Lost Continent

I usually enjoy movies where scientists with guns find some lost world where dinosaurs exist.I have seen a ton of them and they are usually good.This is the exact opposite.The most exciting thing about this movie is that Hugh Beaumont is in it, another old sitcom star that I have never seen in a movie.But his barely noticeable appearance is not enough to save this movie.It's literally so boring that I bet most people won't be able to make it to when they get to the "Lost Continent".There's so much non-sense,unintelligible babble and straight out lying that it's not easy to understand what's going on.Don't waste your time with this.Go watch it done right in The Land Unknown.

The Lost Continent is an excellent, low budget dinosaur adventure from 1951. Although we don't get to see any dinosaurs until the last half hour, this is worth the wait.

A party is sent to a South Seas island to search for a missing atomic rocket. They eventually arrive there after a long flight and a lot of rock climbing. While resting on the rock face, one of the party sees an enlarged lizard, but no one else believes him. When they get there, they discover an uncharted plateau where time has stood still. It is tinted green. On the plateau, they battle a Brontosaurus, some Triceratops and a Pterodactyl. These stop-motion monsters look quite impressive, even though they are not done by Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen. The party eventually finds the rocket, get the information they want off it and escape from the plateau which is then destroyed by an earthquake.

This movie stars Cesar Romero and several familiar faces from 50's sci-fi movies: Whit Bissell (Creature From the Black Lagoon), John Hoyt (When Worlds Collide) and Hillary Brooke (Invaders From Mars). All play good parts. The score in this movie is excellent throughout and the green tint looks good too.

I had been after this movie for ages and was pleased when I obtained an NTSC copy.

This is a must for fans of dinosaur movies and 1950's sci-fi. A treat.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

Sam Newfield was one of the, if not THE, most prolific directors in American film history. Counting features and two-reelers, Newfield racked up close to 300 films in a career that started shortly after the turn of the century and ended in 1958. Newfield churned out movies so quickly and on such a regular basis that one studio he worked for, PRC (owned by his brother, Sigmund), tacked the names "Sherman Scott" and "Peter Stewart" on much of Newfield's output so it wouldn't look like one man was making almost all of PRC's product. As can be expected, much of Newfield's work is of little or no importance (his Buster Crabbe westerns for PRC in the '40s are especially worthless), but every so often something would happen and Newfield would turn out a film that was coherent, professional-looking and even (gasp!) entertaining. He was assigned by producer Sam Katzman to the Tim McCoy series of westerns for Puritan in the mid-1930s, and some of them are actually tidy little gems--tight, humorous, well-staged little examples of the best of the B-western. "The Lost Continent" is among Newfield's best work--in fact, it probably IS Newfield's best work. Working with a larger budget than he was usually accustomed to (even given the fact that it was a cheapo Lippert production), and given a stronger cast than he got in many of his films, Newfield manages to do quite a good job with what he is given. The story (an Air Force plane trying to recover a lost missile that has landed in what turns out to be a prehistoric jungle, complete with dinosaurs) is nothing much, but Newfield's pacing is quite steady, the dialogue isn't as mind-numbing as the usual Newfield extravaganza, and he actually manages to generate some suspense (a first for him) with the Russian character played by John Hoyt (is he or isn't he a Commie spy?). The crude stop-motion dinosaurs are cheesy and badly done, but since they seem to have been thrown in at the last minute, they don't really detract from the film all that much. If you're familiar with Sam Newfield's work, this will be a revelation to you. If you're not, check it out to see what is the best film in an otherwise almost completely undistinguished career.

"Lost Continent" (1951) is a film that I used to love as a kid, but hadn't seen in over 40 years. I still remembered parts of it vividly, however, especially the gripping image of a man falling to his doom through a covering of cloud, and wondered if it would hold up all these years later. The answer: well, partly. In this one, the prototype of an atomic rocket crashlands on a mountain plateau in the South Pacific, and Air Force pilot Cesar Romero is called on to ferry scientists Whit Bissell, John Hoyt and Hugh Beaumont (six years pre-"Beaver") to the site, along with a few others. After a protracted but nonetheless suspenseful climb up the steep mountainside, which the band accomplishes with only ropes (and no pitons or carabiners!)--a climb that takes up more than 1/3 of the picture--our heroes make it to the top and discover a suddenly green-tinted world, populated with prehistoric critters. Although the switch from B&W to that greenish hue IS pretty nifty, it must be said that these dinosaurs are brought to life by the filmmakers using what might be the lamest stop-motion photography ever committed to film; 1925's "The Lost World" did a better job at this! Still, cheaply put together as it is, "Lost Continent" is mighty fun to watch, mainly because the leads are so appealing and convincing. The presences of yummy '50s gals Hillary Brooke and Acquanetta in bit roles doesn't hurt, either. Although the dinosaurs-on-an-island bit had been better handled three years earlier in "Unknown Island," and the notion of going after a crashlanded rocket over dangerous terrain would be dealt with infinitely better in 1968's "Ice Station Zebra" (and even in the 1963 Bob Hope comedy "Call Me Bwana"), this film still has a pulpy appeal that manages to strike a chord in me 40 years later. Watch it with the kiddies one night. Oh...nice-looking print on the DVD that I just watched, too!

In its day this film probably did appeal to teenagers looking for some vicarious adventure. "Lost Continent" is your typical 1950's Saturday afternoon matinée movie. With all that walking and climbing the characters do, there's anticipation of what they might find, and that anticipation probably lent some tension to the plot for viewers back then. Furthermore, no one could have foreseen CGI. The film's dinosaurs thus were probably quite impressive to kids in those days.

But, by current standards, "Lost Continent" is bland, unimaginative, slow, and hopelessly cheap looking. The story, about scientists who go in search of a downed rocket, is razor thin. It's really just a rehash of "The Lost World" (1925), except that in "Lost Continent", WWII rocket technology is the rationale for the exploration.

The action takes forever to get going. There's lots of back story and routine human drama scenes, all of which could have been edited out. But in that case, the film's run time would have only been about thirty minutes.

In addition to the thin story, another problem is the cinematography. In the many, many rock climbing scenes, there are too many close-up shots. Some distance shots would have provided at least some sense of vertigo, and therefore could have heightened the tension and suspense.

As cinema entertainment, "Lost Continent" cannot compete with more recent sci-fi. The film now is little more than a historic relic of a bygone era when viewers were much easier to please.