'Land of the Lost' (PG-13)(out of four)

"Land of the Lost" won't go down in Will Ferrell's comedy history book as one of his most triumphant roles, but if you decide to venture into this wacked -out road trip, you might as well make the best of it.

Anyone who remembers the Sid and Marty Krofft Saturday morning kids' show of the same name, from 1974 to 1976, will recall the campy and hokey creatures in the land of the lost. And while scientist Rick Marshall and his two kids took their adventures very seriously, small screen fans delighted in much of its absurdity.

In the big screen update of "Land of the Lost," Marshall (Will Ferrell) is a misunderstood nutty scientist who believes that there are ways to travel sideways in time. An opening scene where the paleontologist is being interviewed by Matt Lauer on the NBC "Today Show" (this is an NBC Universal film, remember) shows just how goofy Marshall is. After being shunned by the scientific community for his crackpot theories, Marshall ends up teaching in a middle school where he drowns his sorrows in junk food.

After a self-induced sugar shock, he's discovered on his teaching lab floor by a Cambridge graduate student with a seductive smile and a heartfelt belief in his studies. Holly (Anna Friel -- "Pushing Daisies") easily convinces him to resurrect his "tachyons accelerator" and continue his research. Amazing what an English accent can convince someone to do.

The two set off to try out the time warp boom box which plays tunes from the Broadway show "A Chorus Line," "left over from the computer's hard drive," according to Marshall.

They end up at a place called Devil's Cave, a cheeky amusement park in the middle of a desert, where they coax the park's strange operator, Will (Danny McBride -- "Pineapple Express") to row them through a polluted water ride. When Marshall sets his boom box to a fever pitch, the three of them careen down a whirlpool to a place they dub, you guessed it, the Land of the Lost.

While Holly and Will were Marshall's children in the television series, here they play one-dimensional adults, cohorts to Marshall's bumbling idiocy. Holly is continually manhandled, even at one point by a half-man, half-monkey. Will shares in the womanizing, adding another annoying dimension of male horniness with his half-baked fantasies of eventually hooking up with the tribe of females that the man-monkey named Chaka (Jorma Taccone) has left behind.

There are a particular number of gross-out moments, including one where alien reptiles shed their skin, and another where Ferrell as Marshall does something disgusting with dinosaur urine. Funnier gross-outs include a massive mosquito bite leftover by a blood sucking bug, and the explosion of a large dinosaur's interior.

As you can image, there isn't much to realistically believe about the adventures of Marshall and his cronies. The lizardlike Sleestaks (leftover from the TV show) look like they were costumed by a mall toy store after a Halloween fire sale, and the computer generated T. Rex, which earns the nickname Grumpy, appear as if it was cut out and merely plopped into the action.

Ferrell pulls out his usual stops, and if not for those, the film would probably splat harder than a pterodactyl egg, which is a great segue to one of the funnier moments. As

Marshall tries to rescue his lost accelerator, he dons a 70s dance outfit and performs some very funny Fosse moves weaving in and out of dozens of dinosaur eggs. Yet there are more cosmic lows than comic highs.

"Land of the Lost" is a mixed bag, especially disappointing since it took $100 million to make this piece of space junk. By the end of this half-baked science fiction farce the scariest part of the whole film is that all that money seems lost forever.