In today’s Shocktober Double Feature, we will be awestruck by rampaging dinosaurs, the always-scrumptious Hillary Brooke, disintegrating gravity plates, and a pre-Jaws Richard Kiel! It’s Lost Continent and The Phantom Planet!
LOST CONTINENT (1951)
Lost Continent is a film that I used to love as a kid but hadn’t seen in over 40 years. I still remembered parts of it vividly, however, especially the gripping image of a man falling to his doom through a covering of cloud, and wondered if it would hold up all these years later. The answer: well, partly. In this one, the prototype of an atomic rocket crashlands on a mountain plateau in the South Pacific, and Air Force pilot Cesar Romero is called on to ferry scientists Whit Bissell, John Hoyt and Hugh Beaumont (six years pre-Beaver) to the site, along with a few others. After a protracted but nonetheless suspenseful climb up the steep mountainside, which the band accomplishes with only ropes (and no pitons or carabiners!) – a climb that takes up more than 1/3 of the picture – our heroes make it to the top and discover a suddenly green-tinted world, populated with prehistoric critters. Although the switch from B&W to that greenish hue IS pretty nifty, it must be said that these dinosaurs are brought to life by the filmmakers using what might be the lamest stop-motion photography ever committed to film; 1925’s The Lost World did a better job at this! Still, cheaply put together as it is, Lost Continent is mighty fun to watch, mainly because the leads are so appealing and convincing. The presences of yummy ’50s gals Hillary Brooke and Acquanetta in bit roles don’t hurt, either. Although the dinosaurs-on-an-island bit had been better handled three years earlier in Unknown Island, and the notion of going after a crashlanded rocket over dangerous terrain would be dealt with infinitely better in 1968’s Ice Station Zebra (and even in the 1963 Bob Hope comedy Call Me Bwana), this film still has a pulpy appeal that manages to strike a chord in me 40 years later. Watch it with the kiddies one night. Oh … nice-looking print on the DVD that I just watched, too!
THE PHANTOM PLANET (1961)
The Phantom Planet is a film that comes off like a cross between Gulliver’s Travels in space and an old Flash Gordon episode. In this one, Dean Fredericks plays Frank Chapman, a moon-based astronaut who crashlands onto a wandering asteroid whilst searching for some missing men. He breathes in the asteroid’s atmosphere and, swifter than you can say “Jonathan Swift,” is shrunk down to six-inch size; the same size as the other Lilliputian-like inhabitants of this world of Rheton, as it turns out. Silent-film star Francis X. Bushman, here in his late 70s, plays the leader of the Rheton folk, and gives Chapman a tour of their underground civilization. Soon enough, viewers are also treated to a duel between Chapman and a jealous Rhetonite – during which each tries to shove the other onto disintegrating gravity plates! – and a nifty space battle between the Rheton people and the Solarites. These latter aliens flounce around through space in ships that look like scraps of flaming paper, and physically look a bit like the Metalunan mutant from sci-fi champ This Island Earth (1955), although their precise appearance beggars my poor powers of description. Richard Kiel, 16 years pre-Jaws, plays one of these Solarites, and is completely unrecognizable. Anyway, this movie is shlocky and cheaply made, but the FX are quite good enough, the camera-work and elegant background music often conspire to produce an eerie, almost poetic feel, the actors play things straight and the dialogue is rarely laughable. For you sci-fi-loving horndogs out there, there are many miniskirted Rhetonite babes to gape at, as well. It’s hard to defend a film this pulpy, fantastical and logic defying, but I must still say that I enjoyed watching it. The Maltin book deems this a “fascinatingly terrible movie,” but I think the editors there are being way too mean-spirited. Oh … a really nice-looking print on the DVD that I recently watched, too!
COMING ATTRACTIONS: The mariphasa flower! Lycanthropy! Boris Karloff! Vera Day! It’s Werewolf of London and The Haunted Strangler, in the Shocktober Double Feature #12…
“Rock climbing, Joel”