In fact even the shots of the partially glimpsed big lizard moving behind some trees are quite effective. Once again they’re following in the footsteps of others, but we do get to the plateau quite quickly and the build-up to the first dinosaur is well done, it being night-time and some genuinely effective roars getting louder and louder. Summerlee, two South Americans and Jennifer’s pet poodle make up the rest of a slightly larger expedition. Challenger forbids Jennifer to come but she turns up at the last civilised outpost anyway with a younger brother David in tow. Malone no longer has a fiancee so has less motivation to go on this crazy journey, and Roxton is already involved with the female heroine Jennifer who here is the daughter of the owner of Malone’s newspaper. We get the speech, but some of the characters and their relationships have been tweaked.
Right from the beginning it’s obvious that this one bares hardly any relation to the novel at all, despite the amusing sight of the reporter-hating Challenger assaulting Malone in full view of loads of people. On the other hand, later on we’re told that the plateau is unscalable and can only be reached from above, which is quite a good device. This version opening with a plane landing immediately gets one thinking how absurd its updated setting is, because the plateau and its inhabitants would easily have been spotted from the air by 1960. Footage from The Lost World turned up in several later Allen productions as well as Hammer’s When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth. had to be censored to remove some shots of obvious animal cruelty. Oddly enough, the BBFC passed it uncut, yet One Million B.C. No doubt helped immensely by the fact that Fox’s similar but far superior Journey To The Centre Of The Earth had been a hit the previous year, The Lost World did score big at the cinema.
David Hedison didn’t want to play Malone because he thought the material was lacking, but was talked into it and afterwards was offered the lead of Allen’s hit TV series Voyage To the Bottom Of The Sea. This also meant that Allen’s plan to cast Trevor Howard and Peter Ustinov in support to Claude Rains also couldn’t come to fruition. He wanted to use stop motion for the dinosaurs and even got O’ Brien, whose career was full of unmade projects, to do lots of pre-production sketches of dinosaurs, but Fox drastically slashed the budget of this and several other films because the costs of Cleopatra were spiralling out of control. Eventually 20th Century Fox picked it up and Irwin Allen, the producer later famous for his sci-fi TV series and disaster movies, happy to make it. At one point Universal agreed to make it with Jack Arnold directing but he fell ill and the project was cancelled. Willis O’ Brien, who of course did the special effects for the original, had been trying to set up a remake for many years. This one is neither and one may wonder how it all went so wrong.
, but that 1940 movie is otherwise really rather good and certainly interesting. No, it’s not very good, a bland, pedestrian and almost wholly unconvincing effort whose employment of the much derided technique of using actual lizards with things stuck on them certainly isn’t its only problem but could be its most notable. My initial plan was to just review the 1925 The Lost World but was curious to see the 1960 version after about 20 years as long as I could obtain it cheaply – so am now throwing in this review too. Of course films can often get things wrong and this version isn’t much beloved by monster movie fans though I imagine it would have thrilled many kids back in the day who weren’t in the know. Back then I just couldn’t understand how a film could get something so wrong. I sided with the guy who then says to him: “You’re insane”. I was a dinosaur lover from a very early age and I distinctly recall my first viewing of the 1960 remake of The Lost World, especially my incredulity and irritation when Professor Challenger identifies a prehistoric creature as a Brontosaurus yet the lizard with some plates stuck on its back was absolutely nothing like one. Along for the ride are Malone, big game hunter John Roxton, Jennifer Holmes the daughter of the Golbal News owner, Jennifer’s younger brother David, rival professor Summerlee, Latin American guide Gomez and his pal Costa…. He then challenges the Society to mount another expedition to verify his story. At a London Zoological Society lecture, he talks of live dinosaurs on a plateau and is met with ridicule. REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Criticįamed biologist and anthropologist Professor Challenger returns from a trip to the Amazon Basin and immediately knocks Global News reporter Ed Malone down the plane steps. Starring: Claude Rains, David Hedison, Jill St. Written by: Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Bennett