At the Earth’s Core

At the Earth’s Core

Never before has Peter Cushing said the name “David!” so many times in his life. You remember Peter Cushing; he’s the one in all those British horror movies that stars Vincent Price and Christopher Lee with him. His dialogue usually goes something like this: “But good heavens, man! The person you saw has been dead for more than two centuries!” This time it’s just “David!”

David is played by Doug McClure. You remember Doug McClure. Good. I don’t. McClure plays a rich young American inventor who has financed the Iron Mole, which is a gigantic steam-powered screw, designed to penetrate to the Earth’s core. The Mole was built by Cushing, an eccentric British inventor as who would not be after such an invention?

McClure and Cushing get into their seats and pull some levers and the Mole goes crazy. It forgets about the hill and screws itself right into the very mantle of the planet itself, emerging in Pellucidar, that mysterious land within the Earth where they speak English except when it comes to proper names like Dia (the beautiful slave girl with the heaving bodice), Ra (her boyfriend) and Ghak (the evil one), not to mention Hooja (whose impenetrability goes without saying).

Well anyway Doug and the Professor step out into this sinister underworld which is full of telepathic giant parrots and next thing you know they’re on the chain gang and all day long they break rocks which seems unnecessary at best since you wouldn’t think there would be a rock shortage at the earth’s core but there you are.

About here we begin to notice what I will call The Captain Video Effect. You remember Captain Video; he was a science fiction hero on TV in 1949 or so on DuPont Network who landed on strange planets where they had rocks painted silver and he and his trusty sidekick (Bucky? Rocky?) sneaked around them for three weeks until he realized they were the same rocks, always.

Same here. Doug and the Professor sneak around one strange man-eating vegetable and there’s another one which is the original vegetable, photographed from a new angle while the telepathic parrots wander by opening and closing their beaks by spring action. It’s along about here we begin to zero in on Dia’s bodice. Let somebody else break up the rocks and clean up after the parrots.

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