Il tesoro segreto di Cleopatra

I remember seeing this film on television multiple times in the early 1960s. It is roughly in the same style and genre of another Jules Verne story and film, "In Search of the Castaways" (1962), which was made into a film at almost the same time and was also shown multiple times on television around 1962-1964. As children, my sister and I were captivated by both these films, and we loved to re-watch both of them on television in those years whenever they were shown.

By today's standards the effects and acting are weak, but the film is still captivating, memorable, and fires the imagination. The film has a lot of particularly memorable imagery: a basket balloon, a castle-like fortress on a beach, chained gorillas in a dungeon, the lost treasure of Cleopatra, a very tall and eerie black man who can't speak because his tongue was torn out, a torture chamber with a stretching rack, a woman threatened with torture, a man jumping into a lake from the basket balloon, being chased by African natives with spears, cannibals, a shrunken head hanging on a rack, a fight with a medieval mace, a condor attack, having to dump priceless treasure overboard, and so on. Some scenes border on film mastery. For example, it is surprising how much tension could be put into a simple scene of a man gathering water at a river to take back to the balloon while the audience knows that cannibals are watching him from behind the coconut palms. The aerial photography is reasonably inspiring, although admittedly the filmed backdrop effects aren't high quality.

To clear up some common misperceptions: the basket balloon in the plot is actually a hydrogen balloon, not a hot air balloon. In the story, acid and water are carried on board to generate hydrogen, which is obviously dangerous and this fact figures into the plot since it is too dangerous for the balloon's occupants to fire the musket that they brought along, which leaves them largely at the mercy of attacking condors, spear-throwing African cannibals, and an unwanted guide. Also, the date of Friday, April 7, 1878 is shown at the beginning of this film, on the sign outside the lecture hall, so this is definitely not the medieval period.

The plot is solid and the imagery great. If only the acting and effects were improved, this could be an outstanding film.

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed and Screenplay by Nathan Juran; Produced by Bernard Woolner, for Woolner Brothers Pictures. Photography by Jacques Marquette; Edited by Rex Lipton; Music by Hal Borne; Stop-Motion Animation by Jim Danforth. Starring: Mala Powers, Marshall Thompson; Douglas Kennedy, James Lanphier, Robert Gillette and Felippe Biriel.

Extremely poor science fiction adventure lifted from a Jules Verne story. Our heroes travel along the African continent in a balloon and have numerous scrapes with danger, against poorly processed stock footage.

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.

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.

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.