Entertainment

FERRELL A ‘LOST’ CAUSE

PITY the unwitting par ents who take their kids to see “Land of the Lost,” Will Ferrell’s terminally stupid, sloppy, campy and cheesy — and thoroughly unexciting and unfunny — experiment in “family entertainment.”

Those parents will surely be cringing as:

* Ferrell reaches into his pants to pleasure himself.

* A half-man, half-ape repeatedly fondles Anna Friel’s breasts.

* Ferrell, under the influence of a hallucinogenic substance, strokes the aforementioned creature’s hair and contemplates kissing him.

* Ferrell, out of nowhere, blasphemes about Jesus.

Nominally based on Sid and Marty Krofft’s innocuous ’70s TV show, “Land of the Lost,” the film — which reportedly carries a price tag of more than $100 million — does not seem aimed at any identifiable demographic except fans of bad movies.

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Even hard-core adult fans of Ferrell’s frat-boy humor may have trouble swallowing the movie’s big gross-out scene — wherein he repeatedly douses himself with a jug of dinosaur urine.

There are also plentiful poop jokes. Not to mention the torturous sequence in which a scantily clad Ferrell prances through a field of pterodactyl eggs while accompanied by a much-heard number from “A Chorus Line.”

If it sounds like I’m describing a bunch of scenes rather than a movie, that’s exactly what we’ve got here.

Ferrell plays a disgraced scientist who is sucked into a time warp along with a doctoral student (Friel) and a nitwit tour guide (Danny McBride).

They all end up in a place where “past, present and future mash up together,” where they run from dinosaurs and actors in rubber alien suits, try to stop the conquest of the universe and plot to get back to their own time.

Mostly, they’re swimming upstream in decades of random cultural references — everything from the original “Planet of the Apes” to the 1956 play “Tea and Sympathy.”

Director Brad Silberling (“Casper”) indulges Ferrell even more than his usual enabler, Adam McKay, letting scenes play out long, long after it’s clear the joke isn’t working.

The special effects aren’t bad, but there isn’t an instant you’re not aware that the action — and that’s a kind term — is taking place on a Hollywood sound stage.

Friel, who strips her jeans into cutoffs early on, serves mostly as the decorative rebuttal to the plentiful gay-panic jokes.

The increasingly desperate comic heavy lifting is left to Ferrell, McBride (“Pineapple Express”) and Jorma Taccone of “Saturday Night Live” — who will likely spend decades trying to live down his grotesque role as the half-man, half-ape.

To report that Matt Lauer, in two lengthy scenes as himself, gives the funniest performance in “Land of the Lost” is to damn it with the faintest praise possible.

lou.lumenick@nypost.com

LAND OF THE LOST Half a star Jurassic snark. Running time: 106 minutes. Rated PG-13 (crude humor, sexuality, drugs, profanity). At the Empire, the Union Square, the Lincoln Square.