Tag Archives: Dana Gillespie

IMAGINATOR MAGAZINE’S LOST WORLDS SPECIAL EDITION!

September 5, 2026 Ken Miller Leave a comment

Imaginator is much more like a book than a magazine: it is a journal-type publication that has a thick spine and boasts 116 pages crammed with colour photos, concept art, comic art, illustrations and storyboard panels! It will definitely look great on any bookshelf!

IMAGINATOR ISSUE 13 IS CURRENTLY ONLY AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE FROM THE MONSTER ZONE SITE – THE FIRST 40 ORDERS WILL GET A FREE LIMITED EDITION A4 POSTER BY IMAGINATOR MAGAZINE’S ARTIST ZILLA MAN!

IF YOU LIVE IN THE UK ORDER HERE:

Imaginator Issue 13 – To order if you’re in the UK

An issue devoted to the lost world sub-gentre! Interviews with Caroline Munro, Dana Gillespie, Kevin Connor, Joe Jusko, Brett Piper and more!

£22.99

IF YOU LIVE IN THE EU ORDER HERE:

Imaginator Issue 13 – To order if you’re in the EU

An issue devoted to the lost world sub-gentre! Interviews with Caroline Munro, Dana Gillespie, Kevin Connor, Joe Jusko, Brett Piper and more!

€34.99

IF YOU LIVE IN THE USA ORDER HERE:

Imaginator Issue 13 – To order if you’re in the USA

An issue devoted to the lost world sub-gentre! Interviews with Caroline Munro, Dana Gillespie, Kevin Connor, Joe Jusko, Brett Piper and more!

$42.40

Listen, if you find the cost (because of the postage) a bit too much, you’ll have to wait until this issue becomes available to purchase next month from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

THIS LOST WORLDS SPECIAL EDITION IS JAM-PACKED WITH GREAT ARTICLES AND INTERVIEWS, WITH A BIG SECTION DEVOTED TO EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS’ SAVAGELY FANTASTIC REALM OF PELLUCIDAR! LET’S CHECK OUT WHAT LIES WITHIN THE PAGES…

THE JOY OF LOST WORLDS
This article is an exploration of cinema’s wild and uncharted regions… zones populated by a myriad of exotic perils: Cavemen! Carnosaurs! Despotic queens! Killer plants! Ape gods! Giant crabs! Missing links! Biplane-chewing pterosaurs! Plesiosaurs! Unstable volcanoes! Lava! Lizard Men! Slurpasaurs! And so much more!

THE WILD WOMAN OF TWO LOST WORLDS
Dana Gillespie chats about dealing with killer seaweed, giant scorpions and cave-dwelling dinosaurs, as she recalls starring in The Lost Continent (1968) and The People That Time Forgot (1977)!

THE VALLEY OF GWANGI
Alan Friswell, the skilled conservator for The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation, praises Ray’s rip-roaring fantasy-western, and Alan also explains how he keeps the magnificent stop-motion denizens of Forbidden Valley looking as good as new!

A CONVERSATION WITH A CAVEMAN
Bobby Parr, who played amiable neanderthal Ahm in The Land That Time Forgot, enjoys remembering working with Doug McClure and he explains how he was carried away by a pterodactyl!

THE PERILS OF PELLUCIDAR
An overview of Pellucidar: the savage and timeless domain located at the centre of the Earth. It is a remarkable world inhabited by hostile tribes, lethal beasts from the dawn of creation, man-apes, pirates and cruel reptile rulers known as Mahars… and it all came from the fertile imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs! Imaginator takes a look at how Pellucidar has been portrayed in novels, magazines, comics, TV series and movies! Look out for Thipdars (pterosaurs), beautiful stone age women, drilling machines and more!

Frazetta's painting for At the Earth's Core

BEAUTIFUL BARBARIAN
Caroline Munro on when she starred as a primitive Pellucidarian princess in At the Earth’s Core, acting alongside Peter Cushing and Doug McClure! She also talks about her movies The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Starcrash (1978) and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)!

