Archive features
The Quatermass Xperiment
1955
Britain's first rocket has been successfully launched and returns to Earth but communication has been severed. Only one of the three spacemen (Wordsworth) remains on board whose physical and mental health has been severely damaged. He is put under strict observation but his wife smuggles him out ...
PRODUCTIONS
Lost Continent, The
1967
British quad poster. Courtesy of hammerhorrorposters.com
- Director: Michael Carreras, Leslie Norman [uncredited]
- Producer: Michael Carreras
- Writer: Michael Carreras [as Michael Nash]
- Cast: Eric Porter, Hildegard Knef, Suzanna Leigh, Tony Beckley, Nigel Stock, Neil McCallum, Ben Carruthers, Jimmy Hanley, James Cossins, Dana Gillespie, Victor Maddern, Reg Lye, Norman Eshley, Michael Ripper
Synopsis
[The following review was first published on Hammerfilms.com as part of a Dennis Wheatley retrospective feature by Graham Skeggs in January 2002]
When Hammer filmed Dennis Wheatley’s Uncharted Seas, they confusingly decided to name the film The Lost Continent. This latter was the name of two other (unrelated) books. The first, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan of the Apes fame), tells the story of a crew who find themselves in the ruined and overgrown London of the twenty-second century. The other, by C.J. Cutliffe Hyne (1866-1944), tells a story based in the fabled Atlantis.
It is more likely, though, that the influence of name was largely from the 1951 Lippert Production, also of the same name, that was not based on any of the three books, but penned by Richard H. Landau, who was to go on to write many screenplays for Hammer/Exclusive in the 1950s, most notably The Quatermass Experiment. The Lippert production was standard exploitation fare of the era concerning an atomic rocket lost on a dinosaur-infested plateau and starring Cesar Romero. Lippert employed tricks that Hammer was to learn, such as re-using sets (from Jungle Goddess) and footage (from RocketShip X-M). At one stage, Hammer had planned to call the film The Island of Lost Creatures, and later Voyage to the Lost Continent.
The Lost Continent is a strange and unsatisfying film. This principally derives from its uneasy mixture of thriller and fantasy genres, also noticeable in The Vengeance of She made about the same time.
The intense, seedy scenario on the tramp steamer is played out to an extent that is quite unnecessary for the purposes of the eccentric fantasy plot that develops. One does not become more convinced that these are real people who become plunged into the fantastic; rather, the fantastic takes on an intrusive absurdity.
Once one accepts the changeover, though, the fantasy elements are oddly attractive: a mixture of weird biology and 17th-century Spanish colonialism of a comic-book Romanesque extreme.
Overall, though, the lack of directorial purpose makes this film flawed. This lack of direction may be tied up with the fact that the film went seriously over its £500,000 initial budget during shooting, and emergency cost-cutting was enforced in the latter stages of production.
It is more likely, though, that the influence of name was largely from the 1951 Lippert Production, also of the same name, that was not based on any of the three books, but penned by Richard H. Landau, who was to go on to write many screenplays for Hammer/Exclusive in the 1950s, most notably The Quatermass Experiment. The Lippert production was standard exploitation fare of the era concerning an atomic rocket lost on a dinosaur-infested plateau and starring Cesar Romero. Lippert employed tricks that Hammer was to learn, such as re-using sets (from Jungle Goddess) and footage (from RocketShip X-M). At one stage, Hammer had planned to call the film The Island of Lost Creatures, and later Voyage to the Lost Continent.
The Lost Continent is a strange and unsatisfying film. This principally derives from its uneasy mixture of thriller and fantasy genres, also noticeable in The Vengeance of She made about the same time.The intense, seedy scenario on the tramp steamer is played out to an extent that is quite unnecessary for the purposes of the eccentric fantasy plot that develops. One does not become more convinced that these are real people who become plunged into the fantastic; rather, the fantastic takes on an intrusive absurdity.
Once one accepts the changeover, though, the fantasy elements are oddly attractive: a mixture of weird biology and 17th-century Spanish colonialism of a comic-book Romanesque extreme.
Overall, though, the lack of directorial purpose makes this film flawed. This lack of direction may be tied up with the fact that the film went seriously over its £500,000 initial budget during shooting, and emergency cost-cutting was enforced in the latter stages of production.
Available in HD: No
Available on DVD: Yes
