Who can say what may be living in that jungle -- as vast as all Europe?
Eight years before he brought King Kong and the other fantastic denizens of Skull Island to life, Willis O'Brien animated the prehistoric beasts in the 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World. And in the 26 minutes before we catch our first sight of one of them (a pterodactyl, naturally), director Harry O. Hoyt introduces us to the members of the expedition that sets out to rescue the missing explorer that found the plateau where they've managed to survive, cut off from the rest of the world in the backwaters of the Amazon.
First, there's eager cub reporter Malone (Lloyd Hughes), who wants a dangerous assignment and certainly gets one when he's sent to cover the lecture of Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery), who's used to being heckled by audiences and is leery of reporters as a result. Even so, he gets eminent naturalist Professor Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt) and famous hunter Sir John (Lewis Stone) to agree to come on the expedition, which Malone also talks his way onto after overcoming Challenger's strenuous objections. Summerlee's aim is to discredit Challenger, but Sir John goes along so he can win over Paula (Bessie Love), the daughter of the missing explorer who is easily half his age, which isn't creepy at all. Unfortunately for Sir John, Paula has a more age-appropriate suitor in Malone, and they both have an unexpected rival in the jealous Ape-man (Bull Montana) that bedevils the expedition once it reaches the plateau.
Of course, The Lost World's raison d'être is Willis O'Brien's stop-motion work and it delivers all the dinosaur action one would hope for. In addition to the pterodactyl, we also get to see a brontosaurus, an allosaurus, a family of triceratops, and a stegosaurus, among others. As fate would have it, the one that is brought back to London is the brontosaurus, which manages to break free before it's even able to be put on display and causes a panic when it's loosed on the streets. Apart from some property damage -- some minor, some a bit more serious -- it doesn't appear to cause any fatalities, though. That's the benefit of capturing a vegetarian, I guess.