Island of the Lost

Wow this one was weird. I didn't know what to expect, but I was in for an unforgettable adventure....Unforgettable doesn't mean good.

All jokes aside I liked it, but It was without a doubt stupid. A scientist sets off to find an island which everyone but him doesn't believe to exist . He knows if he finds it that he will find "the missing link". What he finds is amazing to him and his family, but to me setting at home watching TV I laughed out loud. Killer ostriches with little spikes on their head and an alligator with some weird ass helmet on its head and they're suppose to be prehistoric.

The headhunters could've added so much to the story, but they are about as funny as the "creatures". Fun movie, I love when they're so bad that they're good...this is the epitome of that.

Don't miss this one - wish I could change my vote, I might go as far as 8 LOL

There's nostalgic charm if you're a fan of the films of this era. I happen to hugely admire the Ivan Tors film and TV projects. This is possibly a script from the 1950s, as it was co-written by actor Richard Carlson, who made SF films with Tors in the 1950s. It's certainly creaky stuff that seems outdated even by the mid-1960s when it was made. It's far more a fantasy than the usual Tors material, which strove for believability and achieved it. This doesn't. The animal sequences, which were always top-notch in Tors films thanks to trainer Ralph Helfer (inventor of affection training), but here they are awkwardly shot and silly. The cast is likable but the script is just not up to making anything work to its advantage.

In hindsight, I am not sure why I watched this movie. After all, it really has nothing going for it. In fact, it's such a cheap film that I wonder why it ever went to DVD.

The film stars Richard Greene as a really, really stupid professor. He decides to pack off his kids and head on an ocean voyage of discovery. So, he packs off his two girls (one very young), a friend, a college student and a sea lion (yes, a sea lion) and heads on a very long trip in his sailboat. Now I am NOT against boats and family adventures, but this guy seemed a bit flighty to put everyone at risk like this.

Since the film is called "Island of the Lost", it isn't surprising that sooner or later the group will land on an uncharted island and have lots of freaky adventures. The island, it turns out, is full of supposedly extinct animals. This actually means that the filmmakers took animals such as gators and birds and 'embellished them'--sticking cardboard pieces on them here and there to make them look primordial. Well, at least that was the intention. It just came off as very cheap and silly.

In addition to the silly animals, the island features volcanoes and savage natives--or at least some of them are savage...kind of. In fact, none of the stuff they encounter seems that interesting and mostly it's just Greene saying things like "...wow...there's a archaeotperixis coelocanthis..." or "...look out...they look like head hunters..."---and delivering the lines like he's delivering a lecture to a group of coeds. The acting isn't 100% terrible, though it isn't good--and this pretty much can be said about everything--the direction, camera-work and overall production. The bottom line is that it's bad but not bad enough to be funny....just dull and silly.

As of May 2011, this film is available on Netflix. Great scenery.

Jose De Vega is also in this film. This was made six years after he played a Hawaiian buddy of Elvis in Blue Hawaii. But he was Filipino and Colombian. So he played various ethnic rolls on television and also in the movies.

Lots of beautiful tropical scenery. But I keep remembering this was filmed in the area of West Palm Beach, FL. I am not sure why I ordered this DVD. It could have been because of Ivan Tors. He was the producer of Flipper. So all of the underwater scenes and "trained seal" scenes might have a familiar look about them. Only this time, there is a seal instead of Flipper.

Luke Halpin from Flipper is also a son in this flick. Not much of a part, though.

I saw this on late-night television when I was a boy. I remember telling my older brother that the only realistic actor was the wooden sailboat at the beginning. He laughed and said there must be something good in the rest of the film. I replied, "Well the sailboat makes a brief reappearance, as wreckage." In the many decades since, I had long forgotten the name of this gem. A decade ago, much like looking up a High School girlfriend, I searched Google, probably using terms like "Wrecked sailboat movie". That gave this title as a likely candidate, but I was not sure. And today, on this fine day, I looked up the title and found a bootleg on the intertube. What joy, this is that same rotten film from my youth. And it's even worse than I remembered. Interesting to see it is "outside art' from the Flipper TV show people. It gives me some appreciation for Roger Corman and the Troma gang. Maybe living in LA lets some talent in by osmosis, there was not much in Florida or the Bahamas, at least not in 1967.

I have always had an affinity for movies. I would always watch them to the end, even the bad ones. This movie was so bad, I finally learned some movies are unwatchable. Indeed, just a couple days ago I switched off Triangle of Sadness, which is far worse than this movie.

When I was a boy, you had to wait until 3:00 AM to see a low budget movie. Now they are just a click or two away.