STOP-MOTION ADVENTURES AT THE EARTH’S CORE
Brett Piper chats about his fast-paced, entertaining all-puppet short film from 2025, which was an adaptation of the ERB classic yarn!

AUTHOR OF EPICS!
Win Scott Eckert tells Imaginator what it is like to dream up thrilling adventures and create all-new characters who are officially part of the Edgar Rice Burroughs expanded canon! His novels include Tarzan: Battle for Pellucidar and Korak at the Earth’s Core!

AT THE EARTH’S CORE UNFILMED
A look at Jim Danforth’s unproduced movie version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first-rate fantasy-adventure!

THRILLING GRAPHIC NOVEL GOODNESS!
Artist Jamie Chase discusses the creation of his action-packed graphic novel At the Earth’s Core – and he talks about his follow-up graphic novel too… Pellucidar!

THE MAN WHO TOOK US TO THE EARTH’S CORE!
This year is the 50th anniversary of the release of At the Earth’s Core, so Imaginator has tracked down director Kevin Connor to quiz him about the making this film. Kevin also speaks about Warlords of Atlantis, plus the production that Amicus didn’t get to make… a John Carter movie!

PELLUCIDAR UNFILMED
Ron Lizorty talks about his unmade project Pellucidar, and he shares with us storyboard panels, behind the scenes pics of Dian the Beautiful and photos of the prehistoric creatures he sculpted for the unproduced film. Ron also chats about working on Galaxy of Terror (1981) and brings along some behind the scenes photos for us to admire! Plus – Ron shares the concept art he produced when he was the Production Designer on David Allen’s sci-fi-fantasy lost world adventure movie The Primevals!

JOE JUSKO AT THE EARTH’S CORE
Legendary fantasy artist Joe Jusko speaks about some of the impactful Pellucidar-themed paintings he has produced over the years, including the superb Tarzan at the Earth’s Core book cover artwork he created for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Authorized Library! Joe shares some in-progress photos he took of his Tarzan at the Earth’s Core cover illustration as it was being painted, plus he lets Imaginator exclusively reproduce an updated version of a Thipdar-themed illustration he originally painted over 30 years ago!

MARVELLOUSLY MYSTERIOUS UNDERGROUND WORLDS
Stepping away from the subterranean world of Pellucidar, Imaginator Magazine checks out other fantasy domains lurking beneath the surface of our world, such as Jules Verne’s famous Journey to the Center of the Earth, the Hollow Earth of Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse movies, the mysterious land of Agartha in the uber-absurd flick Iron Sky: The Coming Race, the Sumerian civilisation residing beneath a mountain in the B-movie gem The Mole People, and other equally fabulous subterrestrial places…

THE HEART OF THE HOLLOW WORLD
Doug Lefler is a writer, a director, a skilled storyboard creator and a gifted artist. Here he explains why he invented a new kind of digital comics format, which allowed him to create a 24-chapter fantasy-sci-fi-adventure comic tale: The Heart of the Hollow World. Lots of yummy illustrations of gorgeous cave girls, robots, dinosaurs and steampunk drill machines are waiting for you to gaze at them!

LOST WORLD FILM REVIEWS
Movies reviewed include The Land Unknown, The Land That Time Forgot and The Last Dinosaur!

RADIOACTIVE REVIEWS
A final mini-review section looks at a film (and its tie-in book) that is not a lost world-themed story!

The Lost Continent (1968)

May 7, 2021 Ken Miller 9 Comments

Giant hermit crab! — Watch out for the pincers!

Giant hermit crab attacks — Crab attack!

The tramp steamer Corita sails towards a hurricane, which could prove more dangerous than usual because Captain Lansen (Eric Porter) is smuggling barrels of the explosive Phosphor B, which can detonate if mixed with water. His ship’s passengers, unaware of this explosive danger, are a varied bunch of characters who have their own reasons for sailing in this rust-heap of a ship.

