Yesterday was my birthday and while reading through dozens of greetings on my Facebook page, I posted a couple of YouTube snippets that just felt like me … and which I wanted to make part and parcel of the day-long celebration.  We all have favorite movies and a difficult time ranking any kind of order but when you limit yourself to the movies you’d want shown on your birthday you really learn what’s important to you.  Top of my list was THE LOST CONTINENT (1968), a bizarro mash-up of SHIP OF FOOLS (1965) and THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975) that was an atypical choice even for the United Kingdom’s established house of horrors, Hammer Studios.  But therein lies its abundant charm.

I was 7 or 8 when I first saw THE LOST CONTINENT (1968) at a matinee at the Danielson Cinema.  Like so many “kiddie shows” of that era, this thing was wholly inappropriate for children.  End to end, there was leering sexuality a-go-go (from premarital sex to attempted rape), alcoholism (although the movie’s Big Time Drunk sobers up to become something like an action hero by the final fadeout), illegality on the part of the protagonists (smugglers!), swearing, and death, death, horrible death at every turn.  Why, before anybody even so much as sets a foot onto The Lost Continent proper, an Asian frycook is scalded with boiling water, a bursar is entangled in lifeboat guide ropes and has his skull smashed against the davit, another man is eaten by a shark in full view of his screaming daughter and yet another man is shot in the breadbasket with a Very pistol, the flare burning in his belly for several horrific seconds before he tips overboard into the sea to sink by dint of the dead weight of his own dastardy.  This movie is hardcore!

THE LOST CONTINENT was based on Dennis Wheatley’s 1938 novel Uncharted Seas.  Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out was also adapted by Hammer and shot more or less at the same time.  Planned as Hammer’s most expensive and lavish production to date, the film was entrusted first to veteran British director Leslie Norman (who had shot Hammer’s X: THE UNKNOWN back in 1956).  After only a couple days of shooting, however, producer Michael Carerras (who adapted the Wheatley novel under the alias of Michael Nash, actually the name of his gardener!) let Norman go and stepped in to take control.  Production was mounted at Elstree Studios, which boasted the largest water tank in all of Europe.  Despite its flagrantly adult coloring, THE LOST CONTINENT is what little boys are made of: ruined ships, giant man-eating mollusks, secret agents (in the person of Ben Carruthers, from John Cassavetes’ SHADOWS and Robert Aldrich’s THE DIRTY DOZEN), guns, boy-god-kings, explosives (don’t let it get wet!), mutiny on the high seas, robed religious fanatics, strangly sea vines and pretty girls, one of them with the giantest boobs I had ever seen.  As an adult, I can tell you objectively that the film is a glorious cross-genre romp, a Boy’s Own adventure ramped up to 11 and backed with an intoxicating Hammond organ score you’ll be humming until your dying day, peopled by an uncommonly fine cast of character actors (Eric Porter, Hildegard Knef, Tony Beckley, Nigel Stock) chosen from outside of Hammer’s standard repertory ranks (that number represented, however, by the presence of Michael Ripper and Jimmy Hanley, with Christopher Lee’s regular stand-in/stuntman Eddie Powell given a real acting part for a change).  Those classifications would have been beyond my ken at age 8.  All I knew was that THE LOST CONTINENT was wicked cool-ass and that the only thing that could have made this great thing greater would have been the inclusion of machine guns.  But I thought machines were needed in most movies back then and I wasn’t looking for things to criticize – I was too busy having my mind blown.  Forty years later and THE LOST CONTINENT still takes me there.

The entirety of THE LOST CONTINENT (not to be confused with the 1951 movie of the same name) is available for viewing on YouTube but I recommend renting the Anchor Bay disc from Netflix or GreenCine or some other DVD rental outfit online or on the street.  The colors and the scope of the thing really need to be appreciated on as big a screen as possible.  We’re talking forgotten worlds and forbidden rites – you don’t want to watch that on your iPhone.

Many years ago, an English professor friend of mine suggested to me that THE LOST CONTINENT owes as much to William Hope Hodgson as it does to Dennis Wheatley.  I haven’t had a chance to read Hodgson’s The Boats of Glen Carrig, but here’s an especially breathless summation:  “An Edwardian voyage of mystery and imagination as bizarre as Conan Doyle’s Lost World, as sinister and darkly shadowed as the most fevered and haunting creations of Edgar Allan Poe.”  (In Peter Jackson’s recent remake of KING KONG, he has his sailors encounter many horrific monsters before they ever get to the Mighty Kong – not the least of which are giant, man-slurping slugs.)  Hodgson was an avid seaman who was killed in action during World War I.  While props to Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island are likely due in both cases, the Hodgson novel was written decades before Uncharted Seas.  Hodgson’s short story “The Voice in the Night” has also been considered as the source for Ishirô Honda’s haunting and horrifying MATANGO (US: ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE, 1963).

Now there’s a double feature for you fans of lost worlds, uncharted seas and mysterious islands.  Imagine these two alternate realities meeting in the middle!