4) Land of the Lost
I don’t know why I even watched Land of the Lost in 2009 after it was so brutally panned by just about everyone who saw it. But I don’t know if I’ve been more surprised by a comedy before or since. And so it became a topic of interest to me to figure out how in the hell people didn’t love this Will Ferrell/Danny McBride farce. Were they expecting something serious? Something like the 1970s TV series it was (kind of) based on? Some of this could of course be chalked up to a failure in marketing, which didn’t highlight the elements that made this movie a really good, really funny parody of 1970s TV.
Just about every scene featuring Ferrell and McBride riffing off of each other is a riot. Ferrell’s rocky relationship with the Neanderthal character dude is so ridiculous. You see in their scenes just how much of a mistake it was for the studio to market this as some sort of family comedy when Ferrell mouths to this non-verbal creature “F**k you!!” Observed as a family film that’s meant to be loyal to the original series, this movie is of course an absolute failure.
Seen as a raunchy comedy with Ron Burgundy and Kenny Powers doing stupid stuff in a prehistoric setting and seemingly being given free rein to make any moment even more absurd and hysterical, it works like mad. If you watched it in the former fashion originally, give it a second chance.
