LOST CONTINENT (1951)
Article #469 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-27-2002
Posting date: 11-20-2002

A military expedition is undertaken to recover information from a lost missile that crashed on its test run. The expeditioners discover a prehistoric land on their quest.

This cold-war take on the Lost World theme starts out with an appealing group of actors (Cesar Romero, John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, Sid Melton, and Hugh Beaumont are all on hand) with some not uninteresting characters. Unfortunately, once the expedition begins, it finds precious little to do with them. The stop-motion animated dinosaurs don’t appear until about three-quarters through the film (and they’re no better than so-so at best), and until then, we have scene after scene of them walking through the jungle or climbing the mountain, broken up by scenes of them talking to one another, and their characters aren’t quite interesting enough to compensate for the lack of a story for most of the middle of the movie. It almost feels as if the dinosaurs were thrown in to try to spice up a dull script, rather than the story revolving around the dinos in the first place. There are some nice individual moments, but its a dull ride between them.