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4
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6 |
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10
= Highest
Rating
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While
Britain's Hammer Films is best remembered for
its cavalcade of gothic horror flicks
bringing Golden Age fright icons Dracula, Frankenstein
and the Mummy back to the screen in living color
the company also
delved into the worlds of science fiction and
fantasy. The 1960s saw the studio's most active
exploration of non-horror themes with movies like
She, One
Million Years B.C., Viking
Queen and Quatermass
And The Pit, among others. With but
few exceptions none of these movies had the lasting
impact of Hammer's gothic horror films, nor are
they remembered as fondly today. 1968's The
Lost Continent, perhaps the most bizarre
picture Hammer ever made, falls squarely in this
lower tier.
Loosely based on a novel by
Dennis Wheatley (The
Devil Rides Out), the plot comes off like
a cross between Ship Of
Fools and The
Land That Time Forgot. It concerns
the weird events that befall the crew and passengers
of the Corita, a ramshackle tramp steamer
commanded by the secretive Capt. Lansen (Eric
Porter). He's keen to leave port before a customs
inspection can take place; the ship's hold is
stacked with barrels containing Phosphor-B, an
illegal explosive which Lansen hopes to deliver
for a big payoff. As the
contrived setup would have it, the type of explosive
being carried is combustible when it comes in
contact with water! (Besides being extremely impractical,
why the hell would anyone want to transport this
stuff on such a dilapidated ship?) The handful
of passengers, along with the rest of Lansen's
crew, have no idea just what deadly cargo is stored
below deck. Naturally this means the greedy captain
will imperil his ship, risking a hurricane, to
insure timely delivery. When the Corita
is caught in the storm and begins taking on water,
Lansen has no choice but to come clean about the
cargo. This doesn't sit well with the crew, most
of whom stage a mutiny and abandon ship in a lifeboat.
With no alternative, Lansen
enlists the reluctant passengers in an attempt
to move the deadly cargo to a dry portion of the
hold. Despite their efforts the captain decides
the jig is up and orders the ship abandoned. He,
the
passengers and few remaining crew scramble into
the only lifeboat left and take their chances
in the storm. Luck is with them. The boat rides
it out though it doesn't take long before the
castaways begin to get on each other's
nerves, with
the inevitable results. (Look on the bright side
Less people to divide the rations between.) Before
long the lifeboat drifts into a weird morass of
floating, ambulatory seaweed with a taste
for human flesh
an Edgar Rice Burroughs vision of the Sargasso
Sea. This "killer weed" turns out to
be the least of their problems, however. Lansen
and company soon find themselves threatened by
a fanatical remnant of the Spanish Inquisition,
descendents of people trapped in the Sargasso
Sea 500 years earlier. Living aboard the wrecks
of ancient galleons stranded in the muck, these
throwbacks travel across the deadly weed using
snowshoe-like footwear and gas-filled balloons
strapped to their shoulders! To the misfortune
of some of the passengers and crew, giant mutated
creatures also populate this 'lost continent':
man-eating octopods, mullosks and scorpions. Beyond
a battle for simple survival, can Lansen and the
others ever hope to escape such a nightmare?
It's all rather silly. Just
how did this fantastical monster-filled landscape
remain "lost" until modern times? My
problem with the movie lies not with the gonzo
scenario (it's certainly off-the-wall enough to
be interesting) but with its execution. Now this
isn't a badly directed movie by any means, nor
are the somewhat less than special special effects
ever detrimental to the fun. But this
flick just takes bloody forever
to get going. Geezers such as I definitely have
a longer attention span than the MTV-internet
generation, but one doesn't call a movie The
Lost Continent and then take almost two
thirds the running time to even find it!
(The first
sighting of the weird weed doesn't come til 47
minutes in.) Too much of the story takes place
on the ship, wasting our time setting up what
are little more than cardboard characters. Hammer
films are often criticized for moving at a glacial
pace, but with the studio's gothic horrors there's
always plenty of atmosphere to carry the viewer
along.
But not here. Cut to the chase,
mate!
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Anchor
Bay's DVD of The Lost Continent,
part of its excellent Hammer Collection (new titles
are slated for fall 2001), serves up the best looking
video transfer of the film I've ever seen. The print
used is the uncut version of the movie, fleshed
out with 8 minutes of footage shorn from its original
U.S. theatrical release. (Don't expect additional
monster action or cleavage in these scenes; it consists
entirely of dialog and extra bits of character development
aboard the ship.) The disc's audio track is clear
and strong.
Extras: The American theatrical trailer is included
along with two black-and-white TV commercials. Also
on the disc is another Oliver Reed-narrated World
of Hammer documentary called Lands Before
Time, an uninformative and utterly throwaway
featurette focusing on Hammer's non-horror caveman
and adventure flicks. (Aside from some mildly interesting
but murky film clips, the doc offers nothing to
the procedings.) Ironically, my favorite 'extra'
is the most inconsequential: the movie's quirky,
psychedelic 'lounge crooner' theme song rendered
in stereo plays in its entirety over the disc's
main menu. It's pure '60s pop kitsch that Austin
Powers himself would no doubt find very groovy.
6/08/01 |
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