This first, silent version of The Lost World is the best one for dinosaur fans as it has more dinosaurs in it than any other. I have two VHS copies of this, an hour long version and the restored copy, which lasts for about 100 minutes.

Professor Challenger leads a party into an uncharted part of the Amazon where prehistoric monsters still live. When there, they explore the land and see the many dinosaurs that roam it. They then decide to try and capture one of these alive and bring it back to London! They manage this and bring back a Brontosaurus, but it escapes and goes on the rampage through London, brings down Tower Bridge and then escapes down the Thames.

The stop-motion dinosaurs are done excellently by Willis O'Brien and also include Allosaurus, Tricertops and Pteranodon.

The cast includes Wallace Beery as Chellenger, Bessie Love and Lewis Stone.

This movie is a must see, especially if you are a fan of dinosaur movies like myself. Excellent.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

This film really made me feel wistful. You see, the original version of this film was about 50% longer and I really would like to see what some idiots chose to remove from the original print. This is especially true for the very end, as the film ends way too abruptly and it looks like there MUST have been a lot more to this movie. As it was, the film was way too choppy and I'll one day look for a more complete version.

The movie is a masterpiece for 1920s stop-motion photography. Willis O'Brien, who later became famous for this type of filming in 1933's KING KONG, was also the guy responsible for bringing to life the dinosaurs in this film. The overall effect really isn't that much different than a decade later--as both films are wonderful for the time. Sure, it's possible to make them seem almost 100% real today, but for the 20s and 30s, this was amazing stuff.

The plot involves a crazed anthropologist (Wallace Beery) who insists that there is a land filled with living dinosaurs in South America and he wants to mount a return expedition to find a colleague who was stranded there. Though scoffed at by other professors, he is able to get funding and convince others to come with him. Once there, they find pretty much what you'd expect they'd find (except that there are some African creatures here as well--oh, well, if they can have dinosaurs, why not chimps?!). The only surprise is that they bring back a live Brontosaurus and it pretty much does a "King Kong"-type escape at the end and runs amok in London, not New York. And, while all this doesn't seem very original, remember that KING KONG was second--this was the first film of its type and so it deserves a lot of kudos and recognition for its place in film history.

If I could write in my review that the 1960 version of The Lost World was in need of a remake with computer generated dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, than certainly it would hold true for this silent version from 1925. It doesn't detract however from the fact that audiences marveled at this one in the theaters during that year.

When talkies arrived no one would have ever cast Wallace Beery as Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor George Challenger. Beery is unrecognizable beneath that bushy head and heavy beard. Claude Rains from 1960 was definitely Conan Doyle's idea of Challenger.

Beery has gotten possession of a diary from Bessie Love's father who was marooned on a plateau in the still unexplored areas of the Amazon tributary headwaters. He claims through that diary that dinosaurs roam that area only to be met with derision. In fact Beery's special almost pathological hate is reserved for the press.

But through the press, Edward Hughes's newspaper, an expedition is financed and it consists of Beery, Hughes, Love, Lewis Stone as a celebrated big game hunter and Arthur Hoyt who is Challenger's scientific rival and chief critic.

The animated special effects are state of the art in 1925 and are pretty good even today. The plateau is all that the diary claims and more. Beery and company even bring back a large souvenir from the place and it wreaks as much havoc on London as King Kong did in New York. Wouldn't be surprised if Meriam C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack got their idea for King Kong from the Lost World.

The Lost World is ancient and dated, but still good viewing.