Customer Reviews

The Incredible Petrified World

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This film has one redeeming factor: It is only 66 minutes long. I bought this for two reasons, first because I am a fan of Jerry Warren as a Director (after all he made both "Frankenstein Island" and "The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman", two of the most entertainingly awful movies ever), and second, because I am a John Carradine completist. I have seen many, many Carradine films, and am wondering if any of them are actually not made of cheese.

This is a black and white effort and Carradine looks relatively young here. The movie starts with a lot of stock footage shot in an aquarium. First we see a shark fighting an octopus, which I thought was a very promising opening. The fight went on and on in an orgy of teeth and ink, all the while a very boring narrator tells us about the conquest of the ocean. The plot revolves around sending a diving bell (that is normal size on the outside, but as big as my living room on the inside) to break a depth record. Carradine invents this diving bell that promptly sinks into a pocket of luminous underwater caves with two men and two women on board. The survivors then wander around these well lit, comfortable caves for a while, and a few subplots make themselves known. First there is the tension between the women (it nearly devolves to a catfight.) There is also a caveman who makes their acquaintance, although he has other things on his mind, as it turns out. Then there is the volcano, which, though scientifically extremely implausible, provides them with their breathing oxygen, and just happens to erupt as the rescue diving bell is coming to mercifully conclude the film.

I have seen numerous films by Jerry Warren, and I really think that this may be his worst, although "Frankenstein Island" (with cameo by John Carradine's disembodied head) is also in the running. This one is not as egregiously stupid as "Frankenstein Island", but what it lacks in stupidity it makes up for in boringness. We get to see huge tracts of stock footage of every kind of fish imaginable, scuba divers swimming, and machine tools being used. The script is dreadful, the acting awful (Carradine is easily the best actor here), and the editing and narration are appalling. In other words, it's just another workday for Jerry Warren.

I give this film three stars out of charity. It deserves them largely because any Warren/Carradine effort is Z-Grade cinema in its finest form. If you do not appreciate low budget schlock, this is a movie you should run away from as fast as you can.

This movie starts out with a cool battle between a shark and an octopus. It's like watching one of Jaques Cousteau's home movies! This seems to go on forever, until the actual story begins. John Carradine sends a group of four explorers into the depths of the ocean in a goofy looking diving-bell. They somehow end up in an underwater cave system. The biggest hunk of the "film" is taken up by our heroes wandering around through the world's dullest maze. They run into some guy who's been trapped in the caves for fourteen years; and is as crazy as a bedbug! He's also the most interesting thing about the movie! I kept hoping that some rubber spider or giant crab would attack someone, but alas, no such luck! Just lots of walking, talking, and occasional lunacy from the freaky hermit guy. Of course, a way is found to save everyone, but by that time I was numb. I still recommend it though, because I like to torture myself with ultra-schlock...

Schlock film producer & director Jerry Warren returns to the big screen with a real stinker - it would be unimaginable to dream of him doing anything less. This one at least had a promising premise and the benefit of John Carradine's presence. However Warren's typically 'no-budget' feature production values doom this to be classified amongst the worst films of all time. Not even good for laughs 'The Incredible Petrified World' is excruciatingly boring and at only 66 minutes it is still criminally overlong.

Seaman/adventurer/scientist/inventor extraordinaire John Carradine sends his diving bell creation to investigate an area of the ocean in the Caribbean with four people: three scientists and a reporter. The bell breaks free from its cables and lands on the surface of the ocean causing much calamity both on the launching ship and inside the bell. The four trapped below decide to leave the bell realizing there is no way for the ship to retrieve them. They discover that the bell has fallen into an opening in a submerged rock cavern; the caverns hold breathable air and there is phosphorescent rock which enables them to see their way around. The group begins exploring hoping to find a path to the earth's surface and come across an ancient looking hermit who explains he was trapped some fourteen years earlier after a shipwreck. He assures them there isn't a way out as he has searched for an exit for several years. While the men return to the bell to gather supplies they can use the old hermit tries to attack one of the women. A nearby volcano erupts and the women escape when the hermit is buried in rubble. Meanwhile Carradine has enlisted the aid of a California marine research company that has a bell identical to his to attempt a rescue. The diving bell occupants notice the two men swimming nearby and bring them aboard; a short while later the women are retrieved.