A very sweaty Michael Ripper gets mutinous

After an accident causes a leak in the room that holds the explosives, some of the crew (including Hammer regular Michael Ripper) mutiny and leave in a lifeboat. Then, when it becomes apparent that a broken generator cannot be fixed, Captain Lansen decides the passengers and the remaining crew should also sail from the ship in a lifeboat.

After a death-by-flare-gun incident and a fatal shark attack, Lansen’s lifeboat becomes ensnared in a mass of killer seaweed, and the boat eventually drifts back to the still-afloat Corita, which is also surrounded by the almost sentient weed. Lansen and the others climb back aboard the tramp steamer as it floats towards a mysterious, seaweed-festooned ship’s graveyard littered with vessels from different time periods, including a Spanish galleon. In this mysterious, fog-shrouded zone of the Sargasso Sea, the protagonists will encounter weird monsters, the descendants of conquistadores & the Spanish Inquisition, fur-clad barbarian-types (working for the Spanish) and a young woman called Sarah (Dana Gillespie), who traverses the weed-scape using buoyancy balloons and snowshoe-type footwear!

As you can see by the above synopsis, THE LOST CONTINENT is a truly oddball, pulpy Hammer production. The film, directed by Michael Carreras, begins with an incongruously apt jazzy-lounge-pop theme tune by The Peddlers, then maybe spends too much time in the earlier part of the story delving into the melodramatic lives of the dubious passengers on board the tramp steamer. However, once the mutiny happens and the weed appears, this movie becomes luridly enjoyable!

‘Uncharted Seas’, the original Dennis Wheatley novel that THE LOST CONTINENT is based on, is nowhere near as enjoyably madcap as the movie adaptation: in the book the villains are descendants of slaves, whilst the movie boasts marooned conquistadors and their boy leader who, under the influence of his Spanish Inquisition mentor, feeds people who fail him to a rubbery Lovecraftian weed-monster in the hold of his stranded galleon!

The Inquisition in the galleon — The Inquisition likes very pointy hats!

The movie is purely set-based (apart from some Canary Islands landscape stock footage taken from ONE MILLION YEARS BC used during the credits), which gives the production a heightened sense of pulpy artifice, the whole cast takes the production very seriously, with Eric Porter on fine form as the captain and, oh yes, as mentioned earlier, you also get Dana Gillespie trudging across the surface of the weeds with the help of her harness of helium balloons! Suzanna Leigh adds more Hammer glamour and gets attacked by a tentacled, cyclopean octo-thing that leaves her covered in slime.
Weed-festooned madness!

As this blog is called Monster Zone, we’d better talk a little more about the monsters…

Weed attacks the ship interior — Watch out for the weed!

There are actually several types of weed in the film: the constricting seaweed that entraps vessels in the nicely-done, misty ship’s graveyard, there’s a more mobile weed-plant (with flowers) that gets into the ship via a porthole later in the story and, best of all, there’s the aforementioned plant-fungi thing that the Spanish Inquisition keeps in the hold of the galleon to gobble up people who displease them!

Robert Mattey’s creatures are criticised very often in reviews, and there’s no denying the glowing-eyed octo-creature is a bit iffy, though it does nicely exude green ooze from its severed foam tentacles.

Behind the scenes shot of the cyclopean octopus creature

The fight between a giant scorpion and a giant hermit crab on a small, rocky isle is pretty cool. These arthropod beasts are brought to life via full-scale mechanical models that I think look okay: I like the scorpion’s rapidly moving legs when it zips towards the crab to battle it. Though the full-scale hermit crab monster is less than mobile as a whole, it’s facial movements are really impressive: when you get a close-up of its rapidly chattering, beaky face I think it looks pretty good.

Close-up of the hermit crab's face — Close-up of the hermit crab’s face

Though I admit the film would definitely have benefitted from stop-motion critters (as, say, featured in Hammer’s ONE MILLION YEARS BC), this fog-enshrouded production is a sweaty, colourful, bizarre, pulp adventure treat.