The Land Unknown

Umpteenth re-imagination of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel “The Lost World” (1912), this film by Virgil W. Vogel, a director specializing in sci-fi B movies, relies heavily on the environmental aspect, abandoning both the original Amazonian plateau (“The Lost World” 1925) and the popular South Pacific rocky isle (“Unknown Island” – 1948; “Lost Continent” – 1951) to take refuge in the frozen Antarctic wasteland.

The film itself isn’t anything special, given that it features the same tired, stereotypical characters – the stalwart hero, the pessimistic nervous wreck, the hot-blooded young man – and a depressingly bare-bones cinematography. Even so, the constant references to historical events and personalities associated with early polar exploration make the film worthy of some degree of curiosity.

Indeed, historical references include: illustrious British navigator James Clark Ross (1800-1862), for whom the Ross Sea was named, and who also discovered the volcanic Mount Erebus (stock footage of the peak is included in the film); the great Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) who tragically disappeared in the glacial waters of the Arctic Ocean during a valiant attempt to rescue missing members of Umberto Nobile’s North Pole expedition; Richard E. Byrd (1888-1957), the US admiral who led the controversial “Operation Highjump”.

It’s Byrd’s discoveries that provide particular inspiration for this movie. Specifically, the concept of a unique ecological niche surrounded by snow and ice overtly refers to the mysterious “Bunger Oasis”, a hilly coastal range on the Knox Coast of Antarctica, characterized by a climate that doesn’t correlate with its extreme latitude.

Additionally, legends and general conspiracy theories generated by Byrd’s reports feed into that fantastic-imaginative background so conducive to an adventure story such as “The Land Unknown” (consider the reference to the “Hollow Earth” concept, something of an updated take on that family of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories immortalized by Jules Verne’s pen).

Finally, a couple of considerations on the prehistoric world and its denizens: the well-versed Commander Roberts is certainly correct when he hypothesizes that they’ve stumbled onto a vestige of the Late Cretaceous (65-70 million years ago). That would also explain the presence of the tiny mammal called a loris (actually a Loris tardigradus), which represents a member of the genus “Purgatorius”, commonly believed to be the precursor of all of today’s primates, including Homo sapiens.