D/S [as Michael Nash]/P: Michael Carreras. Novel: “Uncharted Seas” by Dennis Wheatley. Cast: Eric Porter, Hildegard Knef, Tony Beckley, Suzanna Leigh, Nigel Stock, Dana Gillespie. UK dist (DVD): Studio Canal.

Leslie Norman, who turned in the workmanlike X-the Unknown for Hammer in 1956, was apparently replaced early on as director of The Lost Continent by writer/producer Michael Carreras; some might call that a narrow escape. Adapted from an atypical potboiler by Dennis Wheatley (who apparently couldn’t – or wouldn’t – remember having written it), this was the first of several deliriously wrong-headed Hammer experiments from the ambitious Carreras; as with the oddball Moon Zero Two the following year, it’s hard to see what sort of audience he imagined would flock to this muddled fever dream. Kids and adults alike will be bored stupid by the seemingly endless shipboard squabbles and decidedly minor intrigues of the first 40 minutes, while the fantasy elements (once they actually arrive) are so haphazardly assembled that they have little impact beyond a straightforward What The Christ Was That??

What we have here are two halves of two very different films, spliced crudely together. The first half is hardly worth describing, a static and talky intro to the surly and hateful assortment of wretches who will later (much later) find themselves flung into the demented second half; illegal smuggling of explosives across the Sargasso Sea by mercenary ship’s captain Eric Porter is pretty much all we need to know. One presumes Carreras’s intention was to craft a cynical, hard-edged “voyage of the damned” adventure movie for grown-ups, with redemption-through-action offered to the human flotsam marooned aboard this ship of fools. But when the characters are this horrid, who cares if they finally pull themselves together and do the right thing? Tony Beckley sneers camply as Violent Alcoholic, Suzanna Leigh sneers sexily as Rich Slut, Nigel Stock sneers sweatily as Disgraced Surgeon, etc etc. Practically the only non-sneerer aboard is Hildegard Knef (as Abandoned Shopworn Mistress); she’s merely boring.

Just as the viewer is on the verge of coma, a giant octopoid monstrosity (complete with bulbous glowing domed “head” and a single glaring green eye) climbs up the side of the ship to drag one of the doomed passengers away in its tentacles and suddenly everything goes ape. From this point on, The Lost Continent shifts up several gears and becomes a psychedelic monster-adventure riot, replete with carnivorous seaweed, pirates, wrecked galleons, despotic child-kings, giant sea creatures and the Spanish Inquisition (whom nobody expects at the best of times, but here…well). This reviewer’s eyes nearly fell out of his head at the sight of an elephantine sea-mollusc going claw-to-claw with a vast scuttling scorpion-thing, observed by a similarly disbelieving band of humans gawping from the sidelines. As for the “bilge-monster” used by the Spanish villains to dispose of feckless minions… “Astonishing” doesn’t begin to cover it. And as if all that wasn’t enough to contend with, there’s the constant goggle-spectacle of Dana Gillespie’s breasts in a life-or-death struggle with an overtaxed blouson. Stap me vitals.

A more charitable reviewer might stoop to praise Carreras for the uncanny prescience of his imaginative vision: for in The Lost Continent we see the antecedent of the Dark/Connor/McClure dino-fantasies (The Land That Time Forgot, et al), Michael Ritchie’s yaar-Jim-lad hoot The Island (1980) and even a couple of George Lucas’s sillier alien beasties (see bilge-monster reference above). But the whole enterprise is hampered by a ramshackle arbitrariness which renders praise null and void. What the hell is the point of it all? Bickering characters, curiously inappropriate jazz-lounge score (by Gerard Schürmann, replacing one originally commissioned from Benjamin Frankel), a plot that’s at once simple-minded and hard to follow and a climax that wants to be spectacular but falls disappointingly short… To call this a strange brew would be an understatement: Carreras’s Old Peculiar is definitely an acquired taste, and recommended only for hardened drinkers with nothing to lose.