Sights have been set low when it comes to Will Ferrell movies. The last time he made tons of people laugh was in 2006 with the NASCAR comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The pitfall of Land of the Lost is that his sketch-comedy style and the film's take on the day-glo sensibility of Sid & Marty Krofft don't mix. That's counterintuitive. You assume Ferrell could easily be slotted into a body of work that includes such bizarre camp as "Sigmund and the Sea Monsters," "H.R. Pufnstuf," and "The Bugaloos." But there's a disconnect. Ferrell's usual shtick induces a few chuckles and the special effects are worthy, yet the big-budget remake of the TV show, which ran from 1974-1977, never gels. It's not funny, strange or exciting enough.

Apparently, screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas were unsure about the adventure angle and so douse their funny guy with urine and send him through the alimentary canal of an ornery T-Rex. "When in doubt, gross 'em out." They don't forget the boob and masturbation gags or the homophobic joshing either. This material, along with "Captain Kirk's nipple!" and similar exclamations, are aimed at the spongy noggins of 12-year-old lads. Sophomoric humor wasn't the Krofft's thing however. The puppeteer siblings favored a trippy mix of British pantomime and mildly counter-cultural psychedelia. The crude overlay isn't something parents will race to subject their kids to, let alone themselves.

Humiliated on national TV by Matt Lauer, Ferrell's dim-witted paleontologist Dr. Rick Marshall has his theories about time travel proven correct when, along with a pert British researcher called Holly (Anna Friel) and a denim-encased redneck named Stanton (Danny McBride), he enters a dimension where dinosaurs roam free and primates are nervous. Both the space-time continuum and the boundaries between cinematic genres are breached.

The scattershot narrative doesn't gain traction as a spoof of creature-features or as a celebration of the Krofft oeuvre in large part because the target audience isn't sufficiently familiar with what's being halfway parodied. They've only been taught to respond to the broadest, most obvious antics (hence Ferrell's hiring.) In addition to the gross-outs and frat house shenanigans, the main source of comedy is Marshall's ignorance, a theme in Ferrell's wheelhouse and consequently twirled ad nauseam. This mind of misinformation has built a time-traveling gizmo that takes the threesome through a vortex into a cosmic junkyard where Viking Ships, Good Humor trucks and other flotsam from various eras have been deposited.

They befriend a monkey-boy called Chaka and Marshall dispenses bogus survival tips while scurrying through the landscape in his Florsheim zipper boots. A crystal-hoarding reptile urges them to locate Marshall's missing time machine lest the universe be destroyed. Having the gadget play the soundtrack from A Chorus Line may or may not be a parody of WALL*E, but it's one of the funniest and silliest touches. The best scene, and arguably the most Krofft-like in spirit, has Marshall, Stanton and Chaka blissed out on a hallucinogenic beverage, lounging by a motel pool and munching on king crabs.

Generously, you can read Land of the Lost as a throwback to the adventure comedies that once unspooled in now-extinct movie palaces on Saturday afternoons. Sadly, those pictures were made in a parallel universe to the one in which Land of the Lost was conceived and executed. At the very least, they weren't so blatant about expressing the vision of marketing departments -- evidenced here by the cross promotion between Universal and its corporate cousin, NBC's "Today" show.

We shouldn't begrudge the Kroffts for letting one of their properties be revived for the big screen. It probably sounded like a good idea at the time. Then again, so did pairing Will Ferrell and professional basketball before Semi-Pro was released.

(Released by Universal Pictures and rated "PG-13" for crude and sexual content and for language, including a drug reference.)