Good concept, poorly executed.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I just watched this for the first time last night. It's interesting that several reviews her express the notion that "Jill St John starts off feisty, then regresses to a simpering mess." That also describes her character in "Diamonds are Forever" exactly! Also, if the point of going there was to verify the professor's claims of seeing dinosaurs on an earlier trip, why do they set their helicopter DOWN ON THE GROUND in the jungle, without more extensive aerial surveying of the limited-area jungle plateau first? Soon after they land, (and scatter from their only means of escape (the helicopter)) the dinosaur attacks (you don't say?) and crushes their chopper. (I could have predicted that before they left London!)I'll give it a 3 - for eye-candy reasons only.

Or you might say that the lizards are disguised as dinosaurs. Those were horrible models that passed for sauropods and theropods. The fact is that the reason the public bought tickets to see this film was to see real-looking dinosaurs in action (as I did back in 1960) and was deceived. The uninformed movie moguls used four-legged crawlers, and attached horns and fins and spikes and frills to their bodies, and simply called them genuine dinosaur names like Tyrannosaurus and Brontosaurus (now Apatosaurus). Although they magnified the sizes of the lizards, most of them lack teeth. Are these supposed to be rip-roaring carnivores, like Allosaurus? Hey, an alligator (or crocodile or caiman) with a glued-on fin kind of looks like a Dimetrodon, doesn't it? Actually the toothed head of a Dimetrodon was more box-like in shape. But a Brontosaurus crawling, and with horns on its head? A baby Tyrannosaurus on four legs equipped with three horns? Ugh!!! By the way, does a large theropod with huge teeth really need horns? Even the movie posters, which are not the best, also misrepresented the genuine appearance of the dinosaurs. They picture a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two large horns! These facts are very annoying to those who knew much of what there was to know about fascinating creatures that lived so long ago. Didn't anybody know about the great Ray Harryhausen and his special effects? The producer/director acted as if he did not know paleontology and fooled us, and we accordingly paid our admission. So, pardon my indignation.When we get past the scientific inaccuracy galore, we see that the action part of the story fares a little better, but just a little. Very loosely taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 book of the same name, Professor George Challenger (Claude Rains) and his group leave England to explore a hidden plateau located near the headwaters of the Amazon basin obscured by a deep jungle (western part of South America). Earlier, the irascible Challenger (he of the red wig) had discovered large prehistoric animals there, where the indigenous people call the "curipuri." The newly funded expedition was made to confirm his findings. An obvious mistake by the director is the idea that dinosaurs would escape detection anywhere in the world until 1960. Better to have the setting in 1912 or even 1925. But again, who was doing the thinking for this feature? The expedition includes, besides the umbrella-wielding Challenger, his rival, the skeptical Professor Summerlee (Richard Haydn) and inscrutable hunter/explorer Lord John Roxton (Michael Rennie) along with newspaperman Ed Malone (David Hedison). Uninvited but waiting for the four associates to arrive in Brazil are attractive Jennifer Holmes (twenty-year old Jill St. John) and her brother David. They manage to join the team. Jennifer is so badly under dressed that she fails by comparison with the women who were in the jungle with Tarzan. They wore the right clothes, not shorts and white shoes in the jungle. And she carries along her poodle in a basket! What? She says that she's good with a gun, but neither has a weapon nor demonstrates her skills. And she screams quite a bit. In the book no woman is part of the expedition, although the hero returns home to find that his girl has married another. Portuguese speaking guides are Gomez (Fernando Lamas) and Costa (Jay Novello). The former is the helicopter pilot, brave, but obviously has an agenda; the latter is cowardly and dubious, and also likes diamonds, yeah, large diamonds, like the size of golf balls.Anyway, the director had early men living at the same time as the dinosaurs. Now scientists know that dinosaurs became extinct around 65 million years ago, long before the coming of man. But at least Allen followed the book in this instance. Actually the text had both dinosaurs and large prehistoric mammals living at the same time (in the Jurassic Period, which is erroneous). Gee, I wonder what happens when a Tyrannosaur (Cretaceous Period in the Mesozoic Era) engages a woolly mammoth (Pleistocene Period in the Cenozoic Era) in battle? In the feature's highlight, two crawlers actually fight each other. But what's with that giant green spider? What about the strange flora? Then we have nasty natives chasing and capturing our heroes. In the book there is a war between ape men and prehistoric Indians. In the movie an available maiden luckily shows our men a way out of the native cave-prison. But why desert her people? Ee-gad! Notice that the young lady (Vitina Marcus) hasn't a blemish on her lovely body? In that thick jungle? Despite supposed advantages in the art of movie-making, this feature cannot hold a candle to the superior 1925 silent version, which is better even in its present, unfortunately truncated form. Arthur Conan Doyle loved that original silent movie. But in the 1960 version, despite some good early aerial shots and cinematography, some of the sets are so cheap they look like they were filmed in a back lot. Normally the actors are decent to very good, except in this movie. There is some truth to the rumor that the best performances were done by the lizards disguised as dinosaurs. Of course they too were not helped by the weak script. Nice directing, Mr. Irwin Allen. You made a near-bust. That volcanic eruption came about an hour too late!

