G.Spider

It is indeed a shame that the excellent and pioneering Willis O'Brien film of the Conan Doyle masterpiece is not being granted the decent big-budget re-make it so rightly deserves. Instead we have, in recent years, been lumbered with a lot of tacky, vacuous, half-hearted re-makes. This TV series has nothing to do with the Conan Doyle story "The Lost World". The name is merely used as a blanket title to attract viewers to what is a completely unremarkable series, little more than an excuse to show uninteresting and woefully cliched 'butt-kicking babes' saving pathetic, inadequate men from computer game sprites. The storylines are slow and tedious, Challenger is feeble, nothing like the fiery character he was in the novel or the 1925 film, the natives are just laughable, and the dinosaur sequences are leaden and unexciting. The Lost World? Conan Doyle would be ashamed to have his name associated with such bottom-of-the-barrel tosh as this, and O'Brien would wonder what special effects have come to.

A hard-to-come-by film, which is a shame as this is a real gem. A group of space travellers are accidentally stranded on a distant alien planet which turns out to be inhabited by prehistoric monsters. This is real edge-of-seat suspence from beginning to end, and you really feel for the characters. There is plenty of appropriately chilling scenery (and I couldn't see any houses or roads), a superbly eerie soundtrack and some dramatic, impressive stop-motion dinosaurs including one of the scariest Tyrannosaurs ever to dominate a movie screen (it even kills the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms at one point, the Harryhausen monster's cameo a nice touch). An under-rated classic, up there with the best dinosaur films.

For some reason or another, a photographically-enlarged lizard foot keeps squashing people whilst boy racers zoom about. Slow-moving, this film has very little to recommend it to anybody but the most dedicated monster-about-town fan. Some nice scenery, but you'll probably fall asleep.