1968 brought what is probably the strangest film Hammer ever made, and certainly its strangest ’60s film—a movie that seems entirely out of sync with the times that produced it: The Lost Continent.
Hammer had an enormous success with its adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out and decided to follow it up with a version of another of his novels, Uncharted Seas. While he was one of the most popular adventure novelists of his day, Wheatley is mostly remembered today for the Hammer films based on his work. In fact, his career had already started to fade by the time Hammer made The Lost Continent.
If one had to try to describe The Lost Continent, it might be simplest to compare it to a pulpy adventure novel written in 1926. Certainly, the one movie that it most strongly resembles is 1975’s The Land That Time Forgot, which was also based on a pre-World War II adventure novel and offers a similar combination of thrills on the high sea, hidden worlds, and strange creatures.
In fact, except for a brief opening tease, the so-called lost continent does not appear until the film is halfway over. It starts with Captain Jensen (Eric Porter) trying to outrun the harbor police. His ship is overdue at the scrap yard; he’s smuggling a deadly cargo of white phosphorus, which explodes if it gets wet; and his passengers are all as desperate as he is. Before long, he finds himself dealing with a deadly storm, a hole in his hull, mutiny, and water rushing into a hold full of explosives.
It’s at this point, with Jensen, the surviving passengers and crew all adrift in a lifeboat, that the characters suddenly find themselves in an SF film. First they encounter carnivorous seaweed, then a strange lost world made of ships caught in the weed, then a girl crossing the seaweed wearing what looks like snowshoes and two big balloons on her shoulders. There are mutant monsters and even the Spanish Inquisition
The Lost Continent is an odd and decidedly old-fashioned mixture of disparate elements. While it has not been well regarded over the years, it’s gradually acquired a cult status of sorts—and a deserved one, as it manages to deliver its share of pulpy thrills, if only to those willing to wait for the lost continent’s arrival.
As the ’60s progressed, Hammer grew increasingly desperate. The market shifted towards subtler contemporary horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Haunting. Hammer responded with a series of increasingly bizarre offerings: from naked lesbian vampires to modern-dress Dracula films (one of which features gun-toting thugs dragging Dr. Helsing into a high-rise office building to confront Dracula!) to a kung-fu-Chinese-vampires-meet-Dracula movie.
Moon Zero-Two, Hammer’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey has more than a hint of desperation about it. Billed as “the first Moon Western,” it offers a heady mix of detailed and mostly accurate space flight with a very familiar story about claim-jumpers on the moon. It even has a heroine named Clementine, although actor Catherine Schell is far too elegant and European for a Western.
The film’s animated opening credits distance it from the Cold War concerns of Hammer’s earlier SF, although they have little relationship to the rest of the film. In that opening, two astronauts, one American and one Russian, vie to see who gets to claim the moon—a long, comic sequence set to the film’s psychedelic theme song. Only the astronauts wind up finding that businessmen have already landed and turned the moon into a big tourist trap, forcing them to flee together.
Perhaps these animated figures are meant to represent the film’s American hero and his Russian co-pilot, forced to fly an ancient salvage ship because no one is exploring space any more; everyone is too busy making money. Moon Zero-Two offers extravagant ’60s design, dancing girls in the local saloon, colorful spacesuits, and a female sheriff. Oddly, despite the accuracy of the rest of the film, it also includes artificial gravity and ray guns.
Long neglected, Moon Zero-Two has also assumed cult notoriety, largely thanks to its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It may be absurd, but it’s also absurdly entertaining, thanks as always to Hammer’s innate professionalism.
Hammer’s all-too-brief career of producing the classiest exploitation films ever made slowed to a halt over the next decade, ending finally on television in the ’80s. The company left behind a legacy of great films: horror, suspense, mystery, adventure—and even SF.
In an era when SF had lost its luster, Hammer deserves credit for bringing so many SF films to the screen, even if they do reflect the confusion that had overtaken the film genre. One can only wonder about the films Hammer couldn’t get made: the fourth Quatermass film and its adaptation of 1961’s British SF television serial, A for Andromeda.
Despite the huge success of 2001 and the rush of films that tried to cash in on it, the film industry did no better than Hammer did in finding a new audience for SF film in the late ’60s and early ’70s. That would have to wait until the late ’70s and Star Wars and Alien.
But that’s another story.
About the Author
Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (”Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”).
To Save Ourselves: A Conversation with Nancy Kress
Jeremy L. C. Jones
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress opens with a deformed teenage boy kidnapping a baby from a hysterical mother. The boy, Pete, has come from the future, using alien technology, to save the baby from the ecological disaster that will soon befall the world she lives in.
Pete is also stealing the child to bolster the gene pool of the future, to bring a fertile human into a time when 26 humans, most of them infertile, fight to keep the human race alive.
The 26 are lead by the brilliant McAllister and live in the Shell, which is sparsely furnished habitat created by the Tesslies, an alien race they believe to be responsible for the devastation of the world.
