THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977)

 Happily, in contrast to AT THE EARTH'S CORE, THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT was a return to form, in part because the production returned to the Canary Islands, giving the film the same expansiveness seen in LAND THAT TIME FORGOT.  Connor and his collaborators seem to ratchet up the excitement, so that almost every single frame suggests some incipient danger, and the heady activity of the film anticipates a similar approach in Steven Spielberg's famed love letter to adventure-flicks three years later.  From ERB's PEOPLE Connor takes two major elements: the idea of a heroic character sent to find the missing hero from the first book, and a character named "Ajor."  In the book Tom Billings finds his way to Caprona looking for Bowen Tyler, and spends the whole novel fighting off cavemen and dinosaurs while slowly falling in love with cute cavegirl Ajor.  In a development rare in Burroughs, Billings also has to fight his own prejudice, as he resists falling in love with a woman he initially regards as a "squaw."

In Connor's PEOPLE, the hero's name is changed to "Ben McBride" (Patrick Wayne), though he still comes to Caprona looking for his lost friend Bowen Tyler.  He comes with other allies in tow, one of whom is spunky photographer Charly (Sarah Douglas).  The tension between Ben and Charly is clearly a substitute for romantic interest, though again, there's not much time alloted for amour.  Charly is fairly liberated for her time-- more so than most if not all Burroughs heroines-- and is frequently shown as having a positive impact on the group's mission, particularly when she suggests using a stegosaurus to help them move their crashed plane.

The group shortly comes across Ajor (Dana Gillespie), a cavegirl who speaks English. Though the last scenes of LAND merely show Tyler and his girlfriend Lisa surviving the harsh world of Caprona, at some point Tyler attempted to reach out to the cavepeople and to lead them toward greater civilization.  Ajor is apparently just one of many tribal types who received Tyler's teachings, though it's slightly suggested that she may be in love with him.  Ajor relates that another advanced tribe-- the "Nagas," possibly named after the snake-demons of Hindu lore-- resented Tyler's influence and abducted him.  She proves more than willing to lead the expedition to "the Mountain of Skulls" to rescue her mentor.

As an interesting side-point, the Nagas-- though they are not hybrids-- function in approximately the same manner as the Weiroos in the third Caprona book, OUT OF TIME'S ABYSS, which focuses on a third hero and only involves the characters of Billings and Tyler very incidentally.  The Weiroos even have a "city of skulls" to indicate that they worship death and murder, and the "Mountain of Skulls" suggests the same sort of corrupt death-worship in Connor's film.  The only downside to these colorfu villains is that for no good reason many of the Nagas dress up in anachronistic samurai armor. Logically such technology should have no place in Caprona, even if one supposed that the world's freaky evolution somehow jumped one tribe up to the level of 12th-century Japan.

The action is fast and furious, even if the climax depends a little too much on again having the local volcano destroy hunks of real estate.  Curiously, Tyler attributes intelligence to the volcano, which is certainly not one of Burroughs' ideas.  Equally curiously, Tyler does not survive the mission.  Perhaps, since his backstory establishes that his wife from the first film is already dead, the scripters thought it would prove poetic for him to perish in the same world.  But all of the other principals-- Ben, Charly, and Ajor-- survive after some lively battle-scenes, and unlike Caroline Munro's Dia, Gillespie's Ajor remains right in the thick of it.