Time flies when it's a bad movie, guess what... it's still a bad movie! Tushka Bergen would be the worst actor I have ever seen, she is so wooded and very forgettable. I hate to even give this movie a single star but that is for Brian Brown who is an Aussie icon. I read on a site that Ms Bergen no longer is acting and this is a good thing - motherhood is for her!If you really want to see 'journey to the center of the earth' just watch the version done in 2008 with Academy Award-winning visual effects artist Eric Brevig. His feature directorial debut with this adaptation of the classic Jules Verne fantasy starring Brendan Fraser. The acting is more professional with better production values too!

For some reason I thought I was renting (from the machine at Safeway) the LATEST version of this film with Brendon Frazier as they usually have new releases there. How stupid of me. It turned out to be the 1999 version with Treat Williams. Only a few minutes into it I realized it was a made for TV by Lifetime. The producers had a lot of nerve coming up with this comic book adaptation of such a great novel. Poor Jules Verne. It was not too bad until they reach New Zealand and enter the cave leading to what they call the center of the earth that turned out to be a movie set with blue painted trees and studio made mache rocks. They all act as if they're at Disneyland on an underground ride. And when they meet the creatures who speak English it's beyond belief. Obviously there was a ballet school somewhere behind those rocks, even with a choreographer, as a full corps of ballet girls were dancing with ballet steps mixed with disco dancing. Totally ridiculous. The husband of the Carnegie heiress who they were looking for and found, speaks with an Australian accent and doesn't give a damn after finding out that Treat Williams had screwed his wife someplace behind a rock, but more unbelievable is that Treat would fall in love with her anyway as she's not at all attractive besides being one of the worst actors I've ever seen. Where did they find her? In a High School play? Then, of course, there's an evil Queen but I fast forwarded over most of that scene so don't know what she was up to. Should I care? The only thing worth looking at is Treat Williams who seems to have kept his youth remarkably. Now I can't wait to see the Brendon Frazier one that's still playing in the theaters in 3D. I should have known better.

This is a grab bag of elements of the Verne story filled out with various Rice Burroughs staples: fights, captures and escapes surrounding a patriarchal tribe whose men dress caveman-style and whose flawlessly-complexioned women wear little leather skirts and bikini tops; Amazon warriors; humanoid lizards; and a seasoning of dinosaurs. The whole thing is given a weird gloss by filtering out greens - presumably a cheap way to get the blue-foliage jungles - so the whole thing is in a blue/brown/red palette. I sort of enjoyed it; but being in hospital the day after an appendix operation, I guess I wasn't in a critically demanding mood.

But I have to say, it takes a set of balls the size of ostrich eggs to make a movie and put a title on it that belongs to an entirely different story. Jules Verne is spinning in his grave on this one, believe me--this isn't even vaguely in line with the book. None of the characters even have the same name, fer crying' out loud! There's tribes of lizard men and humans living down there, AND THE HUMANS SPEAK English!! I did find the movie entertaining however, my only real issue with it is blatantly stealing the name of one of the greatest science fiction fantasies ever written in history and dropping it on another story in the blatant interest of tricking people to come in and think that they're about to witness the real thing. For God's sake, they even credit Jules Verne!!! For what, writing the title? On the up side, the women are all beautiful, but on the other hand, the men don't look like any of them, at least the subterranean dwellers, have bathed in years. What IS that stuff on them, anyway, if not dirt.I hear that they're remaking Plan 9 From Outer Space next year, and they're going to call it Gone With the Wind.