Director: Virgil W. Vogel
Year: 1956
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Trying to discover a long-lost civilization, a team of explorers in a remote mountain valley finds a mythical culture of people living underground from a race of deformed humanoid creatures and are forced to help their society return to its former grace.
Review:
This here was quite a decent if rather flawed effort. This one really doesn't get started off on the right foot at all with the lecture from the professor supposedly giving off a rather banal and horribly inaccurate part of the possibly theories of human evolution that is intended to make the events here seem all the more logical which it isn't to begin with but just goes on for so long that there's some utterly terrible work to get it going past this stuttering starting point. Likewise, there's also the rather troubling effect of the film manages to turn the supposed creatures of the story into pathetic audience-identification figures in them being slaves to the society at the forefront of the film which in effect makes it seem more like a sci-fi effort rather than a true horror effort.
Even more, the concept of them being slaves really hampers the fact that there's barely any time with them on-screen, as this one spends far more time on not only the trip to the underground city but also getting them to believe that the newcomers are important to their culture, which really stumbles with how it treats the creatures. It never manages to explain why they made them slaves to begin with or how they're able to be controlled so easily here, with the simple whipping accomplished that really makes no sense, not only how they knew how to accomplish the feat, but also in how they lived alongside them all this time as slaves without doing so until now. This alone makes that storyline inherently predictable and quite easily seen coming a mile away, with the set-up being so obvious as to how this gets to the eventual rebellion, which in turn leads to a lot of rather pointless and bland scenes of them going around the civilization, interrupting their methods, trying to be heroes.
That none of this leads to a lot of true horror is a major detriment to this one, with the fact that it really piles on the lost-civilization sci-fi antics rather than horror being a huge part of what really holds this one back, despite how much there's potentially to fear from the creatures with this one. Though there are a few decent moments here, it's not all that often at all with the early scenes of them going through the underground tunnels after getting trapped and slowly becoming aware of what they've stumbled upon, as well as the scenes of them getting captured by the guards of the city. These are quite action-packed as well as mildly chilling, providing the best parts of the film where it really lets the creatures have some semblance of threat while also getting in some nice horror elements. As well, there's the decent finale, which showcases the eventual rebellion and overthrow of their government, which is a lot of fun with the different battle scenes as the creatures get involved in a rather decent enough brawl that does end this on a nice action scene, but it's too little too late to save this one.
Overview: *.5/5
A bland and pedestrian sci-fi/horror effort, this has some pretty big issues that are quite hard to overcome, which manage to bring it down over the few potential positive factors. Those with an appreciation for this kind of genre fare or who are curious about it will have the most to like here, while most others out there might want to heed caution.
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