I haven’t yet seen Land of the Lost. I’m too busy hangin’ with my grandma in Arizona and trying out D-Box Motion Code seats (Grandma didn’t accompany me for that experience, unfortunately). But the truth is, I wasn’t planning on seeing it, despite my regular appreciation for Will Ferrell vehicles. After today, however, I’ve changed my mind, and I plan to check out the TV adaptation as soon as I return to NYC.

Why should I bother, given the abysmal 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the sad score of 32 at Metacritic? Because I trust the few positive reviews and defenses I’ve read on the movie blogs this afternoon. And to let the positive spin possibly influence you, I’ve quoted and linked some of these recommendations after the jump:

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline makes the case for the big budget comedy:
  

  [Land of the Lost] made me laugh. Not constantly, but frequently — and when the bits hit, they hit harder than anything in The Hangover did. And I wasn’t the only one: There were laughs coming from all over that theater. Some of them were delayed reactions, some only came from certain pockets, some weren’t so much laughs as they were involuntary sounds the diaphragm creates when you don’t know how to react to something. But nearly all felt pleasurable, and none were canned.

• Lane Brown at Vulture defends the existence of the movie by celebrating the Sleestaks:
  

  LoTL makes the most of them — we see a pair having sex, and when they shed their skins, Ferrell and McBride wear them as disguises. If you find either actor funny in anything (as we do, admittedly) then it’s a pretty good sight gag. Maybe not one worth $100 million, but we laughed…we left the theater pretty happy. Like we said, though, we find Ferrell funny in anything. (Especially Sleestak skin.)

• David Poland at The Hot Blog had a “good, dumb time” with the should-have-been-this-generation’s-Flash Gordon. From his take:
  

  The psychedelic of the year, so far, is Land of The Lost, a movie for adults posing as a movie for kids that kids will love and adults who take themselves too seriously will hate intensely. It’s not a masterpiece - not even a Will Ferrell masterpiece - but it has charms that are profoundly unexpected.

• Speaking of psychedelics, Todd Gilchrist at Cinematical opens his review with a sentence that has me very intrigued:
  

  If Hunter S. Thompson were to write a story about his trip to a parallel, prehistoric dimension, then Land of the Lost might be the most accurate representation possible of its subsequent film adaptation.

• Robert Fure at Film School Rejects awaits the 3D version and highlights 5 things he didn’t hate about the movie. Here’s one:
  

  4. No Kids. In the original, it was a family that got transported to the Land of the Lost.  This time, it was a group of adults, presumably so all the boob and ball grabbing would be incestuous.  But since I hate kids, I was glad.

• Annalee Newitz at i09 hits the right buttons for us Will Ferrell fans:
  

  Will Ferrell’s Land of the Lost movie took the original television show in a weird new direction. Ferrell plunked a version of his famous character from Anchorman into a science fiction landscape - and it worked…if you’re looking for good science fiction fun this weekend I would recommend Land of the Lost over Terminator 4 any day of the week.

• Massawyrm at Aint It Cool News admits it works because of the comedy (not the science fiction) and it is a good time. Here’s an interesting favorable comparison from the review:
  

  This isn’t a cool, clever family sci-fi film. It’s a comedy first and foremost. And for the most part it is very funny. But you’ve seen it before. In fact, you may have just seen it last summer with JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Same principle, same tone. But this is a better film. LAND OF THE LOST is superior to that film in every way.

• Meanwhile, Harry Knowles at Aint It Cool News wishes Universal would market the movie to the right audience:
  

  I had a blast with it. As did the majority of the audience. The biggest flaw with the film, isn’t the film - but the marketing campaign for this movie. The fear that they had to make this a Family Film in order to market it, but the reality is - it can play to a much older audience

• Finally, because he could be the most influential, Roger Ebert at Chicago Sun-Times offers a defensive opinion:
  

  “Land of the Lost” inspires fervent hatred, which with the right kind of movie can be a good thing. Amid widespread disdain, I raise my voice in a bleat of lonely, if moderate, admiration.