TLW is a classic piece of 50s/60s Hollywood cheese, literally overflowing with cheerful, exuberant prattle and every cliché in the dino book. The movie never lets up - not even for a second - in its dissemination of goofiness and hooey, but doing it with a Disney-like naivety that is almost screaming for an MST3K drubbing.TLW has a bearded scientist who had just come back from the Amazon (where else), where he supposedly saw dinosaurs. In fact, they were just a couple of iguanas with horns stuck onto their heads, and perhaps a Jesus lizard or two. He actually sweats over how to finance another expedition (as if a dino claim wouldn't shower him with generous offers and/or a plethora of other expeditions going there straight away), so he gets blackmailed into taking along a whole B-movie circus of hoy-paloy characters who would normally go out for a game of cricket, not so much the outer reaches of Jurassic Amazon.One of the comic-book characters joining him is Jill St John, who joins him on his way to the Amazon without any acting classes in tow, much to the dismay and amusement of the viewer, but she's quite pretty so it matters not. And where else but in a 50s/60s movie would you have a rich, beautiful, happy millionaire's daughter cling on to a guy 3 times her age. No, not talking about the professor for he's too old even for Jill. I'm talking about Michael Rennie, who looks older even than her father. Eventually Rennie, realizing perhaps that he should have had grand-kids by now, makes the path free for the slimy journalist to step in to woo her, but not before the two beta males have a fight-out – in which Rennie fights like a girl btw. Nevermind the dinosaurs and the biggest zoological discoveries of the 20th century, because our characters have their heads full of flirting and diamonds, that's all they seem to care about. Oh, yes and revenge. They are obsessed with flirting, diamonds and revenge. This is where Lamas comes in with his over-the-top "macho"-Latino character.The scientist seems to be rather "lost", too. He refers to the iguana dressed up as a stegosaurus as a "brontosaurus". The iguana and the make-up department went through all that trouble in making the lizard look like a stegosaurus and how does the non-professorial professor reward them for this effort? He calls him by the wrong name. Of course there is the obligatory battle between an iguana and another small lizard. How many lizards can say they'd been immortalized in a Hollywood flick? I can't really remember who won that spiffing duel, but I think it's safe to say that a small lizard came out on top.In the end, there is a lot of molten lava, the usual back-stabbing, diamonds and girlfriends, i.e. the usual B-movie claptrap. In these 60s-movie expeditions there is a weird phenomenon whereby the moment a team sets foot on an unexplored island or land, the volcano there seems to starts getting active, melting and even blowing up at least several mountains by the time the end-credits roll. Naturally, all the Westerners escape, leaving the locals to try and make ends meet in the post-apocalyptic wasteland full of dead dino body parts. The slimy journalist gets the girl, the badly-educated scientist gets his plastic ostrich egg, and the viewer gets to wonder what the heck happened to all those Ray Harryhausen effects he'd been promised. There wasn't one stop-motion scene in the entire movie. Liars.And yet, in spite of all this, the 1960 "The Lost World" is far better than Spielberg's "The Lost World".

I was 8 in 1960. And here was a big, colourful, widescreen film with adventure, excitement, dinosaurs, giant spiders, natives, cliff edge escapes, volcanoes - wow! Now, pushing 60, I am not so demanding as to insist that movies from 50 years ago should have effects executed to the same standard as the best of today's - far from it. In fact, I still have huge affection for the best effects movies of my childhood (by which, of course, I mean those by Ray Harryhausen).But hindsight illuminates the offerings of Irwin Allen as very much missing something on the effects side. I'm not entirely sure what or why, but they never quite go as far as they need to for the suspension of disbelief. Perhaps it's errors of scale, perhaps it's messy matte lines, and for sure it is lizards with fins glued on them. But there is something about Allen's films which always disappoints.And the funny thing is that I was aware of it when I was 8, too.