The novel weaves three timelines: 2013, 2014, and 2035. The 2013 story arc follows Julie Kahn, a mathematician consulting for the FBI. Along with Special Agent in Charge Gordon Fairford, Kahn has noticed a pattern to a series of kidnappings and burglaries and developed predictive algorithms. In 2014, there’s unusual geological activity under the Yellowstone Caldera and in the Cannery Islands; K. planticola, a mutating bacteria, secretes too much alcohol and kills plants at the roots. In 2035, the majority of humankind is infertile.
Nancy Kress is the best-selling author of more than two dozen books. She has written novels, such as Beggars in Spain, Dogs, Probability Space, and Steal across the Sky, as well as short story collections and books about writing. Her next book, Flash Point, is due out from Viking in the fall.
Many of Kress’ stories, long and short, involve genetics and speculations about the near future. She blends scientific rigor with intensely human characters. The result is often intensely intimate, and always character-driven. Kress has won the Campbell, Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards, among others.
Below, Kress talks about After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, writing, teaching, Gaia, and giving something back to the field. Be forewarned: Some events of the book will be revealed.
In the first pages of After the Fall, we meet Pete,who’s kidnapping a baby. And yet it’s easy to instantly sympathize with him. How did you do that?
[Laughs.] I don’t know. I got a review from a newspaper somewhere that compared McAllister to Fagin [from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist], teaching this band of juvenile delinquents to steal and I thought, “That’s not exactly the book I wrote.”
[Pete and the other survivors] are trying to ensure the survival of the human race and also save these children from the destruction that they know is coming. And that’s not exactly what Fagin is doing. Pete’s basically a good kid. He has grown up with an odd set of morals. Th
ey’re the morals that fit the situation and, from the outside, his actions probably look despicable, stealing a baby from a hysterical mother, but I wanted to show how it looks to him, on the inside. Maybe that’s why he’s coming across as sympathetic. I’m glad that he is, because I had a lot of sympathy for him. They’re doing the best they can in an impossible situation.
The novel seems to hinge on McAllister’s wanting Pete to not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Right, that’s part of it. The other thing is that I almost never—I was thinking about this the other day—I almost never write villains and there really aren’t any villains in this book. McAllister and her band of “juvenile delinquents” are not villains. The Tesslies are actually trying to rescue what they can and keep this planet going on their own peculiar terms. Julie’s not a villain. Gordon’s not a villain. The only villain, I guess if you want to count it, is the planet, and it’s just going to preserve itself by getting rid of whatever is making conditions [not conducive to] life and, in the moment, that’s us.
Then what do you bounce the protagonist off of?
Sometimes himself, sometimes the fact that humans being being what we are, want conflicting things, and you can’t have both, clashes like love versus loyalty, duty versus love, those kinds of things. Sometimes it’s bad guys. I won’t say I never do villains. But the kind of pure evil villain that’s so common in SF, I just don’t buy. There’s a couple of those guys in history, but not very many. Most people are doing what seems to them reasonable at the time.
It seems like McAllister does everything she can to prevent the kids from thinking in terms of villains. In the end, though, we find out that she has made an assumption about the Tesslies that casts them as villains.
Yes, she made a mistake. She, and everybody else in the Shell, thought the Tesslies had destroyed the earth, and it turns out, of course, that they hadn’t. She has made a misassumption. The book is full of misassumptions. People have assumed the wrong thing in a number of places and that was one thing I was going for.
Where did you start After the Fall? What came first?
[Laughs.] It started with the Gaia theory from James Lovelock which came out in the ’70s, and which now has pretty much fallen into some disrepute, but I was always fascinated by it. I got his book and I read it, and his basic theory is that the earth can be considered as a large self-regulating, non-conscious entity adjusting itself endlessly to make conditions possible for life. For instance, with all the salt that’s washed down into the ocean from the rivers over the millennia, it should be saltier than it is, but it isn’t. There are mechanisms for removing the salt down on the ocean floor, and locking it up in a way that the ocean doesn’t get too salty to support fish, to support life, so that cells don’t burst. And this has turned around in my mind for 30 years now, and at one point it came to me, “Well, if the earth is trying to remove conditions that are inimical to life, the thing on it right now that’s the most inimical to life is probably us, with the climate change, pollution, and dead zones in the ocean.” I thought, “What if the earth started to fight back?”
And that’s an idea, that’s not a character. Usually characters come to me first. But in this case, the idea came to me first and it came through rational thinking. The part that did not come through rational thinking was Pete, because the characters never do. They sort of pop into my mind. I saw what he was trying to do. He was trying to get kids from the past. And the first scene, as often happens when I write, came almost full, and I wrote it down. After I get a first scene, I have to look at it and think, “Okay, where does this go from here? How does this first scene and this idea become a story?”
