User Reviews

"Lost Continent" turned out to be a reasonably solid film, which was a surprise for me since I knew A) it was directed by mega-hack Sam Neufeld and B)it was an early target for Mystery Science Theater 3000 (in their 2nd season, when they really hit their stride).

So let's get the bad stuff out of the way first - rock climbing, Sid Melton, and unconvincing dinosaur animation. Anyone who has seen "LC" all the way through knows that the movie stops dead in the second act and subjects the viewer to endless scenes of the characters scrambling up a mountainside on their way to the crashed "atomic rocket" at the top. I am sure that the point was to help the viewer experience the struggle and fatigue of an 'epic' journey...but the climbing scenes are staged in a plodding, pedestrian manner that kills any interest the first 20 minutes managed to generate. It's worse than watching paint dry. Things actually get moving a little once the crew makes it to the top, but man...rock climbing was sloooooow going.

2nd, Sid Melton. I know that Melton got a lot of work in various TV shows and movies calling for comedy relief. And I remember he was pretty good at times (on "Danny Thomas", etc). But he's just not funny to my "modern" sensibilities...in fact, he's really irritating. His performance pulls the movie down a couple of rating points all by itself. His role is pure cardboard, his dialog is completely lame, and he basically does sad-sack military enlisted man "schtick" here, purely on auto-pilot. I kept praying for his immediate and painful death in "LC". Then again, I'm not sure Elvis channeling Jim Carey could have saved this part, so I don't want to trash poor Sid too hard. I hope he's happily retired and living on his residuals somewhere.

3rd, the dinosaur animation. I am sure this was the biggest expense in the film, but once you've seen Ray Harryhausen, you can't tolerate stuff like this anymore. There are no credits for the animation sequences in the credits, so it's possible that the producers (and the animators) felt the same way. It was also kind of irritating to have a brontosaurus/apatosaur attack the party and try to eat Hugh Beaumont when any six year old could tell you that the bronto was a gentle, timid vegetarian. Apparently, Neufeld didn't have any six year olds around to act as consultants.

As for the "good": everyone else here does a workmanlike job of getting their dialog over and filling out their stereotyped roles. I'd never seen Romero in a "straight" dramatic role before, and I have to admit, he's pretty dashing. He has great hair, and he knows how to rock the mustache. If you were looking for someone to "do" the Errol Flynn role in your movie, Romero would be an obvious choice. Whit Bissell and Beaumont are their usual dignified, genial selves, and the guy who plays the Russian rocket scientist brings a certain humanity and nobility to his lines that a lot of other actors might not.

And c'mon...it's rockets and dinosaurs and manly men on a manly adventure, how could this movie's intended audience (sleepy male adolescents) NOT love it? As I said, MST3000 covered this one early on...if fact, I remember that the episode where they tackled "Lost Continent" was the first MST I ever saw. And yes, the movie deserved all the barbs, japes, and witticisms they tossed at it, but it still has a certain quality that elevates it far above most of their other fare...even if it hasn't aged too well. But let's be fair...how well do you thing Cameron's "Titanic" will hold up to viewers in 2056??

The "men stumble upon lost world" plot seems to be as old as movies themselves, maybe older. It's been used in The Land Unknown, The Mole People, Untamed Women, Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Slave Girls of the White Rhinoceros (aka Prehistoric Women), and countless other films. Here, Cesar Romero leads a group of guys up a mountain where they find...yes, a lost world.

There's lots of talk at the beginning as the group decides to go up the mountain, then they climb, and climb, and climb some more. Somewhere along the way, Whit Bissell falls to his death, but no one seems to mind too much. Finally, the group of explorers reach the top, where they find themselves in a land of flying reptiles and dinosaurs. After a few adventures, the usual volcanic eruption sends the men back down, right to the end of this film.

The plot unfolds in the standard way, and has the usual comic relief, in this case a guy who wears a parachute everywhere (which I found very annoying for some reason). The cast is pretty good, particularly Romero and Hugh Beaumont, who were old pros at this kind of thing. There's enough action to keep your attention, but don't expect any surprises--the movie is strictly standard.

Rock climbing. Those words will forever send a chill down my spine. The reason for that is I endured a so-called "adventure" film about a group exploring sent to a distant island to investigate a rocket crash. In order to get there, they have to climb a mountain. And that's it. 80% of the film is just rock climbing. Just rock climbing. Oh, and they run into some dinosaurs along the way but they have a total of 3 minutes of screen time. So the star of this movie is basically a mountain. God help us all.

And to top it off, when they finally do reach the rocket, the most annoying character is finally killed off, a volcano starts to erupt, and they scale back down the mountain in TWO MINUTES!!!! Then they get on a rowboat and smoke some cigarettes. And that's it. That is how the film ends. WTF??!!! I just cannot express how much I hate this movie. The dinosaurs are a cruel insult because not only do they not do anything but remind me of better things I could be watching. The introductory sequences are so pointless; the characters become cardboard cutouts the minute they land on the island and the acting is so bland. Even the MST 3K boys had trouble enduring this one. I just don't see what can be gained from writing about this garbage further. If you watch the MST 3K version, do so at your own risk.

Rock Climbing :shudder:

This movie is hard to get into. I mean, it's hard to look at,at first. This movie takes black and white to a whole new level as it enhances the drabness by making it gray and white. The rock climbing scenes are only saved by strong, adventurous music that seems unfit for the movie, and the rock climbing scenes without the music look more like someone's silent vacation video rather than an actual movie. In fact, this whole movie is a case where the music is much better than the film itself. I thought I was in for the most boring movie ever made, but I found myself unexpectedly entertained by the end when I saw the guy from Leave It To Beaver, John Hoyt, Cesar Romero, and Whit Bissel narrowly dodging tumbling rocks from an exploding island. But the best part of this movie is: Getting to see Sid Melcher(or whoever that guy from The Danny Thomas Show is) meeting his maker at the hands of a hungry herbivorous Triceratops, a most deserving fate indeed.

