h boy, two lost worlds for the price of one?
Sign me up for one ticket, Jimmy boy, because you know a movie it’s good when it marketed the same way as grocery store coupon for breakfast cereals or boxes of cuetips.
It’s kinda funny too how curiously there wasn’t a Lost World adaptation (talking about the Conan Doyle book, obviously) in the 50s, so i guess, just in case, they doubled the worlds lost, just to give you more bang for your buck, or make you believe that only to get suckered into watching a dinosaur film that couldn’t even afford its own dinosaurs.
Leaving aside the dinosaurs/reptiles don’t show up until 45 minutes into this… 61 minutes film, this in independent production that literally borrows his dinosaur footage from One Million B.C., the 1940 film that will end up being mined of its of stock footage for decades, as in used not a quick reference to the olden days, just ripped off because they couldn’t afford the special effects for the prehistoric creatures they wanted to as a selling point on the poster.
Ironically the film is based on an original script by Boris Petroff, and that sadly make sense, “sadly” because this is pretty much an adventure movie about pirates, cargo ships and romance…. that veers into dinosaur island territory in the last act, as the pirates run away kidnapping a love interest of the “Protag” and by giving chase they wind up stranded on a volcanic island with dinosaurs.
Yeah, the plot – set in 1830 – sees a clipper ship, Hamilton Queen, helmed by a yankee pirate, Kirk Hamilton ( played by James Arness), sent from Salem to East Indies, encounter pirates, leading to “yankee-kun” stopping in Queensland to get his leg fixed. There he meets his love interest in a literal “farmer’s daugher”, Nancy, which infuriates a guy named Shannon, whom already had the hots for the girl, but the two will set rivarly aside when the pirates follow them there and kidnap not only Nancy but her little sister too, so they give chase to the pirates, and eventually, dinosaurs, with a big asterix attached to remember you this is a very cheap indipendent production.
I’d complain more about them not affording the dinosaurs… if this movie wasn’t so cheap they couldn’t afford a single Aussie accent, despite taking place mostly in Australia, so it’s no surprise the title it’s a massive lie as this low budget double knock-off has only 1 “lost world”, and as we said before, even that it’s arguable since it’s mostly stock footage from poor ol’ One Million B. C.
Actually, this can be explained as the production slapping 2 (or 3) episodes of a failed TV series clumped together and selling it as a film, it wouldn’t be the first or last time it happened, and given how it’s edited, the way it HEAVILY uses narration to plug up the many gaps in the stories shown, plus just the overall cheapish look, yeah, this might as well have been a repurposed slice of a cancelled TV series cut into the shape of a movie.
On the upside, the “throw it in who cares” approach this movie has works in its favour, as it tries to be the ultimate sci-fi adventure film, with pirates, dinosaurs, exotic locations, romance, every adventure film element you’d think of that makes an “adventure”, and i will say it’s not boring, it’s a cheap, low budget, uber-derivative film of his time, but the acting is decent enough, it’s short, just barely an hour of runtime, and while still sub-par and cheap, it’s an entertaining enough bit of old fashion fun.
Not one i really recommended, but one that’s also inoffensive, not that bad overall.
This was also the penultimate film by director Norman Dawn (almost a Bruno Mattei pseudonym), the last one being another low budget, stock footage using affair about big game hunters and amazons called Wild Women (not of the Wongo variety), released later the very same year.
So yeah, his film career suffered “death by snu snu”, indeed.
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