The title is quite a misrepresentation of what's actually in the film. There isn't anything incredible to be seen and I don't know where the word petrified fits in here. There is no world either, just an endless series of caverns and a lonely old hermit who just happens to speak English - maybe that's where the incredible of the title comes into play? The movie begins with a prologue that resembles an educational film complete with hokey voiceover narration; an octopus is attacked by a shark while the narrator reminds us of the dangers beneath the sea. However the only dangers our four trapped explorers come across are a rather tame looking Gila monster (which is of course culled from stock footage) and the old hermit who attacks one of the women. There are no special effects to speak of here and the few set designs seen here are the worst I've come across since an Ed Wood film. The most laughable of the settings is the diving bells which as other reviewers have pointed out are a bit of an oddity. Though it seems they look only about eight to ten feet wide on the outside inside they are equipped with more square feet than some apartments I've lived in! The controls for the diving bell are about as big as a portable radio and rest precariously on what appears to be a cardboard box - every time one of the characters touch it the controls sway and threaten to fall off the pedestal. The ladder to exit the bell also moves back and forth suggesting the designer neglected to bolt it to the bell's floor. And speaking of exiting when the four of them leave the bell (or reenter) they do so through the top. Amazingly the bell neither loses air pressure and not a drop of water gets inside! Now that is a revolutionary design that deserves to be patented!

The caves are however real with most of the location filming being done at Colossal Caves in Arizona. These scenes though are quite pedestrian, lacking any excitement whatsoever; it isn't necessarily the fault of the director alone as the script is totally void of any real jeopardy or suspense. Besides Carradine the only other two members of the cast who are recognizable include Phyllis Coates, better known as Lois Lane in television's original "Adventures Of Superman" and also Robert Clarke of 'The Hideous Sun Demon' infamy and the unheralded 'The Man From Planet X'. If you'd like to get a glimpse of the director Jerry Warren he is the gentleman seated directly behind Carradine on the airplane flight. Don't bother to waste your time on this if you haven't yet already. Instead do just what I suggested earlier and wait for a rerun of the superior and grandly entertaining 'Journey To The Center Of The Earth' which covers similar territory much, much better - and does have an "incredible petrified world"!

I was excited about this movie because it centered around a Diving Bell. The Diving Bell in question is an OK design, but curiously is larger on the inside than on the outside! The plot of a lost diving bell and its survivors wandering around in a submarine series of air-pocketed caves could have been a true adventure. Unfortunately, the budget did not allow for any quality special effects or action. The divers exit and enter the bell without an airlock, yet the bell remains water free! Phyliss Coates is the crabbiest female character since Baby Jane Hudson! The male adventurers from the bell have some interesting dialogue, but Carradine has an impotent part and seems to realize it! (He's the designer of the faulty diving bell). There are endless scenes of the lost crew wandering through caverns (filmed in a real cave at least) and the hermit they encounter is one-dimensional. Image quality and sound are poor (the music is out of tune).

You have to love these 1950s sci-fi films that start out sounding like a high school science film. As The Incredible Petrified World (the brainchild of Jerry Warren, who is best known for chopping up the films of others) opens, we are informed that there is apparently some sort of animal life living in the world's oceans - fascinating. After some allusions to the unnamed coelacanth and some completely irrelevant drivel about a large living "shelf" that seems to rise and fall with the sun, we're finally introduced to the actual film. John Carradine is Professor Millard Wyman, and he's ready to take his newly designed diving bell for its maiden voyage beneath the seas. Well, actually, he sends three of his students and a really obnoxious, hateful female reporter on the mission. About 1700 feet down, something goes wrong, the cables snap, and our intrepid foursome of naval explorers become human sardines in a can. To their surprise, they see light outside and, figuring they must somehow be on a shelf rather than on the bottom of the ocean, they don their scuba gear and make a swim for it. Lo and behold, they pop up in some kind of underground chamber where the breathing's fine but the chances of finding a way to the surface are less than encouraging. They would have been even more discouraged had they known that Professor Millard and the ship's captain had ignored the radar guy's reports of their movement under water and gone on home after five hours of waiting for their dead bodies to wash up.

Apparently, this huge underground chamber is the "incredible petrified world" we're supposed to get all excited about, but watching four people explore a cavern is not my idea of great excitement. Things do get a little more interesting, though, when they meet up with another human being down there. The guy looks like he has been stuck down there 14 years, which is exactly what he claims. Will our brave heroes ever find a way back? Will anyone ever give the annoying reporter the hard smack she is just begging for with all of her moaning and groaning? Will the caveman dude get lucky with one of the girls? These questions and more are all answered in the running time of 66 minutes.

I really don't know why, but I sort of liked this movie. Yeah, it's boring - I mean, the most exciting thing you see are the guys swimming back and forth from the diving bell with supplies for their new life in the underground cavern - and I didn't like any of the characters, but that John Carradine just fascinates me. I don't think anyone acts as strenuously as Carradine, yet all that effort never seems to translate into a good performance. And it's fun to pretend that human beings wouldn't pop from the deep sea pressure alone and would never even have to worry about getting a case of the bends.

This movie had to be drive-in theater fodder in the 1950s. I am guessing that it would likely be the third feature in a triple feature, because when I was a child in the 1960s we rarely remained for the final feature, which was frequently low budget garbage.

