The Incredible Petrified World (1957) - A movie as petrified as the title
Posted by Donna Dolezal Zelzer on May 6th, 2006
This is one of the most boring movies I’ve ever seen. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love old SF B movies, but this one is so bad, it’s hard to even find things to laugh at.
Spoiler warning: I give away bits of the plot.
The movie starts with the title credits shown over a stormy sea. This is promising, as the story is about a diving bell that goes missing. Could it perhaps be floundering in this storm?.
No such luck. The credits end, and instead of seeing the diving bell tossing and rolling and people screaming and so on and so forth, the next bit is a documentary about the mysteries of the sea. This drones on for a while with stock footage and a really bad voice-over. It finally ends and we discover that the movie characters are also watching the documentary! This leads into a lot of talk about diving bells and experiments and so on.
Eventually we get to a ship where one of two identical experimental diving bells is going down for the first time. The cables somehow break and the bell sinks with all hands aboard (two women and two men). It lands on some kind of underwater shelf, so the explorers put on scuba gear, get out and swim. And swim. And swim. And swim No attack by a giant octopus. No feet caught in giant clam shells. No sharks. No ancient monsters of the deep. Just lots of stock footage of swimming and swimming and swimming.
They finally reach some mysterious underwater caves (the “petrified world” of the title) and now we get to see them walk and walk and walk. They encounter some kind of large lizard - but wait! It’s actually stock footage and it never attacks them - they all just look scared and walk past (As one reviewer said, “It’s not even in the same movie.”)
Various other boring things happen, including meeting a hermit with a false beard who’s been in the caves for years, and discovering there’s no way out. They decide they have to make the best of it, so the two men put their scuba suits back on and make several trips back to the diving bell for supplies.
Meanwhile, back on the surface, everyone thinks the diving bell crew is dead (although there are clues they have survived.) At any rate, after a long and boring explanation of why the cables snapped on the first bell, it’s decided to put the second bell down at the same place where the first one disappeared.
Coincidentally, the second bell reaches the first one just as the two men from the cave are returning for one last trip. The men are seen and rescued. This is really lucky for one of them, as he ran out of air just before that. Fortunately, the people in the second bell have coffee; he drinks that and is saved from oxygen deprivation. Then someone goes back and gets the women (the hermit has been killed by a volcano that conveniently erupted just when he started to cause problems) and everyone lives happily every after.
Read about this movie in the Internet Movie Database
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