Continente perdido

In its day this film probably did appeal to teenagers looking for some vicarious adventure. "Lost Continent" is your typical 1950's Saturday afternoon matinée movie. With all that walking and climbing the characters do, there's anticipation of what they might find, and that anticipation probably lent some tension to the plot for viewers back then. Furthermore, no one could have foreseen CGI. The film's dinosaurs thus were probably quite impressive to kids in those days.

But, by current standards, "Lost Continent" is bland, unimaginative, slow, and hopelessly cheap looking. The story, about scientists who go in search of a downed rocket, is razor thin. It's really just a rehash of "The Lost World" (1925), except that in "Lost Continent", WWII rocket technology is the rationale for the exploration.

The action takes forever to get going. There's lots of back story and routine human drama scenes, all of which could have been edited out. But in that case, the film's run time would have only been about thirty minutes.

In addition to the thin story, another problem is the cinematography. In the many, many rock climbing scenes, there are too many close-up shots. Some distance shots would have provided at least some sense of vertigo, and therefore could have heightened the tension and suspense.

As cinema entertainment, "Lost Continent" cannot compete with more recent sci-fi. The film now is little more than a historic relic of a bygone era when viewers were much easier to please.