I hadn't been expecting much, so it came as a pleasant surprise to find this was a rather well-done flick. Instead of Annie the Dinosaur, I got "King Kong" in nascent form. The guy doing the special effects, Willis O'Brien seemed to be developing his craft here. The dinosaurs, while obviously models moving in stop motion, are not cartoons but realistic models. If a giant Allosaurus is about to attack, he whips his lizard-like tail around, just as the Ymir did in "20,000 Miles to Earth". They copied a lot of this stuff for the 1950s monster movies.
And the plot! I don't know how closely in adheres to Conan-Doyle's novel, but in "The Lost World" we see laid bare the structure -- the armature, as it were -- of a dozen later movies, beginning with "King Kong." How's this for a plot structure? A hardy handful of explorers and adventurers travel to an exotic land, dragging a beautiful young woman along. There, they discover dangerous creatures of monstrous size, prehistoric and alien. They manage to capture one of the beasts and take it back alive to the Big City, but it escapes and runs wild through the streets, smashing buildings, knocking over landmarks, eating people, and parking illegally in handicapped zones.
That's what happens here, only instead of a giant ape or some ill-formed and befanged organism from outer space, it's a brontosaurus.
The effects are really sophisticated for their time, 1925. And though the science may be pure hokum, still the adventure is an exciting one. What's missing here is the death of the monster, and the pathos of King Kong's death, who, after all, died for love, just like the rest of us. This dinosaur simple rumbles onto Tower Bridge. The bridge collapses under its weight and the creature swims to the sea and presumably freedom. Just as well. There is no record of a brontosaurus ever having harmed a human being before. This one was simply taken from its natural environment and presented with the overwhelming temptation to do so. Live and let live, I say. If you don't bother THEM, they don't bother YOU. Unlike, may I say, certain forms of spyware and the purveyors of male enhancement products.
The acting is of the period and not worth much attention.
This version of "The Lost World" is shorter than the 1960 Irwin Allen version and I enjoyed it more. In the latter, real lizards and crocodilians, dressed in fake horns and blown up to giant size, actually fought and tore pieces of flesh from each other. These models fight too but nothing is being wounded or killed for our pleasure. There's always the knowledge that what we're watching is what was known at the time as "fake photography." Not bad. And not just "not bad" per se, but not bad because in watching it we seem to be witnessing the birth of an entire genre of films. Willis O'Brien was to pass the baton to Ray Harryhausen, who would carry on with the stop-motion work until obliterated by time and the advent of computer-generated images of the kind we see in "Jurassic Park."
And the plot! I don't know how closely in adheres to Conan-Doyle's novel, but in "The Lost World" we see laid bare the structure -- the armature, as it were -- of a dozen later movies, beginning with "King Kong." How's this for a plot structure? A hardy handful of explorers and adventurers travel to an exotic land, dragging a beautiful young woman along. There, they discover dangerous creatures of monstrous size, prehistoric and alien. They manage to capture one of the beasts and take it back alive to the Big City, but it escapes and runs wild through the streets, smashing buildings, knocking over landmarks, eating people, and parking illegally in handicapped zones.
That's what happens here, only instead of a giant ape or some ill-formed and befanged organism from outer space, it's a brontosaurus.
The effects are really sophisticated for their time, 1925. And though the science may be pure hokum, still the adventure is an exciting one. What's missing here is the death of the monster, and the pathos of King Kong's death, who, after all, died for love, just like the rest of us. This dinosaur simple rumbles onto Tower Bridge. The bridge collapses under its weight and the creature swims to the sea and presumably freedom. Just as well. There is no record of a brontosaurus ever having harmed a human being before. This one was simply taken from its natural environment and presented with the overwhelming temptation to do so. Live and let live, I say. If you don't bother THEM, they don't bother YOU. Unlike, may I say, certain forms of spyware and the purveyors of male enhancement products.
The acting is of the period and not worth much attention.
This version of "The Lost World" is shorter than the 1960 Irwin Allen version and I enjoyed it more. In the latter, real lizards and crocodilians, dressed in fake horns and blown up to giant size, actually fought and tore pieces of flesh from each other. These models fight too but nothing is being wounded or killed for our pleasure. There's always the knowledge that what we're watching is what was known at the time as "fake photography." Not bad. And not just "not bad" per se, but not bad because in watching it we seem to be witnessing the birth of an entire genre of films. Willis O'Brien was to pass the baton to Ray Harryhausen, who would carry on with the stop-motion work until obliterated by time and the advent of computer-generated images of the kind we see in "Jurassic Park."