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 Captain Lansen attempts to transport some illegal explosives and some misfit
type passengers on his "rusty tramp steamer". They all get stranded in the
swamp of the "mysterious" Sargasso Sea. When night falls they must confront
"unspeakable monsters, man-eating seaweed, vicious mutant pirates and
stupendously endowed women". They claim that the DVD contains eight minutes of
footage cut by the distributor due to its "adult content." 1969, 97 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
First we had to address some technical problems we encountered when we popped
the disc in. The movie started playing and I noticed that everyone seemed to be
kind of scrunched up. I also noted that this picture was not letterboxed as had
been advertised. So I sat there for a few minutes, then I pulled out the DVD
player's instruction manual and figured out I needed to go in and change the
settings because this thing was somehow set for a widescreen TV. After that was
done, everything was fine (not counting the movie that was to follow). Now,
with proper letterboxing appearing, I settled in to enjoy this tale of killer
seaweed. Then the theme song played. Yes, there was a theme song and this theme
song like all good theme songs managed to work in the title of the movie into
the chorus. You aint heard nothing until you hear some lounge singer croon
about "the Lost Con-ti-nehhhhhhnt." It reminded of some those awful James Bond
songs where they had to put the stupid title into the song (notice they didn't
do that with Octopussy ?). This song seemed to go on and on as most bad songs do. Then it ended and
we met the steely-eyed Captain Lansen.  Captain Lansen is one of those outlaw types who decides that he's going to
make just one more smuggling run and then get out of the business for good,
retiring to some sunny island and the good life. Like most people who decide to
make "just one more run" and get out of the business, he picks a fairly risky
proposition. First, he decides to smuggle contraband (not too bad an idea),
then decides it will be illegal explosives (starting to get iffy, Captian), and
these explosives blow up everything if they come into contact with water
(moving into "stupid" territory) and he will do so on his rusty tramp steamer
in the middle of a hurricane (oh, we have some lovely parting gifts, thanks for
playing!). Along for the ride on this floating powderkeg is a group of loser
passengers who are all taking the ship because of some dark secret in their
past that no one really cares about and that doesn't really merit taking a
rusty tramp steamer loaded with water-sensitive explosives in the middle of a
hurricane. Lansen's crew discovers the explosives and get all mad about it (there were
hundreds of barrels of the stuff, who loaded it all? The Captain?). The wussy
first officer says he will take care of it and asks the Captain about it and
Lansen says, "yep, it's explosives" and then the first officer wants to turn
back because of the hurricane. So Cap Lansen does what any good helmsman would
do in that situation - he puts it to a vote of the passengers! Well, since the
movie is only about 30 minutes in at this point, they vote unanimously to
continue on into the hurricane. The first officer is outraged and he and the
crew have their own little vote. They are unanimous in their vote to mutiny!
The mutiny consists of them getting into one of the lifeboats while the Cap
shoots one of the mutineers in the back. Then the ship takes on water. So the
Captain and the passengers abandon ship into another life boat. Then the float
off into the fog for awhile. The next morning one of the passengers gets eaten
by a shark (durn!) and the Captain notices that there sure is a lot of strange
looking seaweed with its own creepy music. He picks some of it up and it
immediately wraps itself around his wrist and begins squeezing and squeezing
and then it tries to squeeze that thing clean off. Lansen's hand is bleeding
now and he barely gets the killer seaweed off of his ripped up hand. Then he
says something like, "I've never run across anything like that before." That's
the cool head we like to see in a sea captain! Then just in case we didn't get
the point, some dude in the lifeboat falls into the swampy water with all this
seaweed and is devoured before our disbelieving eyes!  They float around for awhile and luckily run smack dab into their old boat
which apparently didn't sink after all. They get back aboard the ship and we
are subjected to some attempted character development when the passengers
blather about their stupid little problems. I immediately began placing bets on
who would get eaten by the one-eyed octopus that was slithering around on deck.
Then some mutant pirates show up. They're wearing these snow shoe things and
giant balloons on their heads for some reason (I guess so they can walk across
the killer seaweed, but where did they get the helium for their balloons?).
What follows is a big fight where the pirates get shot a lot by our heroes.
These mutant pirates retreat back to their galleon (they're descendants of the
conquistadors) and our heroes rescue a stupendously endowed young lady. She
goes back home to her island so some our dummy heroes follow her (why?). On the
island we see a titanic battle between a giant scorpion and a giant crab! That
sounds really cool, right? Um, unfortunately these two giant epic beasts look
like a couple of floats from the homecoming parade (are there any tri-delts in
the house?). The big battle ends when one of the humans shoots the crab in an
eye and the scorpion gets bored and leaves. The mutant pirates capture some of the passengers and take them to their
leader, El-Supreme-o (that's really his name). This Supreme-o guy is really
just some pimply-faced kid that follows the orders of some hooded jerk named
the Inquisitor. To show how mean these pirates are they dump one of their own
into a pit where the guy gets eaten by what could only be described as a big
spiny vagina (ahh, we should all be so lucky). Well, as you might expect, a
rescue mission is mounted and there is an apocalyptic, epic, climatic all out
battle to the death highlighted by El-Supreme-o getting El-Dead-o when the
Inquisitor literally stabs him in the back and then our heroes launch the
illegal explosives at the galleon from catapults they've put on rafts. Then
there's lots of explosions to end the flick. The movie does an decent job of
generating some degree of atmosphere as it seems to have been filmed in a lot
of reds and rusts and makes everything seem vaguely mysterious, at least until
they trot out the parade floats. The characters are complete dullards that you
wish would get dumped into the spiny vagina ASAP, except for Captain Lansen who
remains non-plussed by all of this. Bottom line on this one? See buxom women
decked out in gigantic snow shoes! Watch as hapless men are fed to spiny
vaginas! Cringe as 97 minutes of your life disappear forever!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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