The Lost Continent

1968 ***

There are many movies with the words "The Lost Continent" in their title, but I'm going to go out on a limb and declare this the one with the most drinking.

This was another movie I saw on TV once as a kid and tracked down for the contest (such movies being a big theme of mine last year). I've only seen a handful of Hammer horror movies and they seem to follow the same format: an intriguing setup with starchy but well-delivered dialogue, followed inexplicably by more of the same until they're still setting up three quarters of the way into the movie, and then a hastily slapped-together conclusion.

In this tale, a collection of misfits and a series of bad decisions send a rusty cargo liner into a mysterious and perpetually foggy patch of the Sargasso Sea. The term "continent" is extremely generous here, as only one actual landmass is ever featured and it isn't big enough to hold one of those free-standing Fotomat booths. Instead there's just acres of seaweed, except this is fancy seaweed that's super strong and kills you.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, for to discuss this movie correctly I must mention the high level of interpersonal intrigue that makes up the bulk of the film. Here we see the first mate eagerly informing the five passengers that a hurricane warning has been issued and they'd best turn back to Africa. Turns out none of the passengers want to go back there, because they're all ne-er do wells of one sort or another.

Drunken con man, sleazy lawyer...

unethical doctor, slut, slut

The captain doesn't want to turn back either, as he's made the extremely questionable decision to smuggle aboard his leaky ship tons of explosive material that blows up when it gets wet. We're treated to the characters' backstories via private arguments and revealing conversations over drinks. When the hold with the explosives starts taking water, the members of the crew who don't want to get blown up stage a mutiny and, not being very good at mutinies, settle for taking off in a lifeboat. The captain recruits the help of the passengers to move all the explosives to a drier room (gripping stuff, I tell you) and then they decide to abandon ship anyway. After they lose some more people to sharks and infighting, they awake the next morning to find themselves drifting amongst the carniverous seaweed. Before they can really even fret about that, they happen upon a ship clogged in the weed. It's their ship! The bartender is still on board and in his solitude has become a happy movie drunk.

Things resume pretty much as before, lots of drinking and convesation, only now it's punctuated randomly with attacks by the bitchy seaweed, giant hermit crabs, or perhaps a cycloptopus.

Rather late in the film it's revealed that the collection of ships trapped there over the centuries still contain the descendants of the original travellers, currently led by an obnoxious youth and his Spanish Inquisition-type cronies. How they can keep a society going for centuries with only seaweed for resources is never explained, and sure enough our heroes manage to unravel the entire social structure with a couple of pistols and some strongly-worded critiques.

I can't embed it, but you can view the trailer here. I also tried and failed to upload onto YouTube a movie of my computer playing the ridiculously inappropriate theme song, because I felt ill-equipped to describe it. A Tom Jones-ish crooner with smoooth organ music backing him up sings of The Lost Continent like it's the grooviest club this side of Vegas, and not a weed-choked hell hole.

It's that sort of ongoing "what the fuck?" factor that squeaks this movie into the three-star category. You hear of movies that can't decide what kind of movies they are, but The Lost Continent takes that a step further and flat-out refuses to tell you. The plot is choppy enough to give you a crick in the neck, and in this style the movie manages to go nowhere -- literally, as they're stuck in the weeds.