While not nearly as smitten with this sixties Hammer entry as many others seem to be, I will vouch for its undeniable uniqueness and bizarre story. Whether that makes for a good movie or not, I will leave up to you. This Hammer film, based on Dennis Wheatley's Unchartered Seas, tells a very un-simple story about a freighter going to Venezuela carrying illegal explosives and five passengers with equally suspect backgrounds. The captain of the ship is a man willing to look one way for extra cash and deals in cargo that will also benefit his wallet. Bad weather and some other unfortunate circumstances cause the crew to mutiny the ship and all the remaining passengers and crew get on a lifeboat hoping to survive the expected fate of the vessel that they left. Well, later they miraculously find the ship - in tact pretty much - board again while a strangling(and carnivorous) seaweed drags them into a ship graveyard where they meet some strange inhabitants from other ships as well as fantastical monsters such as huge man-eating mollusks. While the film has all the qualities that made Hammer the Horror studio of the sixties, this one just did not do it for me. The acting is solid with the likes of Eric Porter giving a very credible turn as the captain, Suzanna Leigh as a pretty(easy)passenger, Nigel Stock as her dubious father, Michael Ripper in again another well-played small role as a shipmate, and Hildegard Knef as the atypical lead actress(having just fled a volatile Caribbean country). Director Michael Carreras keeps the convoluted storyline in tact as best he can, but the story for this film is a major, major flaw. The first part of the film is about these personalities going to South America and then be stranded in a small boat ala Lifeboat, but then we get the bizarre creatures, the seaweed, and some religious cult that has apparently lived in the ship graveyard for centuries(whether it is populated by the actual inhabitants of the ship or their progeny was never explained sufficiently to me). But even with all of this going on, the movie just ends with nothing resolved. I was saying at the end, "What's the point?" The strange creatures are never explained nor are they in the least bit realistic - looking like something having been left in the garbage bin of a Syd and Marty Kroft production. And how about the title? What continent? All wee see are a bunch of derelict ships and a rock of an island. That does not a continent make. The film would have been better off using Wheatley's original title. So it is a lukewarm reception I must leave for this Hammer outing. The first half is really the much stronger half. The second half is too bizarre and broad for me with only the buxom(and I mean BUXOM) presence of Dana Gillepsie to give it any saving grace at all as some island girl being chased by the religious cult with balloons and paddle feet. Very original in some ways and yet oh so ludicrous as well.
Review of The Lost Continent
