William Samuel Lost Continent, which stars Caesar Romero and the dad from Leave it to Beaver, is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen. Most of it can be described as filler, and not very good filler at that. It begins, as did so many low-budget movies from the '50s, with stock footage of a rocket launch. The rocket soon crashes in some unnamed county (I think it's in South America, but it might be the South Pacific, or Africa) and a team of scientists and military types are sent to retrieve it. No points for guessing that their plane immediately crashes in the middle of wherever it is they are.They find out from the few remaining natives that the rocket landed on a nearby plateau, which they proceed to climb. Once on top, they discover a lost world where dinosaurs roam and uranium paves the streets, so to speak. Dinosaurs, jungles, treacherous climbs, and even a massive unexplained cataclysm at the end- this is the kind of material that pulp magazines and B-movies thrive on. Lost Continent has all the ingredients of a dumb but exciting adventure movie. You wouldn't expect this to be Oscar material, but you'd think there'd be a lot of action.Alas, Lost Continent fails to meet even these minimal expectations. Most shots involve the team members making small talk, slogging through jungles, or climbing. Oh how they climb. The movie is only 80 minutes long, and a full thirty minutes of that is spent getting up the cliffs. This could have been dangerous, or exciting, but that would have taken too much money. So instead we get the Captain Video effect, in which the actors climb the same fake ledges over and over again, while the cameras studiously avoid any breathtaking vertical shots which would reveal that they're actually at ground level. Even when someone falls to his death, we only see the reaction of the companion who failed to save him.You'd think the dinosaurs would spice things up a bit, but no. We get cheap Claymation dinos that are less detailed than the ones in King Kong, filmed twenty years earlier. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that the scenes with the dinosaurs are yet more stock footage lifted from other films. This would explain why we never see the dinos and the actors in the same frame, even through rear projection. And the Brontosaurus looks suspiciously like the one in 1925's The Lost World. So no, there isn't a single bit of excitement generated by the dinosaur attacks.The movie is further hampered by the lack of any real acting. True, I wasn't expecting the actors to be convincing, but I thought there might be some campy over-acting. Instead the cast performs as if they were on downers. Every line sounds like they were reading it off the script while fighting drowsiness. These guys are more wooden than a cigar store Indian. They get over their colleague's death in less than a minute, and pronouncements that they're running out of food and may never get home alive are delivered with no more urgency than if they were missing an episode of House. I suspect this is a reflection of the cast's total apathy. I also suspect that Lost Continent was made just so the distributors would have something to show on the bottom of a double-bill.If you've read many of my previous reviews, you've probably guessed by now that I cheated and watched the MST3K version. I was pretty good, as Joel and the 'bots had a field day pointing out the utter lack of action. This version is worth checking out for a few laughs. The original is worthless, except as a sleep aid.

Thomas Beekers A riveting adventure filled with joy, Lost Continent is probably best remembered for one thing: rock climbing.In one of the most amazing shows of padding out a film, this 83 minute feature contains about 20 minutes of pure mountaineering. Doesn't sound too bad until you realize that almost nothing happens during those 20 minutes than a bunch of guys walking from rock to rock.So what is this film? It starts as a political-military flick filled with disjointed semi-back-stories and speeches, runs right into the boring uncut mountaineering and finally ends up as it was advertised, as a fantasy-adventure.A good fantasy-adventure? Nope, not really, but it's not bad either. It contains all the flat one-dimensional characters and bad effects and filming of the 50's, but it's no worse than any of those. If you're really into these classic adventure flicks, the movie is worth watching once they're done rock climbing.

john22900 SPOILER ALERT! I loved this movie when I saw it as a kid in spite of the cheesy effects sequences. The acting wasn't bad at all but the writing, especially Sid Melton's dialogue and character, should have been rewritten. His sad sack character's comic relief seems incongruous with the rest of the cast and their parts. That said, the film's actors are literally a who's who of 50's TV and B movies. The director did a pretty good job with what he had. With a slightly bigger budget, the dinosaurs could've been made to look more believable. The dinosaur movements seem jerky and abnormal. The climbing sequences are okay and do tend to generate a bit of suspense. Once they reach the top of the mountain looking for the lost rocket, things progress along rather nicely. I have seen this film in its original form and it appears that in new releases of this film, a brief sequence is missing. After the Sid Melton character is partially eaten by a triceratops, Sid, barely alive, asks Cesar Romero for a cigarette. Sid is given one and as Romero flicks his cigarette lighter, the flame dies. Talk about symbolism. That scene appears to be missing from recent releases!

Lechuguilla In its day this film probably did appeal to teenagers looking for some vicarious adventure. "Lost Continent" is your typical 1950's Saturday afternoon matinée movie. With all that walking and climbing the characters do, there's anticipation of what they might find, and that anticipation probably lent some tension to the plot for viewers back then. Furthermore, no one could have foreseen CGI. The film's dinosaurs thus were probably quite impressive to kids in those days.But, by current standards, "Lost Continent" is bland, unimaginative, slow, and hopelessly cheap looking. The story, about scientists who go in search of a downed rocket, is razor thin. It's really just a rehash of "The Lost World" (1925), except that in "Lost Continent", WWII rocket technology is the rationale for the exploration.The action takes forever to get going. There's lots of back story and routine human drama scenes, all of which could have been edited out. But in that case, the film's run time would have only been about thirty minutes.In addition to the thin story, another problem is the cinematography. In the many, many rock climbing scenes, there are too many close-up shots. Some distance shots would have provided at least some sense of vertigo, and therefore could have heightened the tension and suspense.As cinema entertainment, "Lost Continent" cannot compete with more recent sci-fi. The film now is little more than a historic relic of a bygone era when viewers were much easier to please.