This low-budget Lippert science fiction film does the best it can on a small scale, with special effects that are cheesy oh, probably even then looking rather fake compared to some of the bigger special effects ethics of the time. It involves a search for a rocket that takes Captain Cesar Romero and his crew on a journey where their plane crashes in a lost world, forcing them to climb up a huge mountain (to see what they could see, as the old song about the bear goes), encountering some dangerous large beasts including a gecko who presumably only wanted to sell them car insurance.

I can just hear the wisecracks coming out of the cheesiness of the film, and fortunately, it's more than just a lizard made to look much larger than it was, showing also a brontosaurus, some stegosaurus and a pterodactyl. Why they need to open fire on the brontosaurus who is just grazing makes no sense, although the beast does eventually charge them. Interesting that in "Jurassic Park", the brontosaurus was considered just a gentle giant, like a big cow, but here, it's very dangerous to smaller creatures. Sid Melton ("Golden Girls") gets a close view of the stegosaurus, while the pterodactyl really has no impact on the travels of these men. They include John Hoyt, Hugh Beaumont, Chick Candler and Whit Bissell. Hillary Brooke and Aquanetta appear briefly but serve no purpose in the plot other than to have some women in the cast.

It's pretty entertaining in spite of the low budget oh, and while there certainly is a lot of rock climbing, I like the design of the mountain which includes a covered ledge that they ride out a storm on. The destruction of the mountain in the climax is the best bit of special effects in the film, showing an earthquake moving along the land and giving one of the characters the opportunity to spout the moral as the last line. Still no idea how they successfully got out of this place. I didn't find the film as bad as I had heard it to be, and I'm glad that I stuck with the prince as released rather than watch the Mystery Science Theater episode that ridiculed it.

I don't quite understand the reviews for Lost Continent on IMDb. Most of the users who have taken the time to write a review have rated the movie a 5 or better. Huh? What did I miss? Sure, it's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but come on! Lost Continent is about as exciting as watching grass grow or watching paint dry or any other tired, old cliché you can think of. It's deathly dull! It seems that at least half of the movie is devoted to watching the characters either climb a mountain or just walk around. As a viewer, you get to watch all six characters going over the same boulder - and doing so very slowly - and without any tension or suspense - and often without any background music. And when our group of intrepid explorers isn't climbing over the same stage-bound rock for the fourth time, they're walking through a fake looking jungle. Actually, they're not really walking as it seems each time the camera cuts to them they're taking a fifteen minute break. How exciting is that! They don't do much and nothing much happens to them. Two-thirds of the movie is over before the first dinosaur makes an appearance. I realize that Lost Continent was made with a very small budget, but these dinosaurs are terrible. Movies made 20 years previous had better looking stop motion special effects.

But as I wrote earlier, Lost Continent is far from the worst movie I've seen. The acting alone keeps this thing from being a total waste of time. The name actors in Lost Continent are Cesar Romero and Hugh Beaumont. Both do a decent enough job, but they're not given much to stretch their acting abilities. Also present, as he was in seemingly everything made in the 50s and 60s, is Whit Bissell. The name might not be recognizable, but most fans of older films would be familiar with the face and voice.

Lippert Pictures Lost Continent is an interesting and better product than normally you might get out of this low budget studio. Basically it's a version of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World updated with the plot to include the Cold War. It also is a film that glorifies our brand new United States Air Force only a few years old at the time.

Scientists John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, and Hugh Beaumont are testing a new rocket, modifying those V-2s that the Nazis introduced before World War II ended. The thing goes completely haywire and disappears somewhere in the South Pacific.

This part of the plot completely lost me. After all the fighting in the Pacific over various islands and decisions which ones to fight for and which ones to bypass, you'd think there would be no lost islands by 1951. But apparently we and the Japanese missed this one and it's a beaut. It's got more uranium per square yard than any place on earth and a big mountain with a prehistoric plateau on which a lot of prehistoric flora and fauna still exist. And a few large dinosaurs as well.

Cesar Romero, Chick Chandler, and Sid Melton are Air Force men who take our scientists to look for the rocket and get the data from it. All six have the usual encounters with prehistoric life that one associates with films like these. It looks a whole lot like the Jurassic Park that Richard Attenborough created. The prehistoric sequences are photographed in a sepia toned green, the rest of the film is standard black and white.

When I was a kid I saw this on television in the Fifties and I still remember Sid Melton getting gored by a triceratops. Lost Continent was an exciting film back then and kids who are the age I was back then might still like this film. It's better than a lot of Lippert products, but still very hokey.

I hold great nostalgic affection for this film. Yes, it is no "King Kong" regarding its special effects and story, but the film's real strength is in the characters' clever bantering throughout. Some of the banter is not PC (calling women "dames", cracks about marriage, much smoking as if a cigarette company bankrolled the film) but it's still great fun. The dinosaurs don't come off well in ways more than movement. They look like cute toys. Possible SPOILER*** here. To all wondering about the missing scene with Sid Melton, it is intact in the DVD version with Cesar Romero and Hugh Beaumont sharing the cover with two battling triceratops in the background. The cover is also green. This is a great film to watch on a lazy weekend afternoon especially if the weather is bad.