Lost Continent
Entry updated 8 April 2019. Tagged: Film.
Film (1951). Sigmund Neufeld Productions. Distributed by Lippert Pictures. Directed by Sam Newfield. Written by Richard H Landau, and (uncredited) Orville H Hampton, from a story by Carroll Young. Cast includes Acquanetta, Whit Bissell, Hillary Brooke, Chick Chandler, John Hoyt and Cesar Romero. 83 minutes. Black and white with tinted green sequences.
Major Joe Nolan (Romero) leads a team of Scientists including Dr Stanley Briggs (Bissell) on a mission to recover a downed US atomic Rocket, which has crashed on a south Pacific Island, atop a tall plateau – access to which requires a long climbing sequence, padding the film out considerably. On the plateau, the crew finds a Lost World inhabited by Dinosaurs, which kill some of them. The dinosaurs are filmed in stop-motion animation, if not terribly well. Scenes set on the plateau are tinted green to signal the presence of radiation from the crashed rocket. A powerful earthquake and volcanic eruption destroys the island, but the surviving remnants of the crew escape this Disaster – some such event being close to universal in tales and films of this sort. Lost Continent bears some inevitable resemblance to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (April-November 1912 Strand; 1912), particularly after the dinosaur-filled mountain top has been reached. Overall, a fairly routine film. Some early sequences were taken without change from Rocketship X-M (1950), also distributed by Lippert. The tinted sequences are often removed from television showings. [GSt]
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