The Lost World might have been a better film if it had been set back in the time when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the novel. Which would be in the pre-World War I days of 1912. Back then such a plateau might have escaped detection from modern man.

In any event it's been updated to 1960 and I remember seeing it for the first time at a downtown Rochester theater long since demolished and I was with my grandmother. She took me when I was by myself visiting them in Rochester. I remember the movie, but I also remember how slow she was moving. What I didn't know was that she was in the first stages of Parkinson's disease which would eventually kill her.

Seen as an adult it's a film better left to the juvenile set. And it could use a makeover now and replace those dinosaurs with the more realistic ones of Jurassic Park.

But I doubt we could get a cast as classic as the one I saw. Claude Rains is in the lead as Conan Doyle's irascible Professor George Challenger who was the protagonist in about five books. Not as many as that much more known Conan Doyle hero Sherlock Holmes, but Challenger has his following.

In this film he's back from South America in the country roughly between Venezuela and British Guiana at the time, deep in the interior at some of the Amazon tributary headwaters. He claims he saw some ancient dinosaurs alive on a plateau.

True to his name Claude Rains invites company and financing on a new expedition to prove him right. His rival Richard Haydn accepts as does big game hunter Michael Rennie and David Hedison who is an American newspaperman whose publisher promises financing for an exclusive.

Of course it wouldn't be right in the day of woman's liberation if the shapely Jill St. John, sportswoman and a crack shot doesn't come along with her brother Ray Stricklyn. Guiding the expedition are South Americans Fernando Lamas and Jay Novello who have an agenda all their own involving at least one member of the party.

Watching The Lost World again, I think of myself as a kid back in the day and even with such a cast it really should stay in the juvenile trade. And this review is dedicated to my grandmother Mrs. Sophie Lucyshyn who took me to the movies that day back in 1960.

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.

Producer/director Irwin Allen had big plans for this one. He also had the big budget needed to craft a truly spectacular remake of the original 1925 classic silent film. And, he rightly felt that a new movie based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's science fiction masterpiece had better be up to the task. Allen originally intended using the "Stop-Motion animation" technique (made popular by Ray Harryhausen) to bring his prehistoric monsters to life. But, just as production was about to commence, Twentieth-Century Fox, who commissioned the film (and were then experiencing severe monetary shortages, due to production problems with their money guzzling "Cleopatra") slashed the budgets of nearly every film currently being produced. "The Lost World" was no exception, and Allen's dreams of a Sci-Fi Spectacular were crushed. Being a resourceful film maker, though, he did the best he could with what he had, and that turned out to be very good indeed.

For his cast, he chose British character actor Claude ("The Invisible Man") Rains to play the indomitable Professor Challenger, leader of the expedition. As Playboy Johnny Roxton, he cast another British actor, Michael Rennie. David Hedison played newsman Ed Malone, Jill St. John played Jennifer Holmes, daughter of Malone's publisher and Fernando Lamas was Gomez, the expedition's pilot. Supporting them were Jay Novello, as a cowardly guide, and Vittina Marcus as a helpful island native girl. Forced to forego his original Stop-Motion technique, Allen had to make do with photographing lizards, alligators and such, adding horns and gills when necessary. The result was pretty much the way it sounds - the creatures this bunch discovered were a long way from prehistoric beasts. Nevertheless, the movie entertains, with truly beautiful wide screen photography, a fantastic collection of colors which really bring the striking sets to eerie life.

As for the performances, they are decent enough. Rains has gotten plenty of criticism over the years for his bombastic Challenger, but that's the way the character was written, and Rains is true to the material, and highly enjoyable too. Michael Rennie is a bit colorless in his big game hunter part, but he does have some good scenes as well. David Hedison is OK as Malone, who falls for Jennifer (Roxton's girlfriend) though their romance must have ended up heavily edited, as there's little evidence of it here. Ms. St John and Ms. Marcus are mainly eye candy, (this WAS the '60s after all) but act capably enough, though for a woman described as "brave as a lioness". Jill certainly does a lot of screaming while dressed in a very flattering, if impractical wardrobe (which includes a Toy Poodle). Ray Stricklyn is very persuasive as her rather immature but compassionate brother. Lamas and Novello are the supposed villains of this piece, though Lamas has a reason for his hostility. Allen's direction is good and the score by Bert Shefter and Paul Sawtell adds immeasurably to the drama and suspense. All in all, the picture is perfect Saturday Matinée fare, and though the script is talky in places, it still delivers the goods at the climax. The movie is a textbook example of a period when celluloid escapism was all viewers demanded, and here, they got it In spades.

Fox Home Video has just released "The Lost World" as a two-disc DVD set, with special features (trailer, newsreels and galleries of promotional material) from the film on disc one, and a restored version (with a few outtakes!) of the 1925 original on disc two. Allen's film looks wonderful in it's anamorphic CinemaScope transfer, and after years of suffering through the faded pan-and-scanned prints used for TV and video this is really a revelation. The new stereo soundtracks are equally impressive and make this film, from a producer/director who would one day be known as the "Master of Disaster', (thanks to such fare as The Poseidon Adventure' and "The Towering Inferno") a must have for collectors.