On July 13, 1960, before he made Lost in Space in 1965, and well before his legendary 1970s films, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, director Irwin Allen dropped a sci-fi epic that, in theory, set the template for an entire subgenre. As an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, The Lost World, Allen’s film imagined a collision of living dinosaurs with modern-day humans. The title is so iconic and memorable that Michael Crichton borrowed it wholesale for his 1995 book sequel to Jurassic Park, which later became the 1997 film of the same name. And, of all the movie versions of The Lost World, outside of the Jurassic Park sequel, the 1960 version is the most visible and best known. But, despite all the charm of the film, it has one fatal flaw that renders it inferior to the dino-romps that it followed and preceded.
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in the original 1993 Jurassic Park: You were planning on having dinosaurs in your dinosaur movie, right? Quite simply, there are no recognizable dinosaurs in the 1960 version of The Lost World, rendering this flick a bizarre oddity in sci-fi cinema. Somehow, the visual effects of a 1925 silent film version are, to this day, better. Mild spoilers ahead.
