Dreadfully Boring

Brilliant and touching

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This is a great movie. It is very scary. It has a great story line. It also has great acting. It is one of the best movies I have seen. It is scarier then A Nightmare on elm street.

Fellow film-buff's, let me provide you with a sampling of some of the dialog you can expect to hear, just to give you an idea of what your delving into. "How long's he been out of oxygen? - Only a few minutes. - I'll get him some coffee."Veteran hack film-maker Jerry Warren brings us.......The Incredible Petrified World.......though don't be fooled by the title, because there's absolutely NOTHING "incredible" about it, not even close. Never does it build up (let alone sustain) any real action, suspense, excitement or even a modicum of interest - just pure boredom all the way through. The trials and tribulations one would expect to experience when trapped inside a cavernous underwater cave, lifelessly limps to the big screen! With all the excitement of (insert your phrase here).Jerry-boy must have cranked this one out in a week or less, because it looks and sounds painfully cheap and it's so antiquated it creaks, but above all else, is it's over-powering boredom, like few other movies can do. Which is entirely consistent with the two other "Jerry Flicks" I've seen over the years (The Wild, Wild World of Bat-Woman and Frankenstein Island). And with "The Incredible Petrified World" once again I find myself watching (for the LAST time) yet another pale and lifeless Jerry Warren.......action movie - fasten your seat-belt's everyone, the excitement will be historically epic.Here's the general set of events: We start with an angry sea for the opening titles, followed by 4 minutes of underwater photography - fish and octopus's' mostly, which turns out to be part of a lecture on marine biology and diving bells, wasting no time were then off to a ship that has a diving bell and down they ( 2 guys 2 gals) go, the cable breaks, their sh** out of luck, or so they think, dawning SCUBA-gear they escape the bell and swim into a cave that somehow is filled with air instead of water, it's here where the movie is at its most boring and pointless, just 4 people farting around in a cave for the last 35 to 40 minutes of the movie. Expect to suffer through several long and dull scenes of people constantly talking about the lamest things, these horrendously tedious scenes equal up to absolutely nothing, however, they just might lull you to sleep - pity their audience. At the half-way point, this movie features one of the lamest cave-dwelling villains you'll ever see, complete with a flagrantly fake-looking beard, his very existence there is completely ludicrous. Who claim's he got there "the same way you did" - not likely, for such a misplaced simpleton. After a cave-in or two all 4 luckily escape the cave and scuba to another diving bell (John Caradine and his top-side team were looking for them) and live happily ever after. Pure dreck - at least this movie is fairly short, barely an hour. One gets the notion that they needed: 1 - a better director, 2 - a completely different cast, 3 - at least twice the budget, THEN this limp, so-called adventure film might have been something worth watching. My DVD copy of The Incredible Petrified World is part of a cheap collection called "The Best of the Worst". What does that tell you. The sound is bassy and muffled and the picture was equally hideous, with an overall very poorly preserved gray-scale and there's lots of scratches and speckling, plus the picture and sound "jumps" at least twice a minute. This cheap Jerry-Flick is simply a thing of pure wretchedness.Ultimately just a dismal, dismal, dismal excuse of an adventure film, by one of cinema's all-time least talented directors, Jerry Warren. *People stay away from this man's movies* Re-organizing your sock draw will provide you with more entertainment. If you're ever unfortunate enough to encounter this movie, alcohol would certainly improve the situation or at least help you get through it. I bet watching a static-filled, 12th generation VHS copy, dubbed in Portuguese, episode of My Little Pony would probably be less painful and less boring. Not that I've ever watched such a thing. No Bronie's here, thank you very much.

To be kind, I would give writer John Steiner and director Jerry Warren credit for playing this very "straight." Considering that it was made in the 1950's, this movie was tailor made for the use of undersea monsters and all sorts of creepy life forms. There really weren't any - aside from the man living in the underground caves, who wasn't a monster but was just an unfortunate soul who got trapped there 14 years earlier. So, whatever else you might say about this, it doesn't fall into the "hokey" category that so many B-grade (or worse) 50's films fall into. I can respect the effort to take the story seriously. It revolves around 4 people who, because of a diving bell accident, become trapped in dry caverns deep under the ocean with no apparent way of escape. But, having watched it, as much as I give credit to the effort to take this seriously, maybe a little bit of "hoke" would have helped!The end result was that nothing - absolutely nothing - especially interesting happened in this until the last 5 minutes or so. Otherwise, you get some dreary narration to open, some discussion of the diving bell experiment, a depiction of the accident, and then a lot of shots of people wandering through caves and periodically going back into the water. (YAWN!!!!) It really hardly seemed worth the effort. The only member of the cast who I recognized was John Carradine. Otherwise you had a cast made up either of unknowns who barely acted, or of those (like Robert Clarke or Phyllis Coates) who made acting careers out of guest shots on various TV shows but never really reached any heights. I honestly wouldn't recommend wasting your time with this. It gets a couple of points for the effort to take the story seriously, but in return it loses a lot of points for being just so plain dull! (3/10)

A (very ) low budget flick -Ed Wood's movies are epics compared with it- where the special effects crew apparently worked with stuff bought in a dime store,this is definitely proof positive that this kind of attempt needs a lot of money.It sometimes looks like a poor man's "Journey to the center of the Earth" (1959)which was implausible too but which was saved by the splendor of the settings ,Bernard Herrmann's score and a good cast (yes!).The movie begins with a "cultural " prologue but do not expect Cousteau's "Le Monde du Silence" .It is not long before the "revolutionary" bathyscaphe runs into difficulties and sinks without a trace. "It 's a major loss for science!" the scientist sighs (the passengers,not the machine).Meanwhile,the courageous team (2 men,2 women: to enliven things a bit ,one of the ladies is jealous and nasty)is rambling through subterranean caves where they meet some kind of Robinson Crusoé - a hilarious carnival look-.There's a volcano 2 miles away,thank you Jules Verne.Like this? try this...."War Gods of the Deep" Jacques Tourneur (1965)