Sean came across this on Netflix and was kind of astounded that it existed. What was Sean up to in 2009 that this one passed him by? Well, he made a giant move to a new city in search of a new job, and was dating new and exciting women, unaware that he’d meet his future wife in just a few days. But even if life was a little calmer for you in June 2009, this film may still have avoided your radar because basically it didn’t make anyone’s. It was a huge flop, and even the president of Universal (Ronald Meyer) disavowed the movie, calling it “crap.”
I’ve never seen the TV show upon which it is loosely-and-not-really based and now I 
hope I never do, its legacy forever tarnished by this steaming piece of dung. Land of the Lost is intentionally camp. The effects are deliberately horrible. This doesn’t make it okay. I guess “camp” implies that you’ll be having fun, and I most decidedly was not. I was just sitting there with a pout on my face and a game of phone-Boggle in hand, just to stave off complete boredom.
The script was lazy, the characters confounding. Will Ferrell, who stars as paleontologist Dr. Rick Marshall, does little to endear us. For me, Ferrell’s pretty hit or miss, and in this movie he can’t land a damn thing. Paired with Danny McBride, it’s suicide city. It’s just inexcusable and I’m glad it was an embarrassment to the studio because they deserve to sit on the throne of shame wearing the hat of dunces while enduring finger pointing and aggressive sniggering for this sin. I can’t imagine who the target audience was – it’s too crude for a family movie but too tame for anyone else, and too unfunny to even become passable fare on late-night cable. This movie feels like Will Ferrell’s caution flag: his career has only slumped since this vulgarity was released. Has he been funny at all since? Frankly, he was only sporadically funny before. This is where his career jumps the shark. May it rest in peace.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 
Matt Lauer was funny. Nothing else was 😦
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I’ve never seen it, and now never will! Thanks for the warning.
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Maybe it is because I did watch the the Saturday morning TV? But, I laughed a lot watching this. Yes, it is smug and definitely campy; but, I think it was the intend. No, I don’t think it is a great movie; and, I would only recommend it to people who did watch the old show. Then, maybe, my sense of humor is warped? Either way, as always Jay, I love to read your reviews xx
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Never saw this movie….and (judging by what I saw from the trailers and what you wrote)…I’m glad that I didn’t. I’ll just stick with the original TV show.
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That pretty much sums it up. I don’t think I even finished it since it was so bad. One of the few movies I hated so much I couldn’t finish.
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That sucks, I like Will Ferrell, but thank you for sharing!
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Will Ferrell’s still hit or miss these days, though I think he’s been a bit more consistent with hits like The Other Guys, Anchorman 2, and heck I even liked Daddy’s Home (though I’m not sure why there has to be a sequel, seriously there can’t be a sequel to The Other Guys first?). This one’s kind of a guilty pleasure for me at times, and that “Matt Lauer can suck it!” line cracks me up. That really should’ve become a meme
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fair enough. it ended up kinda winning me over slightly by the end, but i can see why it wouldn’t do that for others!
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I like Will Ferrell much more as a voice actor. Or, at least, I like the movies he’s voice acted in.
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Yeah, that film was fucking crap.
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I actually enjoyed this one, maybe because of how weird it was, and the surreal fantasy element seemed to jive with Will Ferrel’s absurdity.
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This was on my radar. Back in the late ’70s, there was a Saturday morning TV show called Land of the Lost. And it was popular, at least among my friends. I could not escape the horrible thing. No matter how hard I tried. See, I hated this show with every fiber of my being, but I got stuck watching it because everyone else I knew watched it.
Ugh.
It was silly. The “special effects” were cheesy. And I just wanted them to bring back the other shows in the cycle that I actually liked. (The ones I liked were the ones they rarely showed.) But how this worked is all pretty vague to me. I was a child (8, 9, 10 ish) and didn’t get how TV programming worked.
So, considering my hate of the TV show, there was no way in hell I’d ever bother to catch this thing. But I can tell you who the target audience was. Alas, I have lost touch with all of those friends, so I have no idea if they bothered to see this movie.
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Mnah. Thanks for sitting through this. I’ll give it a miss should it appear on my radar.
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I completely agree. This was a horrible film. It just didn’t know what it wanted to be, and wasn’t funny in the process. As for the TV show, I used to watch it as a kid. It’s camp also, but not seemingly on purpose. Us kids ate it up back in the day, but looking back on it, it’s unintentionally hilarious.
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Question: Have you seen Fugitive Pieces?
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I loved the original show. I was also four years old and I suspect if I went back now it would look pretty awful, although the Sleestaks–the one thing the 2009 film didn’t change much–still strike me as wonderfully creepy.
As soon as I heard “Will Ferrell” I skipped the movie, although I caught it on TV one day and knew about five minutes in that it was going to be worse than I imagined. I think Leonard Nimoy only lent his voice to it because he was locked in a recording booth and never shown a complete script.
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Whenever I think of Will Farrell, the word “zany” comes to mind
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Steaming piece of dung eh? Thanks for the heads up.
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