Revamped 'Land of the Lost' not fit for kids - or adults acting like them

I'd say "Land of the Lost" is a sketchy, embarrassingly disjointed, monster-packed movie that sniggling junior high students would make, but that would be insulting to sniggling junior high students.

This movie assumes that if a guy cupping Anna Friel's breast is funny once, it'll be a riot if repeated three more times.

Even the hefty comic presence of Will Ferrell fails to raise the bar on Brad Silberling's reportedly $100 million-plus special-effects-coagulated kids' adventure, one in which three adult humans enter into a sideways dimension without ever leaving their one-dimensional characters behind.

Sid and Marty Krofft's old children's television series "Land of the Lost" (1973 to 1977) concerned a forest ranger named Rick Marshall and his two children who become sucked into a time vortex during a family rafting trip. They wound up in a strange world populated by dinosaurs and other fakey creatures that made the Muppets look frighteningly real by comparison.

Four years ago, Universal Pictures acquired the screen rights to "Land of the Lost" to create a vehicle for Ferrell and director Adam Kay, who last worked with the former "SNL" star on the funny "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy."

Since then, Silberling, the director of "Moonlight Mile," "City of Angels" and "Casper," replaced Kay, and he seems utterly at a loss of how to handle this cheesy, shallow material, scripted by "Saturday Night Live" writer Dennis McNicholas and TV comedy show writer Chris Henchy.

Here, Marshall's two children have been dumped and the forest ranger has become a scientist/explorer with the maturity of a child.

"Land of the Lost" opens with Marshall (Ferrell) being grilled by TV personality Matt Lauer over his discredited theories of time warps and inter-dimensional travel. The dejected, stress-eating Marshall gains one fan of his work - Holly Cantrell (Friel), a fellow academic pushed out by the establishment for her support of Marshall's theories.

She rallies the overeating scientist (there's a positive role model!) to buck up and continue his work with tachyons, particles that move so fast they go back in time, as I would have liked to do to recoup this 93 minutes of my life.

Marshall and Holly test their tachyon machine - which inexplicably plays the Broadway soundtrack to "A Chorus Line" ad infinitum - inside a cave along with a redneck tour guide named Will (Danny McBride). All three become magically teleported to a sandy Salvador Dali-land where airplanes and Viking ships dot the landscape along with vintage cars, the Sphinx and a drive-in movie theater.

The trio gains a hairy mascot, a missing link right out of the opening sequence to "2001: A Space Odyssey." They call him Chaka (an amusing Jorma Taccone), who's so adorable, nobody gets upset by his fascination with Holly's chest.

Silberling gives Ferrell and McBride license to mug, and they do it so shamelessly that it becomes stale and boring. On the plus side, the movie includes tyrannosaurus rex assaults, attacks by alien bugmen called the Sleestak, and lots of yechy, disgusting gloppy stuff, supposedly just for the kiddies.

But if "Land of the Lost" is intended for children, why is it rated PG-13? And why did it throw away the two main children's characters from the original TV series? And what's with the fascination over Friel's bust? Did anyone even consider the target audience for this movie?

"Land of the Lost" has such a thrown-together feel that we sometimes forget the plot, which centers around a seemingly wise old alien named Enik (John Boylan) who enlists Marshall's help to stop the villainous Zarn ("Star Trek" star Leonard Nimoy) from taking over the universe.

One can only hope that "Land of the Lost" won't ding Lauer's standing as a serious television journalist. Even after he attacks a guest author.

"Land of the Lost"

Rating: 1½ stars

Starring: Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, Danny McBride, Leonard Nimoy

Directed by: Brad Silberling

Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 (language, sexual situations, drug references). 93 minutes.