Michael Carreras

(On Cable TV, August 2022) Holy moly, what a weird movie. The plot for The Lost Continent starts out ordinarily enough (indeed, the biggest knock against the film is how long it takes until it gets to something interesting) but once it starts getting strange, it doesn’t stop until the end. Sure, the opening half-hour has an ensemble cast of tramp steamer passengers and crew bickering as a way to develop characters. But the fun starts once their ship gets stranded in the Sargasso Sea, and they discover themselves marooned alongside centuries of ships… and their crew. From that point on, The Lost Continent’s weirdness gets cranked up to eleven. Our characters then have to deal with sentient carnivorous seaweed, a cult of descendants from generations of marooned sailors, suits made of helium balloons to cross the seaweed, a cargo of white phosphorus, a giant crab, an equally giant octopus and much more. No, it’s not a good movie—but more than many more, it begs attention just to see what else writer-director Michael Carreras will throw in. Also, the unusually buxom Dana Gillespie makes quite an impression. All of this comes from Hammer Films—a studio that knew exploitation genre pictures, but never made anything quite like this before. The Lost Continent remains a delirious fever dream of a film once it dispenses with its overlong prologue: nothing respectable, but certainly unforgettable.