You can watch "The Lost World" one of two ways:
1) As a maddeningly mangled version of the great Arthur Conan Doyle novel, turning memorable characters into crude stereotypes and adding a half-dozen others so you won't notice there's only one brief sequence featuring "dinosaurs" (magnified lizards with rubber collars, tortured into listlessly attacking each other).
2) As an early '60s camp fest, what with the babealicious cave girl, Fernando "you look mahvelous" Lamas as a tricky native, Frosty the poodle (he gets special billing!), and Claude Rains as a peppery pipsqueak Professor Challenger -- not to mention Irwin Allen's colored-lights-on-styrofoam special effects. Savor Fernando's peerless reading of the line "my helicopter!" upon seeing that the dinos have crushed same, making escape impossible. Best of all, Jill St. John (an Annette Bening without irony) in her pink pants and boots, who announces "I can ride, fly, and shoot better than any man I know" and then spends the balance of the movie shrieking and running for the strong arms of David "Al" Hedison. Or is it Al "David" Hedison?
Released on DVD with the sweet, rather innocent 1925 silent version... Conan Doyle loved it and in terms of character development, thrills, and faithfulness it's still miles ahead of every subsequent "Lost World" movie or TV series (including the recent "ecologically correct" Bob Hoskins fiasco).
1) As a maddeningly mangled version of the great Arthur Conan Doyle novel, turning memorable characters into crude stereotypes and adding a half-dozen others so you won't notice there's only one brief sequence featuring "dinosaurs" (magnified lizards with rubber collars, tortured into listlessly attacking each other).
2) As an early '60s camp fest, what with the babealicious cave girl, Fernando "you look mahvelous" Lamas as a tricky native, Frosty the poodle (he gets special billing!), and Claude Rains as a peppery pipsqueak Professor Challenger -- not to mention Irwin Allen's colored-lights-on-styrofoam special effects. Savor Fernando's peerless reading of the line "my helicopter!" upon seeing that the dinos have crushed same, making escape impossible. Best of all, Jill St. John (an Annette Bening without irony) in her pink pants and boots, who announces "I can ride, fly, and shoot better than any man I know" and then spends the balance of the movie shrieking and running for the strong arms of David "Al" Hedison. Or is it Al "David" Hedison?
Released on DVD with the sweet, rather innocent 1925 silent version... Conan Doyle loved it and in terms of character development, thrills, and faithfulness it's still miles ahead of every subsequent "Lost World" movie or TV series (including the recent "ecologically correct" Bob Hoskins fiasco).