El continente perdido

Perhaps the strangest film to come out of Hammer Studios, The Lost Continent is literally like watching two movies in one. Similar in format to Tarantino's From Dusk 'til Dawn, the film shifts from a taut "mutiny on the bounty" type nautical drama play (with a little funky late sixties weirdness thrown in) to a whacked out sci-fi freak show complete with corny monsters, strange & hostile plants, an unnaturally large breasted woman, a child King, an oddball religious cult, and balloon-type thingies to keep the characters afloat on the marshy alien wetlands! Whew! Talk about your shift in gears! A must see for fans of oddball cinema. And to think it came out of Great Britain . . .

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.

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 belongs in the same category as films like The Island (1980) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). It's scientifically implausible, childish but fairly inventive in plotting, and surprisingly enjoyable if you allow yourself to be drawn into the story without clinging too stubbornly to reality.

In this one, a ship is fleeing from African customs officials when it runs into heavy weather in uncharted waters. The passengers and crew abandon ship, but later they rediscover it, trapped in a peculiar section of sea infested with weeds. This same seaweed world turns out to be the home of a long-lost community of sailors, ruled (somewhat tyranically) by descendants of the Spanish Inquisition.

Eric Porter plays the lead role with a commendably straight face, getting over a convincing reading the ship's captain. Other members of the cast take things less seriously and seem to have their tongues pretty firmly in their cheeks, but they still give interesting enough performances. The script is a real piece of lunacy, with loads of obvious plot holes and unlikely situations - in many ways you wonder if they wrote it over a drunken weekend - but again there is sufficient imagination to carry the picture through.

This is undoubtedly a wild, wacky and downright infantile adventure film. But, in spite of its many faults, I like it to a certain degree because it has the courage to ignore its own daftness and run along at an entertaining and lively pace.

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.