El continente perdido

I have sometimes confused The Lost Continent to the 1951 dinosaur movie of the same name. It is rather enjoyable though.

A tramp steamer with a motley collection of passengers and plenty of barrels of a dangerous explosive goes on an expedition and ends on an uncharted island in the Sargasso Sea which seems to be a graveyard for ships. When there, they discover the land populated by giant crabs, a giant scorpion, man-eating seaweed and survivors of the Spanish Inquisition! After several of the party and Inquisition are killed by the monsters and the explosive chemical, they set off and head back to civilization, along with some of the Inquisition.

Hammer made this movie in 1968 and I taped it when it came on Channel 4 some years ago. Some of the monsters look rather cheap and the movie has a good theme song.

The cast includes Eric Porter, Suzanna Leigh, Nigel Stock and Dana Gillespie.

This movie is worth a look at. Enjoyable.

Rating: 3 and a half stars out of 5.

You know what a typical Hammer production looks like, and "The Lost Continent" definitely doesn't fit that picture. It doesn't feature any old Gothic castles or torture dungeons, any cloaked vampires or mad Barons and it doesn't even star Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing. Surely Hammer also produced other mythologist films and stories revolving on time warps, but "The Lost Continent" is an entire league on its own and the complete opposite to what you expect. Right after watching this movie, you can't even properly determine for yourself whether it's good or bad … just plain weird. "The Lost Continent" is an outrageously plotted but awkwardly coherent film with two entirely different main story lines rolled into one. The titular continent (although it's merely just a small island) actually doesn't get reached until the twenty last minutes and, before that, it is just a suspenseful thriller set on a boat. The ambiance on the ancient and leaky cargo ship is rather tense and sinister. The captain ignores safety warnings and advice from his personnel and the passengers prefer facing a terrible sea storm rather than to return to the coast, even though they have been informed about the potentially explosive cargo. Suffice to say these aren't normal tourists, but people with dark secrets or even fugitive criminals. There are a lot of intrigues going on-board, but the sea is mightier. The captain and his passengers have to abandon ship, but they recover another one slowly drift towards uncharted regions. There they encounter ravenous seaweed and a lot of other things that don't make the least bit of sense, like gigantic crab-creatures, a native tribe under the impression that the Spanish Inquisition isn't finished yet and a local girl with the most gorgeous pair of breasts in the universe. In order to set food on land, they have to put watery pillows on their feet and attach balloons on their shoulders, which forms another very ludicrous sight to behold. "The Lost Continent" is an incredibly silly film, but all cast members perform their roles with a poker straight face, like as if they were starring in the greatest & most budgeted epic adventure in the history of cinema. The effects and monsters designs are extremely dodgy and laughable, but also somewhat charming. The film hasn't got a real ending, but (fortunately?) Hammer never bothered to make a sequel. Crazy little Brit-film, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to open-minded fans of cult cinema.

THE LOST CONTINENT might be typified by the music that accompanies its credits (a kind of languid 60s house band crooning intro) and perhaps that's not entirely a bad thing, because the movie is an initially-languid action fantasy that eventually includes plenty of angst, violence, heavy weather, man-eating plants, top-heavy Christian girls, oversized arthropods, bloodthirsty Inquisitorial Spaniards and a very explosive substance in yellow barrels...

The overall effect is that of medium-budget comic-strip, but with this much action and so much violence and all these yummy females and heroic guys...it's a fun movie from end to end...a great tonic if you're marooned in the Sargasso Sea...or stranded in your living room of a Sunday afternoon

THE LOST CONTINENT is from a novel by Dennis Wheatley, a prolific writer whose books were a compilation of badly written prose, cardboard characters and often inaccurate details. They also happened to be enormous best sellers.

The movie captures his style. We are introduced to characters whose personalities change during the movie for apparent reason and plot threads that start promisingly then go nowhere.

Ben Carruthers is an almost cartoon-like sleazeball and good actors like Eric Porter, Jimmy Hanley and Hildegarde Kneff somehow manage to keep straight faces throughout.

The music is weird; from the opening crooning of a completely inappropriate title song it seems throughout to have been written for a different movie, having no connection with the mood of the scenes.

With it's painted sets and general air of cheapness it should have been a complete disaster but somehow in the end it all becomes strangely likeable.

One for those yahoo evenings with beer and popcorn.

One of my favorite rainy weekend movies, The Lost Continent also is one of the best ripe Hammer films of the Sixties.

A freighter is blown off course and finds itself in a fog-shrouded part of the ocean where the seaweed enjoys flesh and mutated creatures with claws scamper about. It's a mild horror version of the Sargasso Sea and Bermuda Triangle. Eventually the surviving crew and passengers encounter humans who scitter around the seaweed with paddle-like shoes and balloons. The ship these people are from is a Spanish galleon several hundred years old, the crew of which survived and bred into the generations, evolving an Inquisition-like culture on board.

It's really pretty good, thanks to the interesting ideas of seaweed that bites back and the evolved life on the Spanish ship, plus the skill of the two lead actors. And it has a great look. Eric Porter and Hildegard Knef were both heavyweights in the acting department. I'm not sure why they agreed to this film, but I assume the money was good. Porter is one of my favorite actors. He wasn't handsome enough to make a career as a movie leading man, but if anyone doubts his abilities to command watch him as Soames in the original BBC Forsyte Saga. Knef had a so-so career as a lead actress in a handful of American and British films, but returned to Germany for better stuff. She was sexy and self-confident.