The Incredible Petrified World

Rating:
Summary: The Incredible Petrified World
Review: I was excited about this movie because it centered around a Diving Bell. The Diving Bell in question is an OK design, but curiously is larger on the inside than on the outside! The plot of a lost diving bell and its survivors wandering around in a submarine series of air-pocketed caves could have been a true adventure. Unfortunately, the budget did not allow for any quality special effects or action. The divers exit and enter the bell without an airlock, yet the bell remains water free! Phyliss Coates is the crabbiest female character since Baby Jane Hudson! The male adventurers from the bell have some interesting dialogue, but Carradine has an impotent part and seems to realize it! (He's the designer of the faulty diving bell). There are endless scenes of the lost crew wandering through caverns (filmed in a real cave at least) and the hermit they encounter is one-dimensional. Image quality and sound are poor (the music is out of tune). One surprising aspect of this late 50's film is that the second-in-command male adventurer seems to be a (positive)GAY character! He's philosophical, soft-spoken, slightly effeminent and shows much more commaraderie to his leader (Craig) than toward the two females of the group! Maybe this was unintentional, but it was an interesting feature of an uninteresting film!

Rating:
Summary: The Incredible Petrified World
Review: I was excited about this movie because it centered around a Diving Bell. The Diving Bell in question is an OK design, but curiously is larger on the inside than on the outside! The plot of a lost diving bell and its survivors wandering around in a submarine series of air-pocketed caves could have been a true adventure. Unfortunately, the budget did not allow for any quality special effects or action. The divers exit and enter the bell without an airlock, yet the bell remains water free! Phyliss Coates is the crabbiest female character since Baby Jane Hudson! The male adventurers from the bell have some interesting dialogue, but Carradine has an impotent part and seems to realize it! (He's the designer of the faulty diving bell). There are endless scenes of the lost crew wandering through caverns (filmed in a real cave at least) and the hermit they encounter is one-dimensional. Image quality and sound are poor (the music is out of tune). One surprising aspect of this late 50's film is that the second-in-command male adventurer seems to be a (positive)GAY character! He's philosophical, soft-spoken, slightly effeminent and shows much more commaraderie to his leader (Craig) than toward the two females of the group! Maybe this was unintentional, but it was an interesting feature of an uninteresting film!

Rating:
Summary: Where is Mike Nelson (Sea Hunt) when you need him?
Review: Incredible world, Petrified speech, The is not a whole lot to be said for this 1957 low budget black and white film directed by Roger Corman wan-a-be Jerry Warren. However it is fun to look at the fifty's clothing and makeup. The technical end would give Plan 9 a run for its money. The locations may seem familiar; [Colossal Cave Mountain Park, Vail, Arizona, USA], [Golden Caves, New Mexico, USA], and 26 miles across the sea [Santa Catalina Island, Channel Islands, California, USA.]

The actors look like they are Perry Masson extras. You may recognize Phyllis Coates in the Superman TV Series as Lois Lane (1952-1953).

Craig, Dale, Paul, and Lauri take a dive. Their bell breaks loose and they find them selves to be as low as you can get. Then they see the light. Swimming to the light they find themselves in a cave there they meat Ben Gunn (Treasure Island) oops I mean the old man of the cave.

Will they be given up for dead? Are they doomed to live with this old man for ever? Or will the looming volcano make a Pompeii out of the place?



Rating:
Summary: Wait for 'Journey To The Center Of The Earth' reruns instead
Review: Schlock film producer & director Jerry Warren returns to the big screen with a real stinker - it would be unimaginable to dream of him doing anything less. This one at least had a promising premise and the benefit of John Carradine's presence. However Warren's typically 'no-budget' feature production values doom this to be classified amongst the worst films of all time. Not even good for laughs 'The Incredible Petrified World' is excruciatingly boring and at only 66 minutes it is still criminally overlong.

Seaman/adventurer/scientist/inventor extraordinaire John Carradine sends his diving bell creation to investigate an area of the ocean in the Caribbean with four people: three scientists and a reporter. The bell breaks free from its cables and lands on the surface of the ocean causing much calamity both on the launching ship and inside the bell. The four trapped below decide to leave the bell realizing there is no way for the ship to retrieve them. They discover that the bell has fallen into an opening in a submerged rock cavern; the caverns hold breathable air and there is phosphorescent rock which enables them to see their way around. The group begins exploring hoping to find a path to the earth's surface and come across an ancient looking hermit who explains he was trapped some fourteen years earlier after a shipwreck. He assures them there isn't a way out as he has searched for an exit for several years. While the men return to the bell to gather supplies they can use the old hermit tries to attack one of the women. A nearby volcano erupts and the women escape when the hermit is buried in rubble. Meanwhile Carradine has enlisted the aid of a California marine research company that has a bell identical to his to attempt a rescue. The diving bell occupants notice the two men swimming nearby and bring them aboard; a short while later the women are retrieved.

