The Lost World Found Again

I found myself watching Irwin Allen's 1960 production of The Lost World yet again this weekend.  The experience left me wondering just why I keep watching this film.  It regularly turns up on digital channels like Talking Pictures TV and Legend - often catch the beginning or end of it as I channel surf - yet I couldn't resist watching a version I found on an obscure Roku streaming channel.  As I sat through the scratchy, pan and scan and probably pirated version they were offering, punctuated every few minutes by the same ad over and over again, I was left pondering what it is that brings us back, time and again, to certain films.  Because I'm sure that we all have a number of movies that we frequently re-watch, either intentionally, because we have it on DVD or Blu-Ray, or by happenstance, because it turns up on a TV channel we have access to.  My own list of such films is varied, ranging from The Magnificent Seven (1960) to House of Frankenstein (1944), taking in all manner of other stuff from art house films to British sex comedies of the seventies.  Some of them I watch for pure nostalgia, (House of Frankenstein, for instance, was the first classic horror movie I remember seeing as a child), while others have an emotional attachment for me, being associated with significant events in my life.  Others irrationally move me to particular emotional states for no particular reason.

Nostalgia doubtless plays a part in my obsession  with The Lost World - I recall first seeing it as a child, but that alone doesn't seem a good enough reason for my continued viewing of the film.  In part it comes down to the fact that I'm a sucker for dinosaur films, especially those involving evolution-defying lost worlds.  But The Lost World isn't even a good example of the genre.  It isn't even a good adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel.  I mean, it doesn't even have proper dinosaurs, just photographically enlarged lizards with rubber fins, horns and frills stuck on them.  None of them look remotely like any known species of dinosaur.  That said, the actual photographic effects by which they interact with the human actors are excellent.  But not only does it have fake dinosaurs, but it skimps on them - a common fault of 'Lost World' adaptations, just look at the two Harry Allan Towers adaptations from the nineties - giving us only four different dino-lizards, none of which are really integral to the plot.  Indeed, the whole thing feels like an exotic jungle adventure picture into which some dinosaurs have been rather arbitrarily inserted.  It is as if the producers thought that a standard adventure picture was really what audiences wanted to see, rather than dinosaurs.  Which, obviously, is the opposite of reality - we go to see a film called The Lost World because we want to see dinosaurs.  Proper dinosaurs.  Lots of proper dinosaurs.  They are the film's sole raison d'etre.

Of course, the reason why the dinosaurs underwhelming and peripheral comes down to budget - those photographically enlarged lizards are cheaper and quicker to create than stop motion dinosaurs, (the only viable alternative for realistic dinosaurs in 1960).  Even then, they are still going to eat up a significant chunk of budget, so their appearances are restricted.  To recoup some of those costs, those dinosaur sequences inevitably end up being used as stock footage in other productions.  In this regard, The Lost World came along at the right time - for years, the dinosaur footage (also photographically enlarged lizards) from One Million BC (1940) had been the go to source for prehistoric monsters for low-budget productions.  But they were in black and white and by the sixties, even B-movies were mainly in colour - so the De Luxe colour lizards from the Irwin Allen film replaced them as the favoured dinosaur stock footage.  Irwin Allen himself recycled this footage at least three times in episodes of his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series, (it helped that David Hedison starred in both The Lost World and the TV series).  I'm pretty sure that it was also used in at least one episode of Allen's The Time Tunnel, while parts of the footage turn up in films like When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), supplementing Jim Danforth's stop-motion dinosaurs.  Interestingly, the set-piece dinosaur sequence from The Lost World, the fight between the lizard with a frill and plates on its back and the small crocodile with horns and a fin, is clearly modelled on a similar sequence in One Million BC, using the same camera angles and framing shots in much the same way.  (Seen today, both of these sequences appear quite disturbing, with the animals tearing chunks out of each other in what, to them, was clearly a fight to the death.  But, sadly, animal cruelty was common in film making back then).

Maybe it is the fact that this dinosaur footage became so familiar to me which makes me keep watching The Lost World.  It is somehow reassuring and seeing it again reminds of all those other TV shows and films that it had featured in.  Then again, maybe I just like cheesy old B-movies, particularly those, like The Lost World which are dressed up with an A-movie budget, cast (it stars Claude Rains, Jill St John and Michael Rennie) and production values.