It’s 1960 and The New Frontier. Hammer films have just begun remaking the Universal classics, and magazines like Famous Monsters Of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein are just getting off the ground. The first manned space flight is still a year away. The Lost World film of 1925, with its impressive Willis O’Brien dinosaur effects is regarded a silent classic, though one seldom seen.

Enter Irwin Allen (1916-1991), an ambitious producer-director. Largely forgotten today, Allen ruled briefly as the prince of pointless excitement (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, television’s Lost In Space) prior to finally settling down as "the master of disaster" with that newly developed genre (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno). Now, Allen would co-write (with Charles Bennett), produce and direct a remake in DeLuxe Color and Cinemascope for 20th Century-Fox.

One would hope that some 35 years later, special effects would be better. They were. Ray Harryhausen, an O’Brien pupil (on Mighty Joe Young, 1949), set a new standard in 1958 with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, refining O’Brien’s stop-motion technique to near-perfection, in color and (later) wide screen.

Irwin Allen, however, opted for a simpler, cheaper process, patterned after the 1940 film One Million B.C. Actual lizards were photographed in action, probably "directed" by air jets or hidden prompting devices. These iguanas, monitors, komodo dragons, Gila monsters, crocodiles, and what-have-you were decked out with additional latex horns, fins and frills for disguise (how they kept them from scratching and chewing these off, I don’t know).

Such scenes were later combined with footage of the human actors. Willis O’Brien was credited with supervising the special effects, but one must guess that his heart wasn’t in it. It would be his last such assignment.

Although it stands to reason that a true, living reptile ought to be convincing thus used, it’s quite different in the execution. Do anything you can with ‘em (such as dub in amplified roars or photographically slow their motion to lend them some perceived bulk); they still come off as blown-up lizards, and not as dinosaurs. Moreover, the technical details in Allen’s film fell quite short of the Harryhausen standard: there were problems with focus, color and bleeding edges.

Nobody had anything good to say about the 1960 remake’s "dinosaurs." (Today, animal rights activists would complain of reptile abuse. I suspect that lots of animals were harmed in the filming of this opus.)

The period of the story is unspecified, but is probably contemporary. Bold American reporter Ed Malone is assaulted (caned—or, rather, umbrella-ed) by the arriving Challenger at the airport, but still has to cover the professor’s pompous lecture at the Zoological Institute. Challenger claims that, near the headwaters of the Amazon, on a tall plateau, "isolated from the laws of evolution" he actually saw "live dinosaurs" of the long-dead Jurassic period.

"Were they big dinosaurs, Professor?" asks the snide academic, Professor Summerlee.

"I do not deal in small dinosaurs," is the blustery reply. Wait a minute, there were small dinosaurs, weren’t there? Never mind.

Challenger selects Summerlee and debonair adventurer Sir John Roxton for the new expedition, and reluctantly takes Malone along to obtain funding from the man’s newspaper. By the time the party arrives in South America, Roxton’s beautiful girl friend Jennifer blackmails her way onto the team, and takes along her plucky brother David and, no lie, her sissified poodle, Frosty. Gomez, a smooth helicopter pilot (he even sings), and Costa, an obsequious guide, complete the party.

After landing on the plateau, the ‘copter is wrecked by what Challenger calls "a brontosaurus" (but which looks like a lizard, albeit a big one) and the group is stranded without radio contact. The party will soon encounter man-eating plants, giant spiders, and native humans as well. (There’s no paleozoological basis for the giant spider, a green-tinted tarantula on a string. Somehow, it has a vital spot like no spider before or since, as Malone kills it at once with a single rifle shot.)

There are soap-operatic complications: Roxton wants to dump Jennifer, fearing that she only wants to marry his title. Malone, quite taken with the lady himself, is appalled by this, and comes to blows with Roxton, at which point Burton White’s diary is found. [Spoiler alert! Cover your eyes until I tell you it’s okay to look. Oh, never mind!]

This brings the picture to a talky halt as we learn that White (an American explorer) and Roxton were here three years previously when Roxton abandoned the others. Slain was one Santiago, who turns out to be Gomez’ brother! Gomez then lays plans to kill Roxton, but will be reconciled when Sir John saves his own life.

Eventually, all are captured and held by the natives for sacrifice to some Fire God. Old, blind Burton White helps them escape, but it isn’t easy. In the film’s best scene, the explorers must cross a huge, vaulted cavern (over a giant skeleton, complete with wishbone), and there’s a lot of mist in the chamber and eerie vox humana on the soundtrack.

