Rückkehr in die verlorene Welt

This is one ridiculous sequel that never should have been made. The team that discovered The Lost World comes back to the plateau where the dinosaurs roam come back to help the natives when some oil drillers come to their home and start drilling. It's British imperialism at its finest and native considerations don't count for much.

Except for John Rhys-Davies, David Warner, Eric McCormack, Darren Peter Mercer, and Tamara Gaski who did promise to help the natives if they needed.

What the oil drillers do is tap into a sleeping volcano and the way it is dealt with is plain ridiculous. That together with the chintzy special effects from the original make this a bad sequel.

Arthur Conan Doyle would shudder.

Once again the two bickering professors must join together to save the lost world. The five members of the first expedition return (see The Lost World, 1992, for a list of actors). A man seeking oil brings a drilling crew to the plateau. Instead of striking oil they tap an underground volcano which threatens all life in the Lost World. The oil crew clash with the native people and the scientific expedition. Although the situation looks hopeless.... (I'm not going to tell you the ending).

Return To the Lost World was filmed back-to-back with the 1992 version of The Lost World.

In this sequel, the same five people, lead by Challenger return to the plateau where a group has started drilling for oil which is threatening to destroy the land. Gomez has something to do with this. They manage to defeat the drillers and the plateau is saved, much to the delight of the natives.

Like in The Lost World, what few dinosaurs we see are made of rubber and these include a T-Rex and Ankylosaurus.

John Ryhs-Davies and David Warner reprise their roles as Challenger and Summerlee and three of the other actors are also back.

Despite reading several bad reviews of this and those cheap looking rubber dinosaurs, I enjoyed Return to the Lost World.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

This sequel to the 1992 version of "The Lost World" came out just a month after the release of the first film in Canada. The cast is essentially the same, and the filming was again in Zimbabwe, Africa.

The plot for this partial sci-fi thriller is based on crime. Edward Malone and Jenny Nielson learn that an oil-drilling operation has gone to the area of the lost world. The operators have killed the native chief, Palala, and enslaved tribesmen and the tribe has sent word for help. So they convince a feuding Challenger and Summerlee to return to help the locals.

Between dinosaur attacks, clashes with the European oil drillers, and the threat of a volcano, the good guys are able to win the day. This is even much tamer than the first film, and while young children may yet enjoy it, the older kids would probably be bored and wander off. Parents and grandparents might take advantage of the time for a nap.

British producer Harry Alan Towers was always a man ready to deliver a halfway-decent movie on a tight budget. Not content with filming Conan Doyle's THE LOST WORLD in Africa, he also shot this entirely familiar sequel, in which all of the leads are reunited for a return trip to those dinosaur-infested lands.

Quality-wise, this isn't very good; it's a family-friendly affair, which means we're saddled with cute baby dinosaurs that look like toys, alongside larger creations that don't have much in the way of, well, movement. Towers himself co-wrote the script with his favoured director Timothy Bond handling the filming, and that this is merely adequate is fairly impressive in its own right.

The cast is the best thing about these two films: watching two second-tier actors, John Rhys-Davies and David Warner, constantly butting heads is a lot of fun, at least for this viewer. But the storyline is all over the place, involving a greedy Belgian villain and efforts to blow up an erupting volcano (!) that threatens to destroy the whole land. Location photography in Zimbabwe is a highlight.