Island of the Lost

I saw this on late-night television when I was a boy. I remember telling my older brother that the only realistic actor was the wooden sailboat at the beginning. He laughed and said there must be something good in the rest of the film. I replied, "Well the sailboat makes a brief reappearance, as wreckage." In the many decades since, I had long forgotten the name of this gem. A decade ago, much like looking up a High School girlfriend, I searched Google, probably using terms like "Wrecked sailboat movie". That gave this title as a likely candidate, but I was not sure. And today, on this fine day, I looked up the title and found a bootleg on the intertube. What joy, this is that same rotten film from my youth. And it's even worse than I remembered. Interesting to see it is "outside art' from the Flipper TV show people. It gives me some appreciation for Roger Corman and the Troma gang. Maybe living in LA lets some talent in by osmosis, there was not much in Florida or the Bahamas, at least not in 1967.

I have always had an affinity for movies. I would always watch them to the end, even the bad ones. This movie was so bad, I finally learned some movies are unwatchable. Indeed, just a couple days ago I switched off Triangle of Sadness, which is far worse than this movie.

When I was a boy, you had to wait until 3:00 AM to see a low budget movie. Now they are just a click or two away.

In hindsight, I am not sure why I watched this movie. After all, it really has nothing going for it. In fact, it's such a cheap film that I wonder why it ever went to DVD.

The film stars Richard Greene as a really, really stupid professor. He decides to pack off his kids and head on an ocean voyage of discovery. So, he packs off his two girls (one very young), a friend, a college student and a sea lion (yes, a sea lion) and heads on a very long trip in his sailboat. Now I am NOT against boats and family adventures, but this guy seemed a bit flighty to put everyone at risk like this.

Since the film is called "Island of the Lost", it isn't surprising that sooner or later the group will land on an uncharted island and have lots of freaky adventures. The island, it turns out, is full of supposedly extinct animals. This actually means that the filmmakers took animals such as gators and birds and 'embellished them'--sticking cardboard pieces on them here and there to make them look primordial. Well, at least that was the intention. It just came off as very cheap and silly.

In addition to the silly animals, the island features volcanoes and savage natives--or at least some of them are savage...kind of. In fact, none of the stuff they encounter seems that interesting and mostly it's just Greene saying things like "...wow...there's a archaeotperixis coelocanthis..." or "...look out...they look like head hunters..."---and delivering the lines like he's delivering a lecture to a group of coeds. The acting isn't 100% terrible, though it isn't good--and this pretty much can be said about everything--the direction, camera-work and overall production. The bottom line is that it's bad but not bad enough to be funny....just dull and silly.

This was a film I enjoyed as a kid. Even then I knew it was pretty terrible - the hammy lines, the laughable special effects (ostriches with horns glued on are about the pinnacle of special effects on display), the way Richard Greene and the rest of the cast seem to walk in and out of the camera to represent scene shifts... subtle it ain't, nor art. I have no doubt that I'm influenced by nostalgia, but a revisit a few years ago revealed a film with plenty of charm alongside (or, more accurately, because of) it's extreme silliness. One comment - is this the only sixties Luke Halpin movie in which he keeps his shirt on throughout?

Richard Greene is certainly a man who believes in family togetherness. He's an anthropologist who believes that somewhere in the vast Pacific there is a chain of undiscovered islands. Remember this is 1967 and by that time we and the Russians have had some men who've circled the globe and I'd think that from their vantage point they might have seen something that had hitherto been undiscovered. Anyway he packs his family which consists of his two daughters, a son, and two research assistants and goes off to the South Seas. At this point this actually does sound like Sterling Hayden who chucked his movie career for just such a venture.

When they get to the South Seas, they get themselves caught in the Pacific equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. A lot of unexplained magnetic activity causes their compass to go haywire and Greene and the family are stranded on the Island of the Lost.

This is not any kind of island Gilligan would have found hospitable. Greene finds all kinds of strange exotic creatures, killer ostriches, saber tooth dogs and miniature prehistoric Dimetrodons. The family has to battle all of them and some hostile natives. There last encounter with unfriendly creatures however is when Greene and assistant Mart Hulswit go diving and meet some unfriendly garden variety sharks.

I'm still trying to figure why this maroon would take his family on such a dangerous trip, one that in fact turned out to be as dangerous as it was. But Island of the Lost isn't that good a film to be worried about it.

The film was produced by Ivan Tors and Ricou Browning, the same folks that brought us Flipper, that ever trusty friend in the sea. Which is why teen idol Luke Halpin was in this film as Greene's son. Luke's big moment is rocking out on a keyboard made of balsa and creating a truly eerie musical sound.

What's sad is that Luke Halpin once Flipper had run its course on television and films was just another ex-teenage idol. It's hard to believe that this was the only film offer around. Or maybe Halpin had a sincere case of loyalty to Ivan Tors who certainly had been good to him and his career so far. In any event like so many who sink below the radar once their series is canceled, it happened to Halpin. This film sure didn't keep him visible.

Island of the Lost is kind of laughable today, the special effects at which Tors was acclaimed a master back in the day are pretty lame. It's also hard to believe that television's Robin Hood, Richard Greene, had also sunk so low.

This one is bad news folks, skip the three hour tour to this Pacific paradise.

And the most misleading poster award goes to ISLAND OF THE LOST . I mean if you've got a poster with a screaming face of a creature with yellow eyes , green skin and very sharp teeth you might think you're going to be watching a horror film . It really is a fantastic poster - for another film entirely and it's amazing if the marketing men didn't run in to any trouble with this . It's an incredibly stupid idea too because no responsible parent is going to let their children watch a gory horror . And yet ISLAND OF THE LOST is a Walt Disney type family film !

It wasn't until halfway through watching this family friendly non horror film that I realised I'd seen it many years ago one morning on ITV circa 1983 . It's hardly unforgettable must see cinema but the reason I remember it is because it's got some of the most bizarre monsters ever seen on the silver screen - vicious murderous ostriches with horns on their head , that kick their victims senseless and eat them alive which if nothing else shows an imagination of sorts even if it's by default . There is another jarring aspect and that is the teenage lad never resists the opportunity to play a tune while his siblings put on a sexy dance show Listen sonny these are your siblings you're drooling over . I suppose it could have been worse with the family shipwrecked in the Vatican or BBC television centre , but not much worse