Flight of the Lost Balloon

Sorry, but this comment from another reviewer is simply wrong. The movie takes place in the Victorian age. I'm sure that the Middle Eastern settings for some of the adventures led that reviewer to believe that this took place in medieval times.

This is a better movie than you might think. It was intended for Saturday matinees and is basically an excuse for adventures on the African continent. Most kids who saw it at the time of its initial release loved it.

If you get a chance to watch it, give it a try.

** out of *****

American-International Pictures usually the venue for Roger Corman at the time made this Victorian monstrosity Flight Of The Lost Balloon about a journey across Africa in a balloon. Shortly afterwards Five Weeks In A Balloon came out and was miles better than this.

For one thing this film could use a restoration if someone wanted to bother. The color is very washed out.

Puerto Rico stands in for Africa for the location shooting as Marshall Thompson and Mala Powers set forth to rescue Douglas Kennedy being held prisoner in a castle on an island in the middle of Lake Victoria. The mysterious Hindu who guides Thompson and Powers there is the owner of said castle and he wants Kennedy to spill the beans in regard to Cleopatra's treasure. Cleo didn't die in Egypt she came to the middle of the African veld to do her thing with the asp.

For a film set in Africa, British Africa at that not one of the cast members even attempted a British accent. An indication of the general boredom they had for this project. The situations and the dialog are patently ridiculous, even for a juvenile audience for which this film was intended.

When talking about movies, there are many movies that seem like b-movies, movies of much lower production values than most. What is an example of a b-movie? Well, "Flight of the Lost Balloon" might fit the description of a b movie better than any other movie that I've watched.

The best part about it is the story. A man goes on a journey across Africa, mostly in a balloon, in order to find an explorer who went missing during a voyage. However, one of the occupants of the balloon takes control of the balloon in order to find a treasure, the same treasure the explorer was looking for. This sound like the plot of an at least above average movie, but every other aspect of the movie brings it down by a lot.

The sets look cheap and confined, the costumes and props look like something from a town's local stage play, the script is cheesy, the acting is even cheesier, the music is meh, sound effects get reused over and over again, the characters make stupid decisions, and the worst part of the movie was the special effects, which may contain the worst blue screen I've seen in a film. The shots of the condors look straight out of birdemic, and you can see unedited parts of the blue screen.

Overall, it's not that good of a movie, but I guess it's not all terrible. 4/10.

While I agree with those reviews that found nothing redeeming in The Journey of the Lost Balloon, and am bemused by those that tried to find pieces of cheap quartz in the rough, the film was deeply offensive as it played on the long US history of pervasive, oppressive racism. That the balloon comes down in a jungle and a shoreline where black tribal people live merely sets up the writer and director to show people of color as ludicrous, repugnant, vicious, utterly brainless sub-humans. The clichés are unbearable to watch, including the cliché of the euro-guy outrunning the natives (ha!) and hiding in foliage that the dozen or so indigenous people (otherwise to be assumed as masters of their environment) entirely miss, and then, like dogs, run together after a stick the euro-guy throws to create a diversion. Add to this yet another white guy playing an East Indian named "Hindu" with brown-face on all but the back of his white neck, and we literally have a documentary of racist ideology paraded in minute detail over the course an entire film. Of course we don't want to make such films illegal, but we do want to create a culture where such films are not even imagined.

To the brown shirts who will counter that these were simply conventions of an earlier and more innocent time, we can only say that this tripe is the cultural flag that flies over such conventions as slave trade, slavery, the Klan, segregation, ghettoization, and mass incarceration. Of which, in addition to this film, the brown shirts are very proud.

I remember seeing this movie on cable TV. I watched it because my high school was closed up for a snow day. My parents were working and my brother was spending the day with my grandparents. I was home alone skipping through the dials when I saw this movie. Flight of the Lost Balloon was a grade Z movie with a bunch of unknown actors who embark on a journey to an Arabian land to save a friend of theirs.

As I recall the movie took place in medeval times and yet they traveled in a hot air balloon? People back then didn't have hot air balloons! What were the writers smoking? The grand finale comes when they save their friend and the villain was holding onto the balloon wanting to fight with them. The lead female in this movie didn't do anything, except scream on top of her lungs. This movie was ridiculously bad that it deserves to be listed in the B-Movie Hall of Shame! When I watched this I was making fun of it a'la MST3K who, by the way could've had a field day mocking this piece of junk! Was I the first to comment on this? Look, Ma! Me First!