you can see in the few bit of dialogue I posted above, but these jewels are just too few and far between.  There's many better examples from this era far better than this one.  Just too damn boring.
 
1 Bloody Eyes out of 5
 

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