Did Pete surprise you at all while you were writing After the Fall?
All my characters surprise me. I didn’t realize he was in love in a 15-year-old-boy sort of way with McAllister, but that came out as I was writing. I didn’t realize that he was going to have quite so many 15-year-old-boy sulks, but that came out, too, as I was writing. I grew quite fond of Pete.
It seems as though Pete and of Julie may be working at cross-purposes.
Well, Julie is the grownup. Pete is the 15-year-old, floundering around, prey to his emotions, doing the best he can, making mistakes, flying off the handle. Julie makes rational decisions based on whatever information she has and she has the adult emotions of wanting to protect and care for her daughter [Alicia]. And Julie’s reliable, which Pete certainly isn’t. They’re not really working at cross-purposes. Pete is trying to save his world and Julie is trying to save her daughter, which is all she can save as her own world.
How on earth does Julie make the decision to give up Alicia?
At first, she just intends to try to confront Pete and maybe stop him. Then as she realizes what is happening [in the natural world], she has to be try to get the truth. When she realizes what the truth is, she wants to go with him. And when she realizes she can’t go, at least she can send Alicia. But her initial impulse is to take herself and Alicia, because our initial impulse is always to save ourselves and our children. Incidentally, if the Canary Islands ever did blow in that way, you would get a five-hour warning for a tidal wave that would roll across the Atlantic. I did a lot of research for this story. The science is reasonably accurate.
Are there places where you had to tinker with the science a little, bend the rules?
The Canary Islands blowing is controversial. Half of it did sheer off at one point in history and it did cause a massive tidal wave. I moved the fault line a little bit, so that when the mountain sheers and slides, it does set off the kind of an earthquake that in turn sets off the tsunami. It’s at least theoretically possible. So it isn’t that I changed the science, but I took the most drastic possible view.
I had known some of the science beforehand. As soon as I started writing and researching, I had a nice file of interesting material. The Canary Island tsunami was there; the fact that the Yellowstone Caldera could blow at any time was there. And in this file I also had the K. planticola, the bacteria that creates too much alcohol. It’s a common form that is on plants already. They did try in Germany to create an alternate version that would convert plant waste to alcohol as a byproduct, and they found out that it would kill all the plants, so they obviously didn’t do anything with it. It never got out of the lab. But because it was in my file, it was something I could do something with. I was thinking about it.
And also, at the time I was writing this, Science News came out with a follow-up on the Iceland volcano. So I thought, “Well, that’s interesting, too. I can use more volcanoes like that.” [Laughs.] So I looked around until I found information on that. Science fiction writers, they do two things. First of all, they take the things that don’t ordinarily go together and stick them together. And secondly, they try the best they can to make a little bit of knowledge look like a lot of knowledge. Those are two completely necessary tools for science fiction writing.
You move among three time lines and points of view in After the Fall. Did you write each chapter in the order they appear?
The first part appears in the order I wrote it. And then, for the second half, I was going on a roll with Pete, so I set Julie aside and I wrote all of the rest of his sections up till the end. Then I went back and wrote all of Julie’s sections up till the final scene. This is the way I always write. I never really know how things are going to turn till I’m halfway through. When I don’t know where I’m going, I kind of have to follow along and try different paths.
Are you ever going to return to these characters, to Pete and McAllister and Alicia and the rest?
I haven’t thought about it, but you never know. It’s possible. There’s a bunch of them now loose on the planet trying to restart civilization. Incidentally, one of the characters that I had most fun writing was Darlene: the acerbic and unrepentant Christian who keeps assuming that everything is Satan’s work. [Laughs.] If you’re going to pick up a random assortment of people, the way the Tesslies did
, snatching whoever happened to be alone and available, you’re going to end up with a couple strange people in the group. I could return to them, yeah.
Flash Point comes out in the fall?
Yes. It’s a YA science fiction set on near-future earth, and it’s about teens who are involved in a reality show. That one started with a character. I had in my mind this really desperate teenage girl, in—it’s not a dystopian U.S., but it’s a U.S. in a bad economic slump, even worse than the one we are in—and her parents are dead, she has a young sister she’s trying to support and a grandmother who was supporting them both and is now dying, and this girl desperately needs a job. So I started with her in a position where she’s applying along with several hundred other girls for a job and the story went from there.
Was writing YA terribly different than writing for an older audience?
No, it really wasn’t. YA has changed so much that there really isn’t much of a line anymore, except that the protagonists are teenagers. You’re allowed sex, you’re allowed violence, you’re allowed all kinds of stuff.
Sounds like there’s a similarity between the protagonist of Flash Point and Pete from After the Fall—desperation and the balancing of the needs of family and of the individual. Is there a lot of Pete in this new character?
This girl is much different. She’s very smart. She’s educated in terms of our world, anyway. She’s much more worldly. She’s much more knowledgeable than from Pete. And she’s functioning in a world she understands.
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