BONUS BLOG -- 1968: THE LOST CONTINENT

What’s it about?

A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.

After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.




Is it any good?

I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?

The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.

For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.




The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.

So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.

After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.




I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.

The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.

In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.