Waste 'Land'

Not long into "Land of the Lost," there's a joke about a monkey-man grabbing a woman's breast (the first of many), a sign the movie itself is a little lost.

The movie is meant to be a time-warp yarn about a hybrid dimension where past and present co-exist, fertile ground for an imaginative comedy, tailor-made for out post-modern, mash-up culture.

The gags, though, are about molestation, drug trips, dirty words and dinosaur poop. And urine.

Pixar, it ain't.

How long you last will depend on your taste for Will Ferrell, who stars here as a crackpot scientist who invents a subatomic particle machine (a less refined version than exists in "Angels and Demons") that sucks him into another dimension, along with a fellow scientist (Anna Friel) and a hijacked redneck (Danny McBride).

Ferrell's party, along with a human-ish primate (Jorma Taccone) searching for a way back to his own time, a joint venture with an imprisoned lizard-man alien also trapped in the hybrid dimension.

Not the easiest plot summary in the world, and I give the movie points for its willingness to be trippy (sometimes literally) and absurd.

More of that would have been better. The LOTL set-up vaguely recalls the '80s cult fave "Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension," a movie coated in a heavy layer of laid-back wit.

"Lost," on the other hand, is content to rely on a screaming Ferrell running in terrified serpentine escape patterns in front of a rampaging T-Rex, which doesn't ask very much of the actor, or the writers.

Preteen boys and Ferrell followers will like it fine, and the suddenly hyper-employed McBride milks some laughs from the Camaro cowboy persona he work-shopped on HBO's "Eastbound and Down."

Wider audiences might be harder to impress. Fans of the 1970s show from which the movie is adapted might also want to take a look, since there is not likely to be a sequel.