LAND OF THE LOST is aptly named since its clearly lost its way, along with its script, its characters, and its sense of humor. In fact, we may look back at this film as the moment Will Ferrell finally jumped the shark.

OR it will be another massive hit and we’ll have to endure LAND OF THE LOST 2, 3, AND 4. Please, oh cinema gods, spare us such a fate.

What I find most dispiriting about LAND OF THE LOST is that projects like this ever get greenlit in the first place. When most filmmakers worldwide struggle mightily to scrape together enough funds to get their visions on the screen, Hollywood seems to have no qualms about throwing money at the lamest of scripts, as long as there’s a big name attached and a pre-determined target audience who supposedly can’t resist the whiff of a remake. I know it’s always been thusly. It’s just that LAND OF THE LOST is such a stark example of a Hollywood truism – no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Why anyone would want to remake the original TV show is beyond me. It’s amazingly primitive 1970’s children’s programming, barely a step up from Barney, and not even in the league of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. If the film was going to be a “camp”-fest, I could maybe see it working. But the TV show’s earnest Dad and his two kids are replaced with an idiot scientist (Will Ferrell), a redneck vulgarian (Danny McBride) and a sexy Brit (Anna Friel) and that completely changes the dynamic of the story. Instead of the show’s wide-eyed naivete, the film delivers low-brow potty humor laced with leering vulgarities. And I mean potty humor quite literally. In one scene, Ferrell drenches himself in gallons of dinosaur urine as a way to mask his scent. And in another, he gets swallowed by a dinosaur and comes out the other end, so to speak. So we conveniently get #1 and #2 in the same movie. Congratulations, you just graduated from Toilet Humor 101.

Of course, lots of movies coat themselves with piss and poop jokes, so LAND OF THE LOST does not really distinguish itself from the field in that department. What’s remarkable is how unfunny almost all of it is. A giant mosquito sucks the blood of Ferrell while he blithely plays the banjo, the Brit decides to stop and take a posed photo with an onrushing dinosaur, and McBride eyes some comely “apes” – but that’s about it for humor. So desperate is it for laughs, the film actually throws in a bald-faced insult to the Poles, something to the effect that you may think the Polish are dumb but the T-Rex dinosaur is even dumber. LAND OF THE LOST is not only where Polish jokes must go to die, it’s apparently also the burial ground for all humor as we know it.

Conveniently, LAND OF THE LOST provides a perfect contrast to another “kid’s movie,” last year’s brilliant WALL-E. Both movies make significant use of an incongruous Broadway show tune. Although WALL-E takes place 500 years in the future, a vintage videotape of HELLO DOLLY plays a love song over and over and over and actually becomes central to the movie’s overall theme. In an equally distant time, albeit in the past, LAND OF THE LOST also features a song played over and over, this time from A CHORUS LINE. But unlike in WALL-E, this song is played strictly for laughs, mostly gay jokes actually. In fact, there’s an extended scene where Ferrell strips down to his short shorts and, doing his best Richard Simmons imitation, prances around in a nest of dinosaur eggs to the blaring soundtrack of A CHORUS LINE. And like everything else in this movie, it’s also not funny.

It may not seem fair to compare one of the worst films of 2009 with one of the best of 2008, but it sure is instructive.