The title is quite a misrepresentation of what's actually in the film. There isn't anything incredible to be seen and I don't know where the word petrified fits in here. There is no world either, just an endless series of caverns and a lonely old hermit who just happens to speak English - maybe that's where the incredible of the title comes into play? The movie begins with a prologue that resembles an educational film complete with hokey voiceover narration; an octopus is attacked by a shark while the narrator reminds us of the dangers beneath the sea. However the only dangers our four trapped explorers come across are a rather tame looking Gila monster (which is of course culled from stock footage) and the old hermit who attacks one of the women. There are no special effects to speak of here and the few set designs seen here are the worst I've come across since an Ed Wood film. The most laughable of the settings is the diving bells which as other reviewers have pointed out are a bit of an oddity. Though it seems they look only about eight to ten feet wide on the outside inside they are equipped with more square feet than some apartments I've lived in! The controls for the diving bell are about as big as a portable radio and rest precariously on what appears to be a cardboard box - every time one of the characters touch it the controls sway and threaten to fall off the pedestal. The ladder to exit the bell also moves back and forth suggesting the designer neglected to bolt it to the bell's floor. And speaking of exiting when the four of them leave the bell (or reenter) they do so through the top. Amazingly the bell neither loses air pressure and not a drop of water gets inside! Now that is a revolutionary design that deserves to be patented!

The caves are however real with most of the location filming being done at Colossal Caves in Arizona. These scenes though are quite pedestrian, lacking any excitement whatsoever; it isn't necessarily the fault of the director alone as the script is totally void of any real jeopardy or suspense. Besides Carradine the only other two members of the cast who are recognizable include Phyllis Coates, better known as Lois Lane in television's original "Adventures Of Superman" and also Robert Clarke of 'The Hideous Sun Demon' infamy and the unheralded 'The Man From Planet X'. If you'd like to get a glimpse of the director Jerry Warren he is the gentleman seated directly behind Carradine on the airplane flight. Don't bother to waste your time on this if you haven't yet already. Instead do just what I suggested earlier and wait for a rerun of the superior and grandly entertaining 'Journey To The Center Of The Earth' which covers similar territory much, much better - and does have an "incredible petrified world"!

Rating:
Summary: The Incredible Petrified Carradine
Review: This film has one redeeming factor: It is only 66 minutes long. I bought this for two reasons, first because I am a fan of Jerry Warren as a Director (after all he made both "Frankenstein Island" and "The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman", two of the most entertainingly awful movies ever), and second, because I am a John Carradine completist. I have seen many, many Carradine films, and am wondering if any of them are actually not made of cheese.

This is a black and white effort and Carradine looks relatively young here. The movie starts with a lot of stock footage shot in an aquarium. First we see a shark fighting an octopus, which I thought was a very promising opening. The fight went on and on in an orgy of teeth and ink, all the while a very boring narrator tells us about the conquest of the ocean. The plot revolves around sending a diving bell (that is normal size on the outside, but as big as my living room on the inside) to break a depth record. Carradine invents this diving bell that promptly sinks into a pocket of luminous underwater caves with two men and two women on board. The survivors then wander around these well lit, comfortable caves for a while, and a few subplots make themselves known. First there is the tension between the women (it nearly devolves to a catfight.) There is also a caveman who makes their acquaintance, although he has other things on his mind, as it turns out. Then there is the volcano, which, though scientifically extremely implausible, provides them with their breathing oxygen, and just happens to erupt as the rescue diving bell is coming to mercifully conclude the film.

I have seen numerous films by Jerry Warren, and I really think that this may be his worst, although "Frankenstein Island" (with cameo by John Carradine's disembodied head) is also in the running. This one is not as egregiously stupid as "Frankenstein Island", but what it lacks in stupidity it makes up for in boringness. We get to see huge tracts of stock footage of every kind of fish imaginable, scuba divers swimming, and machine tools being used. The script is dreadful, the acting awful (Carradine is easily the best actor here), and the editing and narration are appalling. In other words, it's just another workday for Jerry Warren.

I give this film three stars out of charity. It deserves them largely because any Warren/Carradine effort is Z-Grade cinema in its finest form. If you do not appreciate low budget schlock, this is a movie you should run away from as fast as you can.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible Putrified Cheese!
Review: This movie starts out with a cool battle between a shark and an octopus. It's like watching one of Jaques Cousteau's home movies! This seems to go on forever, until the actual story begins. John Carradine sends a group of four explorers into the depths of the ocean in a goofy looking diving-bell. They somehow end up in an underwater cave system. The biggest hunk of the "film" is taken up by our heroes wandering around through the world's dullest maze. They run into some guy who's been trapped in the caves for fourteen years; and is as crazy as a bedbug! He's also the most interesting thing about the movie! I kept hoping that some rubber spider or giant crab would attack someone, but alas, no such luck! Just lots of walking, talking, and occasional lunacy from the freaky hermit guy. Of course, a way is found to save everyone, but by that time I was numb. I still recommend it though, because I like to torture myself with ultra-schlock...