Lawbolisted Powerful

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

artpf Explorer Professor Challenger is taking quite a beating in the London press thanks to his claim that living dinosaurs exist in the far reaches of the Amazon. Newspaper reporter Edward Malone learns that this claim originates from a diary given to him by fellow explorer Maple White's daughter, Paula. Malone's paper funds an expedition to rescue Maple White, who has been marooned at the top of a high plateau. Joined by renowned hunter John Roxton, and others, the group goes to South America, where they do indeed find a plateau inhabited by pre-historic creatures, one of which they even manage to bring back to London with them.I like that they go to SA instead of Africa.The story is boring.and there's actually a guy in a bad monkey suit, but the movie is all about the stop motion dinosaurs. Still cool to watch them nearly 100 years later! And bronty in central London is spectacular! Also notable for one of only 5 films Arthur Conan Doyle appears in.

RainDogJr Last weekend I attended a screening of Harry Hoyt's THE LOST WORLD that offered the one- hour version. The quality of the image was great and the score was performed live. And I only had the obvious reference of it: Willis H. O'Brien, who was responsible for the special effects in KING KONG (the original 1933 version certainly), worked here, doing the stop-motion material as well. I'm pretty sure I'll write *King Kong* a whole lot more in this commentary since this is similar to "Kong" in many ways. I was actually very surprised because of that fact; I, certainly, expected similarity to "Kong" but really nothing more than something technical oriented. Actually, I would say THE LOST WORLD is pretty much KING KONG. It doesn't have, however, a very iconic character (nor a sad ending); after all, it isn't titled after the name of a specific creature (here we have dinosaurs of all kinds). But don't let this confuse you dear reader since "Lost World" does features iconic scenes. In other words, the dinosaur here (the one that suffers a similar denouement to the one Kong had) doesn't climbs a famous London building, equivalent to New York's Empire State (yes, this film, or better said, the last part of it is set in London, England), but we do enjoy a really wonderful scene featuring the dinosaur at a London landmark. Needless to say, this was made eight years before "Kong". THE LOST WORLD is one of those films that are worth watching not just because they were influential. I mean, this is so much FUN! Unlike many films of this kind, it never hesitates when it comes to show you its main attraction (the dinosaurs of course) – we get to watch lots of fights between them (great and fun material) and some heart as well (there's a crazy ape- man too). I'm willing to seek the DVD of it and hopefully I get to watch the full (or just longer) version. Meanwhile, this one-hour piece was a blast and a perfect Saturday night movie! Watch it, even if it's the online version that IMDb is offering now for free. *Watched it on 25 August, 2012

zardoz-13 Long before Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" astonished audiences by releasing dinosaurs to rampage around Southern California, co-directors Harry O. Hoyt and William Dowling had beaten them to the punch with their 1925, black and white silent movie dinosaur saga "The Lost World" where a brontosaurus creates havoc in metropolitan London. In truth, the silent film "The Lost World" qualifies as the first live-action dinosaur epic. The ingenious filmmakers blended shots of actual flesh-and-blood actors with scenes of model dinosaurs tromping through the jungle by means of the static matte and the traveling matte so that both appear to be interacting at the same time. The first special effects guru, Willis O'Brien, paved the way for future classics with his pioneering efforts in stop-motion animation with which he achieved greater and more enduring success in 1933 with "King Kong." Although time has not been kind to it, "The Lost World" still ranks as the best adaptation of author A. Conan Doyle's science fiction novella. Incidentally, this is the same Doyle who wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Until David Shepard of Film Preservation Associates restored "The Lost World," this landmark opus has been shown in prints that eliminated about a third of its actual length. The egregious public domain versions average about an hour, while the Image DVD restoration boasts 93 minutes. Experts have estimated that the original running time of the film was about ten minutes longer that this restored version. Again, the claim to fame here is that "The Lost World" not only beat the "Jurassic Park" sequel to the punch, but it also predated the seminal Japanese monster flick "Godzilla" as well as "King Kong." Everybody who has produced a fictional dinosaur film owes a debt of gratitude to Hoyt and Dowling as well as O'Brien and his behind-the-scenes collaborator, Mexican sculptor Marcel Delgado, who carved the miniature dinosaurs for him. Ironically, during the production of "The Lost World," the suits at First National Studios didn't believe that O'Brien's ground-breaking technical innovations would fare as well as they did. Mind you, this wasn't the first time that O'Brien played around with miniature dinosaurs. O'Brien engineered the effects for the 1918 film "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain," that some would argue was the original "feature-length" dinosaur movie. Reportedly, not only did Doyle see a print of "The Lost World" but he also liked it! According to the archivists at Turner Classic Movies, "The Lost World" was "the first in-flight movie, shown on an Imperial Airways flight in a converted Handley-Page bomber from London, UK, to Paris, France, in April 1925."

Boba_Fett1138 Thing with this movie is that we'll most likely never get to see it as it was original intended and released as during its initial theatrical release. There are several different prints of this movie available, all variating heavily in its running time. Now days there are versions available that combine as many sequences as possible from all of these different prints that have emerged over the past decades but its still minutes short of its original theatrical released version. Therefor we'll most likely never be able to judge to movie for what it original was but the long put back together versions of the movie should give us a fair and decent enough impression of what the movie was supposed to be like.For its time this movie obviously was a big movie experience. It's the first ever movie to use stop-motion effects for its creatures. It must have really impressed audiences back then to see all of these use dinosaurs walking around on the screen and fighting and interacting and all of that. Before there was "King Kong" there was "The Lost World" and there is no denying that the movie because of its effects remains an historically important and revolutionary one. It was like "Jurassic Park" for the '20's. You can tell in some of the sequences that the techniques used are still far away from perfection in this movie but still watching stop-motion is always an impressive and extremely delicate and detailed thing, even in this 1925 movie and you just can't help to have some enormous respect for it. Its effects and concept help to make this movie a very entertaining one, especially for its time. But this is also one of the problems for the movie. Basically all this movie is a bunch of people in the Amazon encountering a whole bunch of different prehistoric creatures. There is not really much story to it all, though I'm sure that the original Arthur Conan Doyle novel this movie was based on had some more depth and story and character development to it all.Thing I also don't like about this movie is its use of title cards, especially during its first half. I don't know if this was purely due to the restored longer version of this movie that I watched but the movie extendedly used title cards for its dialog and to explain what was happening all. It's sort of annoying when a silent movie does this too much, as this movie does. When you have a good director and good enough actors there really is no use for an extended use of title cards. You can let the all of the images and expressions of the actors speak for themselves and while watching this movie you can't help but wonder if most of these title cards were even needed in the movie. You could perfectly follow and understand the story without them, I would say.But well, all this doesn't matter that much though. This movie could obviously made purely for entertainment purposes and was supposed to impress with its new revolutionary techniques and its overwhelming images. You can pretty much forget about the story and simply enjoy this movie for its entertainment, though its of course hard to still please todays modern audience with this movie.8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/