Return to the Lost World

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.

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.

RETURN TO THE LOST WORLD features the return of the entire cast from the first film. Yes! This includes Nathania Stanford as Malu -My goodness! How can anyone be this beautiful?! She's hot enough to walk on the sun without even burning her feet!

Anyway, picking up where part one left off, a familiar villain is back, joined by a noxious pig who wants to drill in the dino mesa for oil. This leads to disaster and tragedy. Can Challenger and company save the day?

Unlike in the first film, the dinosaurs only pop in occasionally to remind us that they exist. RETURN is also a bit less family-friendly than its predecessor. The addition of more eeevil characters brings more violence into the story. There's even some brief -Malu!- partial nudity! It also has a heavier moral / ecological message to it.

An enjoyable enough follow-up...

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.

This was filmed back-to-back with the 1992 re-make of Conan Doyle's famous novel 'The Lost World'. And it shows.

The film starts promisingly enough, with a ruthless organization intending to exploit the lost world and Challenger et al returning to defend the prehistoric plateau, but then things go downhill. Everybody is stranded on the plateau and we're left with a feeble, boring, over-length rehash of the first film.

The dinosaurs (who are hardly ever seen) are just laughable. Are we expected to take that cuddly toy that's supposed to be an ankylosaur seriously? And the tyrannosaur seems rooted to the spot.

Do yourself a favor and get hold of the 1925 silent version of the Lost World. Unbelievably in this age of CGI and other advanced effects, the twenties version is the best and will remain so until somebody finally decides to do a decent re-make.