Tell me this guy on the left isn't Brent Spiner's double! This is one of those really quirky 50’s films that stands out as bad, but kind of fun to watch for all the wrong reasons. First it has Beaver and Wally’s dad in it, Hugh Beaumont. There’s that. There’s also some really bad archeology going on. There’s that. There’s underground dwellers who are really sensitive to light and they also have a slave race of mole people to serve them. And the ending is crap, and oh yeah, there’s a guy who looks like commander Data from the Star Trek series.
But my favorite thing about this film is how seriously it tries to take itself. From the opening, we see a man who introduces himself as a professor from some university in California, blah blah blah who explains previous theories of what is inside our planet. Here I’d like to explain about logical appeals. If you want to persuade someone of something, you need to make an appeal to either their logic, their trust in authorities, or their emotions.
By having a professor introduce the film, it gives it a sense of reality, even probability. It appeals to our sense of trust in authority. That’s ETHOS in a nutshell. Aligning this make believe movie with academic study gives it an heir of authenticity. The professor even calls it a Fable with a moral at the end, but I didn’t want to even go there with this cheesy flick. I just enjoyed watching it because, I don’t know, it reminded me of the Planet of the Apes mole people, I guess. It IS worth a watch just for the fun of it.
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