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Rating:  - The Lost World 1960
I just viewed the DVD the lost world recently.
It's a clean,decent fantasy movie.
The special effects aren't that great as you would expect from a movie made in this era and with the budget allowed.
But nonetheless it's a good family movie that ends well.
Rating:  - The Lost World (SE)
This is an interesting edition of one of our classic sci-fi movies, especially for anyone who is into the old black and white version and wants to make a comparison to a more "modern" version done inn 1960. While the "monsters" in the 1925 version are a little jerky, they were "state of the art" in their day, and in that context, the earlier version, in my humble opinion, is better. The dialogue in the color version was canned in too many scenes and some of the special effects looked cartoonish! Still, they are both classics, and deserve their particular place in horror film history!!
Rating:  - Please....
Special Edition? How about Special Ed?
I watched "Science Fiction,Fantasy Reality" on the "Global Warming Edition/Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea".
These idiots were trying to say that Global warming was not invented by Irwin Allen.
They actually claimed that Jules Verne predicted the size of the Apollo spacecraft.
He didn't,he just set up some chairs in his parlor,added a walkway and gave it the shape of a bullet,duh.
[20 bucks says that Verne had a chair,if you multiply it's width by 5(passengers+ walkway on either side) and add the hull thickness of the USS Maine..you have his "prediction" of the Apollo spacecraft's size,minus the Saturn V booster,of course.Those science fiction writers aqre so stupid,The Nautilus was just given a magical way of propelling a surface warship sized sub,look at when it was written!!!]
Now these idiots have to update the whole Irwin Allen catalog so nobody suspects what they are up to.
Thanx,You know who
Rating: - You know, for kids...
Irwin Allen's 1960 version of The Lost World may be shot in CinemaScope, but stylistically it fits right in with his 60s sci-fi TV shows (indeed, stock footage from the film found its way into his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series, as did co-star David Hedison). Originally intended to feature state-of-the-art stop-motion animation from Willis O. Brien, the special effects genius behind the groundbreaking 1925 version as well as King Kong, the ever-economical producer opted instead for the tried and trusted and, most important of all, much cheaper technique of supergluing fins and horns on real lizards and having them double for dinosaurs despite looking like nothing so much as lizards with fins and horns superglued on them. However, even had he spent the extra time and money, this modernised version was never going to be the definitive one: 'dinosaur' action is fairly thin on the ground and the novel's finale that sees a pterodactyl on the loose in London is unceremoniously dropped. Instead there's a lot of wandering around the Fox ranch and backlot, cameo appearances from the odd poisonous giant plant left over from Journey to the Center of the Earth, a tribe of natives with a yen for human sacrifice, a fortune in diamonds and the obligatory erupting volcano finale, though it retains a certain nostalgic Saturday kids matinée appeal even if most of today's kids wouldn't sit still for it. Claude Rains gets to grandstand as Professor Challenger while Michael Rennie's aristocratic big game hunter seems almost like a blueprint for George Lazenby's take on James Bond, with Jill St. John tagging along for no good reason other than Arthur Conan Doyle's thoughtless failure to provide any female roles in the original novel.
Fox's new Region 1 NTSC DVD boasts a fine 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, but the stereo tracks are reversed so that the left comes from the right speaker and vice versa. Along with original trailer, brief featurette, Movietone newsreel footage of a kids charity screening and a still gallery that's irritatingly locked so you can't fast-forward or reverse but have to play at normal speed for nine minutes (!), it also comes with the original 1925 silent version (which was, coincidentally, the first ever in-flight movie). Unfortunately it's not the relatively recently restored 93-minute version that's available separately but the 75-minute version preserved by George Eastman House. For many years the longest version available after multiple cuts for reissues as the film's ownership changed hands several times over the decades, for the more casual viewer it's still a welcome addition and offers a decent tinted print.
Willis O. Brien's special effects are still surprisingly good and way ahead of the 1960 version even if he was to perfect them further in King Kong (for which this film feels almost like a dress rehearsal at times), giving the film an epic scale in the volcanic eruption and stampede sequences, while Wallace Beery is a perfect choice for Professor Challenger, embodying the gruff, belligerent nature of the character to a tee. There are changes to the novel - not only is Bessie Love brought along on the expedition to search for her lost father (with none of the comic relief chauvinism from Challenger found in the 1960 version) but the pterodactyl that terrifies the streets of London has been changed to a lumbering Brontosaurus, which is certainly a change for the better - but then Doyle's book is rather light on plot to begin with. The dinosaurs aren't as well integrated into the story as you might hope - usually it's cutaways to herds of dinosaurs in their natural habitat - and the racial stereotyping from Jules Cowles' blackface routine as `Zambo' is painfully embarrassing and horribly unfunny (sample dialogue on seeing campfire smoke from the plateau: "That means our folks is still alive." "It MAY mean dat some of those cannibules dat drop dat rock down on us yistiddy am cookin' `em in dar stew-pot!"). But it's hard not to like a film with dialogue like "What are you thinking of, Paula - in this lost world of ours?" or Challenger's immortal "My brontosaurus has escaped! Keep off the streets - until I recapture it!" and where our hero's rival for his girl back home's affections is called Percy Bumberry!
Although not advertised on the packaging, it also includes a surviving one-minute fragment of the original trailer and seven-and-a-half minutes of stop-motion outtakes, one including an unplanned one-frame cameo by Willis O. Brien himself!
Rating: - Lost World Review
As a youngster when I first viewed this movie, it seemed very entertaining
considering the fact that I was raised on the old black and white atomic enlarged monsters of the 1950's. Watching it now, I realize that the pro-duction values and special effects of today's films have rendered the old
creature features to novelty status. The main highlight of this version of the Lost World is Jill St. John. She was one hot chick.
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