**
Adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's exciting novel of explorers finding prehistoric life on a South American plateau is rough going for adventure fans as Irwin Allen tosses ditzy Jill St. John into the mix, then populates his lost world with modern reptiles. We get an iguanodon played by an iguana with horns glued to its head, a stegosaurus played by a monitor lizard, and so on. When the chief scientist first catches a glimpse of the iguana, he tells his companions he thinks it might have been a brontosaurus! It's all less convincing than The Giant Gila Monster, which at least produced one of the great MST3K episodes. Oh, and there's also a giant green-glowing tarantula. (The tarantula scene does have one saving grace, however: an opportunity to look past it at Vitina Marcus, an American actress of intriguing beauty, being of Sicilian and Hungarian descent, who plays a native girl captured by the explorers.) The actors aren't bad here -- Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, David Hedison, and Fernando Llamas -- but they've got nothing to work with. Their best scenes all take place at the beginning of the film, before they ever get to the silly plateau.
Adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's exciting novel of explorers finding prehistoric life on a South American plateau is rough going for adventure fans as Irwin Allen tosses ditzy Jill St. John into the mix, then populates his lost world with modern reptiles. We get an iguanodon played by an iguana with horns glued to its head, a stegosaurus played by a monitor lizard, and so on. When the chief scientist first catches a glimpse of the iguana, he tells his companions he thinks it might have been a brontosaurus! It's all less convincing than The Giant Gila Monster, which at least produced one of the great MST3K episodes. Oh, and there's also a giant green-glowing tarantula. (The tarantula scene does have one saving grace, however: an opportunity to look past it at Vitina Marcus, an American actress of intriguing beauty, being of Sicilian and Hungarian descent, who plays a native girl captured by the explorers.) The actors aren't bad here -- Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, David Hedison, and Fernando Llamas -- but they've got nothing to work with. Their best scenes all take place at the beginning of the film, before they ever get to the silly plateau.
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