Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Leofwine_draca Irwin Allen's version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World is very much in the spirit of 1959's JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH, with double-crosses, character revelations, back-projected giant lizards with fins and frills made out to be dinosaurs, and lots of bubbling lava come the finale. Unfortunately it's nowhere near equal to the status of that acknowledged classic, saddled with grating characters, very dated, and very much a product of its time. The excellent, atmospheric set design (including spooky jungles and fiery caves) and the reliance on an action-orientated plot to keep the film moving at all times makes it watchable, escapist B-film fun with a budget larger than usual, nothing more.The cast is also pretty good, with not one but two heavyweight performances listed. The first is Claude Rains who excels as the short-tempered, reporter-beating Professor Challenger, and considering his age at the time Rains does a brilliant job, really fitting into the character. Michael Rennie is big-game hunter Lord Roxton but you can't help feeling his performance is a little wooden here and there - perhaps his outstanding turn in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL was a one-off, or maybe he could only play one type of character skilfully. Whatever, he seems miscast here and out of place. David Hedison (brother of THE FLY's Al) has the uninteresting role of the young macho reporter/adventurer and makes a fist of what is pretty much an inconsequential part. Sadly, as with other adaptations of the Doyle story, superfluous characters have been grafted in to make the relationships a bit more complex - even a poodle! Jill St. John is the annoyingly feisty red-haired companion and what is it with that irritating voice of hers? The jabbering natives and sweaty diamond-seeking Mexican character reek of racism and are an unfortunate by-product of the period.I was elated to see the name of the pioneer of stop-motion animation, Willis O'Brien, appear in the credits but alas this is a deceit, as there is no stop-motion in the movie. Instead we get some rubbishy effects of enlarged lizards with spikes and frills glued on to their bodies in place of real dinosaurs and the effect is less than convincing. There is one exception, a shot at the end where a wiggling man is trapped in the jaws of these reptiles and he's certainly not a dummy, and I'm still curious as to how that particular shot was achieved. Cheap thrills come from giant spiders and killer plants but these can only be enjoyed on a so-bad-it's-good level, as the effects have dated that much. Fun does come from watching a few errors, like the hilarious action man falling down a cliff at the end or the dinosaur egg which breaks and turns out to be hollow with a lizard inside! There's also a fist-fight between Hedison and Rennie with hilarious dubbed-in punching noises which had me laughing out loud. Overall this is an okay effort, not great but it certainly passes the time for kind fans of the period.

GUENOT PHILIPPE I watched this movie after nearly thirty years and I saw the 1925 version just after. I did not remember this one and I was astonished to see that the first version of Conan Doyle's novel was far far better. I know this sounds strange, but the remake seems to end where the original resumed towards a terrific climax: the prehistoric monster loose in a big city, in the pure KING KONG manner, or so many other monster movies, such as those we saw during the fifties. I don't know why Irwin Allen did not continue his story in NY, London or Paris...This would have been great; instead of that we only see a baby monster where maybe in the future give many difficulties to the human kind. A sort of open ending. And watching such an end and then resuming with the original, with an ending where the monster is brought to London to finally attack the city, watching the Irwin Allen's feature may be really painful, such as an one arm man who, after an amputation, still feels his missing arm.

TxMike This movie was shown on the Movies! network. It came out in 1960 when I was only 14 years old. I don't remember this one specifically, I may have seen it back then, but it certainly is typical of the 1960s Sci-Fi genre.Simple enough story, a team of scientists travel to a deep Amazon location to investigate reports of dinosaurs still living there. When a few had gone off then returned to camp they found what "looked like a cyclone had hit" the campsite and the rest were missing. Soon they found them, captured by an unknown native tribe, seemingly intent on eating them.In the cave of the volcanic mountain they found a long-lost professor, now blind, and a well-meaning native lady who would help them find a way out. Which they did, with difficulty, barely escaping the chasing natives. Along with a few nice diamonds and a large egg, a dinosaur egg. It is a very "campy" movie, fun entertainment for an afternoon with nothing else to do. Stars included Michael Rennie, Jill St. John (only 19 or 20, just eye candy), Claude Rains, and Fernando Lamas. They did encounter a live dinosaur, the "special effect" for this was to film extreme close-ups of a lizard. It works pretty well.

Scarecrow-88 While I'm a fan of adventure fantasy as the next nerd, unfortunately, a sci-fi picture like "The Lost World" has a plot that has become shopworn and a bit too familiar (watch numerous Irwin Allen shows from the 60s, like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" or "Lost in Space" for reptiles "disguised" as dinosaurs, and the plot of this film is almost copied to the point of scenes practically being identical to that of an episode of "Voyage" in its First Season) to have the kind of resounding effect it might have had for kids back then. A group of characters (like a professor played with bluster and gruff by the wonderful Claude Rains and the dignified and proper Michael Rennie as wealthy hunter, and the usual assortment of colorful tag-alongs, like David Hedison (who would go on to star for Allen in "Voyage"), and curvy Jill St. John as the love interest that seems to come between Hedison and Rennie) pursue the location of a "hidden" world where prehistoric dinosaurs still exist, finding a lot more than they bargained for.Diamonds, lava-flowing volcano eruption, cave-ins, a tribe with spears ready to sacrifice, and giant lizards—oops, dinosaurs all offer dangers to the cast. Included is the smokin' Vitina Marcus as a tribe babe (with a tan to die for) the group encounters and brings into the fold, character actor Ian Wolfe (he's been in a little bit of everything) as the blind, lost scientist Burton White, Richard Hadyn (the Twilight Zone episode "A Thing About Machines" and "The Sound of Music") as the hapless, always-embarrassed professor who accompanies them and often played as a comic foil, & Ray Striklyn and Fernando Lamas, both sketchy and perhaps not to be trusted (Lamas is amusing as the local who offers salutations to the group once they arrive to the jungle prior to traveling into the lost world). With diamonds, greed could motivate a gun from its holster and pointed at people.Marcus seems to be in the film merely as eye candy, and I must admit that it was hard to pay attention to anything else going one when she's bandying about in such a skimpy costume of such barely-there rags. I can only imagine how cool this could have been if Willis O'Brien had been hired for stop motion effects instead of the laughable lizards used as fake dinosaurs that are very unconvincing. The Lost World, in widescreen color, looks every bit the large sets on a Fox lot. I felt like I was watching a television show of "Voyage" expanded to 90 minutes. Still, seeing Rains brushing annoying people aside that get on his nerves (at one point, knocking Hedison to the ground after leaving his plane!), and Rennie every bit the stoic gentleman (on screen) are fun to watch in the same film together. While Jill St John is stuck with the gold digger part, pursuing Rennie, thankfully she's likable enough to flesh out her character a bit (these kinds of films often feature the stunner with the well-manicured pet who has no business participating in a grand adventure that requires a tolerance for the outdoors, sweat, dirt, and monsters). Dinosaurs fighting with their tails threatening Hedison and St. John who try to keep from plunging off the side of a mountain and even the large flowers that open and close on humans who walk within them ("Lost in Space" fans will recognize this), Irwin Allen wasn't about to let such scenes and sets go unused after this film. For a Saturday afternoon, in need of an adequate adventure to waste some time on, "The Lost World" could do the trick, but I have seen "Voyage" episodes from the first season that are just as good.