The Lost World

The Lost World ~ I first saw this 1960 update of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World on the afternoon movie when I was maybe five or so. I had seen excerpts on the Gene London show early Saturday morning and then the whole thing later that afternoon. Maybe a year later I saw it again on a weekday afternoon with my big sister and her then boyfriend/now husband as she made a home cooked meal for them while they watched. Yeah, I was the annoying baby brother, but still the film holds good memories.

The Lost World was an early work of Irwin Allen, who besides creating some wonderful scifi television like "Lost in Space," "Land of the Giants," and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," later pioneered the disaster film with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. He was campy cool and to a five year old, a film genius. Heck, I still dig his stuff at fifty-one. Allen produced, directed, and co-wrote this one.

The bearded Claude Rains is protagonist Professor Challenger, who with Michael Rennie, David Hedison (of the aforementioned "Voyage" and Felix Leiter in two James Bond flicks), Fernando Lamas, and the very young token female Jill St. John in tow, takes a trip to a lost plateau in Venezuela where dinosaurs still exist (yeah, the same one from Up). Rains is quite fun, Hedison overshadows Rennie sadly, and St. John plays the even sadder dual role of independent woman and damsel in distress. All that said, the cast's chemistry is tight and entertaining.

The updating of the story is well done except for the special effects, which might really tick the folks at PETA off in this day and age. One of the things that stands out most about this movie are the 'dinosaurs.' While Allen originally wanted to use stop motion for the dinosaurs, budget constraints led to iguanas, crocodiles, and monitor lizards with horns and fins attached. Yeah, I know.

This was waaay old school, a practice dating back to the Flash Gordon serials and cruel treatment of the animals, especially when they are made to fight each other. It's also quite distracting and takes the viewer out of the movie when Challenger calls a beast a brontosaurus and one can see it's obviously a monitor lizard. Some of this 'giant' reptilian footage was recycled for some of Allen's TV shows.

All things considered, this is a great traditional adventure with a wonderful pulp flavor - fun, thrills, and Jill St. John in tight pink pants - well worth seeing. Irwin Allen at his campy best, and still as good as it was when I was five.

2012

2012 ~ A close friend of mine said the other day that she would watch John Cusack read the phone book. I have to wonder if she’s seen this gem…

The real star here is the special effects. It seems like co-writer/director Roland Emmerich just didn’t get to destroy the world enough in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow (and that’s not even mentioning how he destroyed Godzilla, grrr…) and had CGI effects leftover. That said, this wannabe Irwin Allen has created stunning disaster imagery that is almost worth the price of admission (or rental), if only a story went along with it.

The film’s structure revolves around the solely Western idea that the world will end when the Mayan calendar ends in the year 2012. To me this always seemed absurd. The calendar ended because the guy carving it got tired and just ended it on the last cycle. Remember no keyboards or pencils then, just chisels – it was hard labor. Anyway, the world’s going to end, cue special effects and let your butt get numb.

John Cusack is writer Jackson Curtis (who just happens to have written a book about Mayan ‘prophecy’) who struggles in the midst of the disaster to save his estranged family. The hilarity, and unbelievability factor, ensues from there. I have to wonder however if John had some gambling debts or alimony payments we don’t know about he had to cover with this flick. It certainly couldn’t have been the script that lured him in. Woody Harrelson, on the other hand, is actually quite a hoot as an ersatz Art Bell type radio show host.

The chase scenes will certainly make your heart race, and if only this would have been in IMAX... See it for the effects, and only if you don’t have to pay for it.

Off the Top of My Head...

The Poseidon Adventure

Irwin Allen's classic first major disaster movie, Gene Hackman as hero and Shelley Winters creating a legend in her Mrs. Rosen. Gotta love where folks dance to music that doesn't match. Must see train wreck flick!



And just for the record, that Dukes of Hazard movie should be shown to prisoners on Death Row to make their stay that much more painful.