"Terrifying
monsters from a lost age!", promises the movie's ads from its original
release in
1959. One can only assume they refer to
John Agar,
B-movie veteran and star of this immensely silly but moderately entertaining
sci-fi/horror
flick of
yesteryear.
Agar, as
archaeologist Dr. Roger Bentley and Hugh Beaumont (that's right,
Ward from
Leave It To Beaver) as Dr. Jud Bellamin drag Etienne LaFarge into what is apparently one of the world's many
randomly positioned hidden
underground civilizations, where they come upon a race of
albinos who have enslaved horrible
mole people. Apparently these
mole people are only
tangentially related to the
story and, to the best of my
understanding, reside in shallow
pits of
gravel in otherwise sturdy terrain and feed upon non-albino
passers-by. Just like real
albinos, the people of this race of
english-speaking subterranean
Brits are horribly
afraid of any sort of
light, and
burn instantly to their off-screen deaths whenever they come into contact with natural
sunlight. They are ruled by a king sporting a giant
hood ornament for a hat, who is advised, of course, by
Alfred the Butler (
Alan Napier).
The esteemed Doctor Roger Bentley apparently then falls in
love with one of the
pale people, and after a bit of
philosophical masturbation on the part of Bentley they decide to incite a mole-person
riot, guided of course by
rational thinking and the
complex and deeply
philosophical notion that
slavery is bad. The resulting
chaos destroys the
ancient underground
civilization, and somewhere along the line Bentley's
love interest, Adad, gets
squished by a falling pillar.
The end.
I have also come across the
information that "LaFarge" would translate into french as "the load". This would explain everyone on
MST3k referring to LaFarge mockingly as a
deadweight through the course of the
flick (that is, up until he becomes a literal
deadweight).
Also not to be confused with
the molé people.