Adam Hibberd
A fair few people of my age and older will remember the American actor Doug McClure and his popularity in the UK as the personification of the brave, handsome and daring adventurer into distant lands inhabited by dinosaurs and other strange creatures, in a fairly long list of British action adventure films made largely in the ’70s.
What can I say? I remember them with a great deal of fondness, but I remind you at the time I was a young and impressionable child with a wild imagination and these films were just up my street. Compared to today the special effects were distinctly low-key and primitive, but that left a lot to the imagination and I was always willing to forgive their crudeness and fill in the deficiencies with creations of my own mind. A man in a monster suit, for instance, was never, ever a man in a monster suit but a monster which happened to look like a man in a monster suit.
The film I show you below, I watched at the ABC cinema on Hertford Street, Coventry, with my good friend Ravinder Bains. I’ve mentioned Ravinder before he was well ahead of me in intelligence at this age and he immediately saw through to the tragic ridiculousness of this film and came out of the cinema trying desperately to stop himself laughing – for me – bless him – for I had taken the film so seriously I was rather indignant at his mocking attitude.
My father who had reluctantly taken us and had patiently watched it as well, actually sided with Ravinder on this and of course looking back at this film with the benefit of hindsight; this truly was a pretty crap, risible, attempt at an action-adventure movie.
Never mind, I still love it for heaven’s sake!
