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 Lost World" has Summerlee and Challenger returning to the Lost World to thwart some rascally oil prospectors. Rather more spectacular than the first film (it includes a brief nude shot of the delectable Nathania Stanford) it has the same rather likeable qualities.

It plays like a Victorian adventure story, brave, honest Englishmen against cowardly, devious continental Europeans (In this case Belgian and Portuguese). The lead villain over acts badly but Rhys-Davies and Walker are good in the lead roles.

There is rather more action and plot than the first film and generally it holds the interest.

Why do Berlusconi films use such poor quality film stock? This, its predecessor, the Sherlock Holmes films with Christopher Lee/Patrick MacNee, all present fuzzy images. Surely this is a false economy? How much difference in price is there between good quality stock and the rubbish stuff? Is it purely to match the stock footage(volcanoes) and avoid those Irwin Allen type mismatches? This film is worth watching if you want to be a completist, but the previous criticisms, hammy acting, ludicrous dinosaurs are all correct, but I can't agree that the two principals are second rate. Warner was an actor of promise before he went to Hollywood(see Gielgud's comments on Claude Rains{irony alert 1960 version}). There are also mistakes, piranhas in Africa, guns not firing, why do the workers wear their tin helmets all the time? Whatever happened to Nathania Stanford? Just these two films? Probably saw sense and got a life.

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.

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...