The Lost World
Origin of King Kong, Godzilla, Jurassic Park / World and monster / creature movies in pioneering trick technique. 
Silent movie special screening with piano accompaniment by Richard Siedhoff. 
Introduction and insights by Matthias Fetzer. 

The 2016 restoration is put together out of 11 different film pieces and has colorized parts. 
The story is written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and follows after Sherlock Holmes, his second favorite character Professor Challenger. 
This story is already very similar to King Kong and the 1933 film is like a remake in parts. 
Both are made by the visionary special effects and trick technician Willis O’Brien. 
These dinosaurs have even breathing bellies! 
It is like in King Kong and Jurassic Park…

This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of feature-length dinosaur movies, the first ever of which was this quite crude and rudimentary and yet still ambitious and influential silent-era adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventure novel, featuring stop-motion model setpieces by the legendary Willis H. O'Brien which were a precursor to his work on King Kong and thus just about every large-scale monster movie you've ever seen from 50s B-movies to kaiju brawlers to any movie with "Jurassic" in its title.

It's funny to have a document from the very beginning how much trouble these movies often have merging the monster mayhem with the human drama, in this case quite literally they were figuring out how to even…

It was overdue for me to return to the era of reviewing feature length films from both the Golden Age of Hollywood and the silent era, which I haven’t done in the past several months. This was a DVR recording made from a recent Turner Classic Movies airing. I hadn’t seen this before & a 100th anniversary is a good reason for a review. Of course I haven’t read the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel before but to clarify, this is the full film and not the truncated version that was the only one available before various elements were combined together to finally present a complete print after all those decades. Flicker Alley and Lobster Films were behind that restoration.

The…

The first feature-length film featuring dinosaurs. It is, of course, as is evident from the early date of the year of its release, a silent film. Yet I'd put this one up there with other top silent features like Metropolis, Nesferatu and Maniac. The stop-motion dinosaurs are as convincing as any other silent-film fantasies. The characters of the story are colorful even through a lack of audible dialogue. Old Challenger reminded me of John C. Reilly playing Dr. Steve Brule. The 1912 novel from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle surely inspired everything from other Lost World adaptations to King Kong's story and films to Jurassic Park, and with this being the first adaptation it very well might be worth seeking out…