The Fire God is rather disappointing: he’s just a bigger big lizard who eats the slimy Costa and is dispatched when Gomez sacrifices himself to break an earthen dam and rain molten lava on the scaly critter.

Following White’s suggested path, the party regroups in safety, free of the plateau, which is now in the throes of volcanic destruction--of course, this expedition had the extreme bad luck to visit this civilization in the final one hundredth of one per cent of its existence, something that happens all the time in the movies.

Did I mention the diamonds? Roxton reveals that he has salvaged some diamonds as a wedding present for Malone and Jennifer. Big deal! Challenger has managed to smuggle out a dinosaur egg, which promptly hatches. A little lizard with extra frills emerges, and Challenger swears (jokes?) that it’s a "Tyrannosaurus Rex," and that "it’ll live long enough to grow as big a house, and terrify all London." Well and good, but we don’t get to see it!

Okay, what does this film have to offer? Well, one hell of a cast. Give him credit; Irwin Allen never scrimped in this department.

Michael Rennie, whom you’ll certainly remember as the Spock-ish alien visitor from The Day The Earth Stood Still, gets top billing as Roxton, although he’s mostly just along for the ride. His character leaves most of the heroics to Malone, played by David Hedison, who himself is just between The Fly and Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. Jill St. John, a young redheaded actress who remains gorgeous through Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 and to this very day, enacts Jennifer Holmes. Her tight pink slacks will almost make you forgive her dialogue delivered in simpering drawl.

What can one say about Claude Rains other than that he’s a legendary figure in fantastic films and a good mainstream player, star of The Invisible Man (1933), The Wolf Man (1941), Casablanca (1942), Phantom Of The Opera (1943) and others too numerous to mention. Nearing the end of a distinguished acting career, Rains portrays Professor George Edward Challenger with proper bombast. Red-bearded and determined, he’s just the type who’ll stick a burning cigar in his pocket--which he does early on--when he’s not beating reporters with his umbrella or staring down the poodle.

Given the advantage of sound, one that Wallace Beery, the 1925 Challenger didn’t have, Rains uses his impressive pipes to good effect. He’s supported by prissy Richard Haydn as Summerlee. Haydn had a distinctive style as a stage and screen comedian, but is probably best remembered for his comic relief in The Sound of Music (1965).

Then there’s Fernando Lamas, the suave Latin. He’s the guy that Billy Crystal sends up with that "You look marvelous" shtick. There’s also Ray Stricklyn as David; he was the teenager in Return Of Dracula (1958). Jay Novello, a veteran character actor, is sneaky, cowardly, greedy, and (quite unexpectedly) lecherous as Costa. Jay is the father of comedian Don Novello, better known as Father Guido Sarducci, Saturday Night Live’s Vatican gossip columnist. A daughter-in-law is former U. S. Surgeon General Dr. Antonia Novello. A truly scary legacy that!

I haven’t even mentioned Vitina Marcus, primarily a television actress who here appears as a sarong-clad native girl with superb legs and a great pair of . . . cheekbones. Burton White is played by Ian Wolfe, who appeared in horror classics such as The Raven and Mad Love (both 1935), and who played literally hundreds of other fine supporting roles.

I’m opposed to the colorization of classic films. I don’t even like to see--or rather hear--dubbing where subtitling would suffice. But I wonder how many of you would object to reconstructing a film like this in an enhanced version, a film in which the special effects were the principal letdown? Would it be economically feasible to paste some computer-generated dinosaurs right over those lizard impostors, so that the brontosaurs and tyrannosaurs described looked like the real thing as we imagine it?

We’d gain by retaining a fine cast, one that simply couldn’t be recreated today. We know that Irwin Allen would have used the best technology available to him were it affordable. This film would be an excellent subject for such a treatment.

There was a 1992 remake, a sequel, and a television series based upon the novel, which (thankfully) are beyond HORROR-WOOD's scope.

Contemporary author Michael Crichton (also a Doctor of Medicine who found a better career as a writer) paid homage to Doyle when he re-used the title The Lost World for his sequel to the mega-bestseller Jurassic Park. In Crichton’s follow-up, a dinosaur did escape to the civilized world and scare people for a time.

If Sir Arthur was correct about the spirit world beyond this one, and is looking on from its shadows, I hope he’s flattered.