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Before Luke Skywalker, there was Doug McClure... His John Dark-Kevin Connor fantasy adventures were a mainstay of Summer holiday movies in the days before Star Wars: they weren't masterpieces, they didn't boast state-of-the-art special effects, but they were exactly what an audience of kids wanted from a film back in the mid 70s. Except for this one, which has always been regarded a bit like the dotty relation nobody ever talks about, and not without good reason.
Despite the success of their first two Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, The Land That Time Forgot and At the Earth's Core, The People That Time Forgot was barely released, and it's not hard to see why. Combining the last two novels of Burroughs Caprona/Caspak trilogy and removing almost everything of interest from them, it was filmed on the cheap and looks it. This time round there are few dinosaurs, glove puppet or otherwise, and, either to keep the budget down or because they were too similar to the evil Mahars in At the Earth's Core, the flying dinosaur/human hybrids of the last novel have been replaced by a tribe of human sacrificing volcano worshipping samurai. With McClure reduced to a cameo, the film focuses on the rescue mission to the lost island of Caprona led by Patrick Wayne, Sarah Douglas and Thorley Walters but apart from Dana Gillespie's spectacular cleavage and an okay score from John Scott, there's not much to recommend it as it drags on forever to little effect. Unlike the first film there are no ideas, no plot, no sense of continuity with the original film, just the feeling of an unwelcome contractual obligation that everyone wants to get over as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Failing even to work on the most elementary kids matinee show level and with no fun to be had, this one feels like hard work to get to the end.
MGM's DVD offers an okay widescreen transfer with a trailer the only extra, though the DVD is apparently missing one brief sequence.
