Island of the Lost (1967)

Fresh and Exciting

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

And the most misleading poster award goes to ISLAND OF THE LOST . I mean if you've got a poster with a screaming face of a creature with yellow eyes , green skin and very sharp teeth you might think you're going to be watching a horror film . It really is a fantastic poster - for another film entirely and it's amazing if the marketing men didn't run in to any trouble with this . It's an incredibly stupid idea too because no responsible parent is going to let their children watch a gory horror . And yet ISLAND OF THE LOST is a Walt Disney type family film ! It wasn't until halfway through watching this family friendly non horror film that I realised I'd seen it many years ago one morning on ITV circa 1983 . It's hardly unforgettable must see cinema but the reason I remember it is because it's got some of the most bizarre monsters ever seen on the silver screen - vicious murderous ostriches with horns on their head , that kick their victims senseless and eat them alive which if nothing else shows an imagination of sorts even if it's by default . There is another jarring aspect and that is the teenage lad never resists the opportunity to play a tune while his siblings put on a sexy dance show Listen sonny these are your siblings you're drooling over . I suppose it could have been worse with the family shipwrecked in the Vatican or BBC television centre , but not much worse

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.

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.