I don’t wanna eat dinosaur!
Main Cast: Greg Evigan, Deedee Pfeiffer
Directors: David Jones and Scott Wheeler
So I sat down today to a viewing of the 2008 movie JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH … no, not the one where a scientist, his nephew and their mountain guide go in search of a lost brother. That was the theatrical release with Brendan Fraser and Josh Hutcherson. I meant the other 2008 JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. No, not the one set in the 1870s where Martha Dennison hires anthropologist/adventurer Jonathan Brock to track down her husband Edward. That’s the TV movie starring Ricky Schroder and Victoria Pratt. I mean the 2008 straight-to-video movie produced by The Asylum and starring Greg Evigan and Deedee Pfeiffer! You know, the one where the army guy sends a team across the world to Germany in a teleporter only to have them wind up 600 kilometers inside the earth and he has to get the team leader’s sister Emily to let him use her breakthrough drilling machine to go down and get her and the team back. Yeah, that’s the one. You’ve seen it, right? Of course you have.
Now, I’ve never read the Jules Verne book and most likely never will, so I can’t say for sure which of those movies sticks closest to the original story, but I have a feeling it isn’t this one. This one was written by Steve Bevilacqua and directed by David Jones and Scott Wheeler and is about as bland as bland can be.
The acting screams Syfy original movie—which most Asylum movies were. Mockbusters they were called, cheap look-alike movies meant to capitalize on recent blockbuster theatrical releases, and they are AWESOME in that way terrible movies are awesome. These movies usually get stars you recognize but couldn’t name if you had to. The effects always border on insulting, and the stories are made as simple to understand as possible. Not a lot of subplots or character development in an Asylum movie.
In JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, we have two main plots running concurrently. In the center of the earth, in a land where the sunshine is never explained and dinosaurs roam but are rarely seen and aren’t much of a threat to our all-female team of soldiers, Kristen and her team (Case, Gretchen, and Jansen) are constantly on the move with no real destination in mind. One of them claimed she saw what might be a way out in the distance, but it’s never explained what this exit might be or where it might lead since Gretchen, the resident scientist, figures out how far under the surface of the earth they are. In the other storyline, ex-husband and wife Joseph Harnet and Emily Radford are on board the DD, the Deep Digger, heading down and down and down and down and down into the earth. Up until the last maybe 10 minutes of the movie, Evigan and Pfeiffer really don’t do a whole lot but sit in their chairs with their goofy headsets and argue over their failed marriage in a way that makes it obvious they’re getting back together at the end of the movie.
The team underground run afoul of some giant spiders once, but they kill and eat a dinosaur, they find fresh running water, and generally don’t appear to be in much danger at all—except for the giant spiders, of course.
For the most part, I really love Asylum movies. With titles like TRANSMORPHERS, SNAKES ON A TRAIN, THE DA VINCI TREASURE, and INDEPENDENTS’ DAY—not to mention the entire SHARKNADO series, Asylum movies are always entertaining no matter how brainless they feel.
This one is no different. I mean there wasn’t a lot that happened, and they really had to stretch for any sort of tension in most of the scenes, but I was never bored and I didn’t come across any character I outright hated and wanted to see die. Asylum movies are like the kiddie coasters at amusement parks. They go up and down, they’re kinda fast without being dangerous. They give a momentary thrill but you’re never really scared. They get the job done, barely. So far I haven’t seen one so bad it puts me off Asylum movies, because I go into each other knowing almost exactly what I’m gonna get. JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH delivered just what I expected it would, which wasn’t a whole lot, and I wasn’t disappointed at what I got.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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