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.

Based upon Arthur Conan Doyle's famous novel, this film really avoids the book. Filmed three and a half decade after the first 1925 version, the director Irwin Allen avoids the the book, not slightly but too much and I think that caused a failure of this film.This film has a brilliant acting crew, I mean Claude Rains (always brilliant, unforgettable and distinctive in his performances, but, I think he didn't care to much for his character, I guess he was payed and that's it, he didn't do much with his character), Michael Rennie, Jill St. John, David Hedison and Fernando Lamas... but no luck from them either. The movie "set", where they were filming was so fake, that I wouldn't take a leak there. Special effects? Where? They masked lizards and edited them on big screen to look more intimidating, that's it, I think that lizards didn't feel to good...But, the main thing is that these stories about lost worlds, and other remote places in which evolution didn't occurred, filled with all kinds of degenerate creatures are extremely old, even today. Today? Those stories are long dead on big screen. Well, except maybe for King Kong (2005), but that was remake. No matter how you try, these kind of stories, if you want to put them back on big screen, than you must adapt it to the modern audience. But, again... who would watch that?

TLW is a classic piece of 50s/60s Hollywood cheese, literally overflowing with cheerful, exuberant prattle and every cliché in the dino book. The movie never lets up - not even for a second - in its dissemination of goofiness and hooey, but doing it with a Disney-like naivety that is almost screaming for an MST3K drubbing.TLW has a bearded scientist who had just come back from the Amazon (where else), where he supposedly saw dinosaurs. In fact, they were just a couple of iguanas with horns stuck onto their heads, and perhaps a Jesus lizard or two. He actually sweats over how to finance another expedition (as if a dino claim wouldn't shower him with generous offers and/or a plethora of other expeditions going there straight away), so he gets blackmailed into taking along a whole B-movie circus of hoy-paloy characters who would normally go out for a game of cricket, not so much the outer reaches of Jurassic Amazon.One of the comic-book characters joining him is Jill St John, who joins him on his way to the Amazon without any acting classes in tow, much to the dismay and amusement of the viewer, but she's quite pretty so it matters not. And where else but in a 50s/60s movie would you have a rich, beautiful, happy millionaire's daughter cling on to a guy 3 times her age. No, not talking about the professor for he's too old even for Jill. I'm talking about Michael Rennie, who looks older even than her father. Eventually Rennie, realizing perhaps that he should have had grand-kids by now, makes the path free for the slimy journalist to step in to woo her, but not before the two beta males have a fight-out – in which Rennie fights like a girl btw. Nevermind the dinosaurs and the biggest zoological discoveries of the 20th century, because our characters have their heads full of flirting and diamonds, that's all they seem to care about. Oh, yes and revenge. They are obsessed with flirting, diamonds and revenge. This is where Lamas comes in with his over-the-top "macho"-Latino character.The scientist seems to be rather "lost", too. He refers to the iguana dressed up as a stegosaurus as a "brontosaurus". The iguana and the make-up department went through all that trouble in making the lizard look like a stegosaurus and how does the non-professorial professor reward them for this effort? He calls him by the wrong name. Of course there is the obligatory battle between an iguana and another small lizard. How many lizards can say they'd been immortalized in a Hollywood flick? I can't really remember who won that spiffing duel, but I think it's safe to say that a small lizard came out on top.In the end, there is a lot of molten lava, the usual back-stabbing, diamonds and girlfriends, i.e. the usual B-movie claptrap. In these 60s-movie expeditions there is a weird phenomenon whereby the moment a team sets foot on an unexplored island or land, the volcano there seems to starts getting active, melting and even blowing up at least several mountains by the time the end-credits roll. Naturally, all the Westerners escape, leaving the locals to try and make ends meet in the post-apocalyptic wasteland full of dead dino body parts. The slimy journalist gets the girl, the badly-educated scientist gets his plastic ostrich egg, and the viewer gets to wonder what the heck happened to all those Ray Harryhausen effects he'd been promised. There wasn't one stop-motion scene in the entire movie. Liars.And yet, in spite of all this, the 1960 "The Lost World" is far better than Spielberg's "The Lost World".

Dinosaurs, diamonds, cannibals, Jill St. John! Having had big success the year before with "Journey to the Center of the Earth", 20th Century-Fox repeated the expedition-into-the-unknown formula with this school kid's fantasy adapted from the original tale by Arthur Conan Doyle (previously filmed in 1925). Claude Rains is an ill-tempered, impatient professor who boasts to the British press that he has found Jurassic monsters on an island plateau in the Amazon; with funding from a wealthy newspaperman, Rains returns to the creatures along with a reporter and a natty adventurer (the newspaperman's feisty daughter, along with her dog and younger brother, join the troupe later). Producer-director Irwin Allen co-wrote the script as well, and his cartoony, tongue-in-cheek style is all over this colorful saga. The special effects aren't bad for 1960, and there's enough amusingly dopey dialogue and disparate characterizations to make the film a minor treat. Rains steals the acting honors, while St. John (who boasts about being able to shoot better than any man, but who never gets the opportunity to prove it) carries around her pup in a wicker basket! Non-think entertainment benefits from excellent art direction and design, though Allen's pacing is a bit lax. **1/2 from ****