The Land that Time Forgot (4 Stars)

Is this the film that time forgot? It was released in 1975, but it wasn't released on Blu-ray until 2015, 40 years later. To be fair, Blu-ray discs weren't marketed until 2006, so it only had to wait 19 years. The Blu-ray editions are now out of print in England and America, but you can still buy the film on Blu-ray in various European countries, including Germany, which is fortunate for me. Don't worry, the menus are in English and it can be played in English.

Critics don't seem to like the film much, but it's a fan favourite among people who fondly remember the days before CGI when dinosaurs were rubber toys filmed in close up. The dinosaurs don't appear until the second half. The film begins on 3rd June 1916 with a German submarine sinking a British ship in the Atlantic Ocean. It's a civilian ship, but the Germans have received intelligence that weapons are being transported below deck. Did the British really use human shields? I'm curious how accurate this is.

There are only a few survivors. A dozen British sailors and two American passengers escape in lifeboats. They aren't seen in the thick fog, so when the submarine surfaces they board it and take control. They head for America, but the German captain sabotages the compass and they sail due South. They arrive at an island called Caprona, which is inhabited by dinosaurs and primitive men.

The Germans and the British form a truce on the island. The German captain is obviously a man of learning. He recognises that the animals come from many different periods of prehistory. There are qualities in the water that accelerate evolution, so that men are born primitive, then intellectually develop while they age. Men belong to the Balu tribe when they're born, as their intelligence develops they move into the Galu tribe, and eventually they join the Stolu tribe. Weird. Maybe this is made more credible in the novel on which this film was developed.

This is the Galu tribe. The women are bathing in the evolutionary waters while the men prefer to remain stupid. There must be a message in that. Also, this is an example of the improvement of the Blu-ray over the DVD edition. It's true, the women are only seen from a distance, but on the DVD I didn't even notice that they're topless. Praise be remastering! There are also disadvantages to the higher definition. On the Blu-ray it's obvious that the background in some of the scenes is a painting. This isn't clear on the DVD.

The remastered film is beautiful, even if it's not as miraculous as the remastering of "Planet of the Apes". From what I understand, there's an automatic process to remaster old films for Blu-ray, but the true quality comes from manual retouching of individual scenes. Sometimes there's damage in the original that would make repair too expensive, so it's left as it is. The best restoration of old material that I've seen is the Star Trek original series. The technicians claim to have examined every frame of every episode individually. That's about five million frames, which is incredible! An example of poor HD remastering is "Faster Pussycat Kill Kill" (1966), the worst Blu-ray that I know. There's no menu; there are no subtitles; the director's commentary from the DVD isn't included; the film starts when the the disc is inserted, and the disc freezes at the end of the film. In addition, the picture quality shows no improvement over the DVD played on an upscaling Blu-ray player. "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" (1988) looks good on Blu-ray, apart from a scratch on the original tape, which would have cost a small fortune to repair.

Summing up, when you watch an old film (pre-1996) on Blu-ray, you can see from the quality how much loving care was put into the remastering. As already mentioned, "Planet of the Apes" (1968) is a beautiful piece of art. In contrast, "Monster" (2003) is a recent film that looks awful on Blu-ray.

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I've added links to the American and English DVD releases, but true film lovers will prefer the German Blu-ray.