Before we get to the good stuff, we get the best stuff in the film. There are various scenes of real fish, sharks and an octopus, pigging swimming around in the water and periodically attacking each other. You would think these scenes were filmed in the ocean, but there is one place where you can see a reflection of windows with people in them and you realize that most or all of the scenes may have been filmed in an aquarium.

John Carradine is Professor Millard Wyman. Professor Wyman has developed a diving bell (golly gee whiz!) for exploring the ocean's bottom. The diving bell might be about 8 feet in diameter from the outside. From the inside it looks like it might be about twice that or more. The four intrepid explorers dress in their nice clothes to go into the depths of the ocean, where the diving bell breaks loose from its cable and plummets to the ocean floor. Oh my.

Our intrepid explorers fortunately have scuba gear and they exit the diving bell, which is brightened to hide the entry and exit (I suspect either special effects or they dove behind a fake bell). The overwhelming pressure of the depths does not crush the explorers! The movie does not explain why the explorers are not crushed (I guess that is what makes this a science fiction movie).

Instead of being close to the surface, which is what the explorers think, they are near a series of underwater caves (which are actually in Arizona). The explorers discover a hermit who survived a shipwreck 14 years earlier and apparently has designs on one of the women. Things are looking grim for the woman when a fortunate volcano eruption puts a damper on things (ever notice how that happens in science fiction movies?).

I will leave you to discover how our intrepid explorers encounter the end of this exciting thriller (more than a little tongue-in-cheek here people).

While this movie is quite low budget, there are some interesting talents in here. Phyllis Coates was one of the earliest Lois Lane's on television. I seemed to recognize Lloyd Nelson's name, and then discovered that he was in at least ten Clint Eastwood movies along with a number of other well known movies (e.g., "Pretty Woman"). Of course, John Carradine is credited with over 200 hundred screen appearances and is the father of David, Robert and Keith Carradine.

This black & white movie is not all that bad, but it is also not very good. There are a lot of stock shots and cheesy sets with all sorts of implausible transitions that make anyone with a high school science education groan. On the other hand, it is fun to dissect the movie and make fun of it in a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" sort of way. Perhaps you will get a few moments of enjoyment from this dinosaur of 1957 that promises petrified, and only delivers in the production of the movie.

If you enjoy old movies and adventure, this is a likely choice for entertainment. The star performer is well known and as always, performs well. Lots of adventure with a twist on Robinson Crusoe's man, Friday. Well... that's who he reminds me of.

This is a very bad movie. With the exception of a wooden Carradine, the acting is perfectly awful. An explorer inventor creates a diving bell that gets lost. All survive and find an underwater cave, where there is an old man living mysteriously. If that is not preposterous enough, there is a volcano that becomes active, the characters find love and friendship, and then they are rescued. Sorry for playing the spoiler, but that is all you need to know.

Not recommended. I did laugh a bit at the stupidity of it and the clunkiness, but it was best on while I was cleaning the house.

in the first five minutes you watch the deep ocean, strange creatures and a dramatic voice talking about the life in the sea, you expect a movie about some sea monsters but this is only a very slow motion film about an expedition of four persons under water and nothing happens...no monsters, no mystery, no nothing. Just a cave where they were trapped in, and a strange guy with a fake beard and no suspense at all. The two guys should show some worry about the situation but it looks like they are in a picnic inside a touristic cave.

The Incredible Petrified World (1957) Producer Jerry Warren (Frankenstein Island) gives the world another of his sometimes pretty peculiar sci-fi outings, but this one actually turns out pretty good. After some running time-padding stock footage and narration to get going, we meet three scientist types played by nobody famous talking about their new diving bell invention. Then one mentions another scientist who has also invented a new super diving bell, and we quickly turn our attention to him, since he's played by John Carradine! That's more like it! John sends four younger types (including perennial Warren star Robert Clarke and one of TV's Lois Lanes-Phyllis Coates) down to plumb the depths of the ocean further than anyone has gone before. But a mishap snaps the submersible's cable and sends the diving bell plummeting into waters so deep it can't even be detected anymore! Then imagine the crew's surprise when they find themselves not at the bottom of the ocean, but in an even deeper cavern that is pretty well lit and awfully dry considering it opens into the sea... While the quartet down below slowly makes their way up, even running into a crazy old guy who would have probably been played by Carradine if this had been a bigger budgeted version, Carradine stays in the lead and goes about trying to borrow the other guys' diving bell for a rescue attempt. I had a good time with this movie, which ran 62 minutes in the print I watched. Not a whole lot happens, true, but there are recognizable actors (at least to film and TV buffs) and despite a slow pace enough goes on across the hour to make this worth a watch for 50's science fiction fanatics. If you're so inclined, dive in and give this one a try!