Fantastic!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I finally found it. I saw this as a kid. That was back when I would watch any movie until 4 in the morning, I like movies that much. This was the only movie that I saw back then that made me regret watching it. I remember telling my older brother "The best character is the sailboat. And they only show it a little at the beginning, but at least it does make a re-appearance as wreckage at the end." The whole thing is bizarre and it had to be one of those situations where the producer wanted to go to Bahama on vacation so he took a camera and some pals and then tried to piece together what they shot after they got back stateside and sobered up.The makeup on the ostriches is laughable, and the phony fangs on the dogs are as cheezy as the plastic skeletons. In between the bad acting, ludicrous score and ridiculous plot, its like National Geographic nature film, with pointless underwater shots that add nothing to the story. Hey, if you rent that underwater camera, you better use it.The dogs attacking the turtle was the only authentic thing in the whole movie, and it would get them arrested in the US if they staged it here, pity the ASPCA was not on set to prevent it.OK, fun time, lets do the rewrite. Loose the dogs and ostriches. Let the wild man be doing the king test sure, but lets have him kidnap the 11-year-old girl, to take a wife. Savages. So then the rest of the idiots try to save her, all egged on by the British guy. They fail, but it turns out the British guy is a pedophile, so the savage is really a hero, and he really just wanted the girl as a slave, since who wants to marry a kid, they are too little, too little. They all make the British guy walk the plank, the little girls enjoys being a slave, the other 4 all hook up, and a happy happy ending.

In hindsight, I am not sure why I watched this movie. After all, it really has nothing going for it. In fact, it's such a cheap film that I wonder why it ever went to DVD.The film stars Richard Greene as a really, really stupid professor. He decides to pack off his kids and head on an ocean voyage of discovery. So, he packs off his two girls (one very young), a friend, a college student and a sea lion (yes, a sea lion) and heads on a very long trip in his sailboat. Now I am NOT against boats and family adventures, but this guy seemed a bit flighty to put everyone at risk like this.Since the film is called "Island of the Lost", it isn't surprising that sooner or later the group will land on an uncharted island and have lots of freaky adventures. The island, it turns out, is full of supposedly extinct animals. This actually means that the filmmakers took animals such as gators and birds and 'embellished them'--sticking cardboard pieces on them here and there to make them look primordial. Well, at least that was the intention. It just came off as very cheap and silly.In addition to the silly animals, the island features volcanoes and savage natives--or at least some of them are savage...kind of. In fact, none of the stuff they encounter seems that interesting and mostly it's just Greene saying things like "...wow...there's a archaeotperixis coelocanthis..." or "...look out...they look like head hunters..."---and delivering the lines like he's delivering a lecture to a group of coeds. The acting isn't 100% terrible, though it isn't good--and this pretty much can be said about everything--the direction, camera-work and overall production. The bottom line is that it's bad but not bad enough to be funny....just dull and silly.

There's nostalgic charm if you're a fan of the films of this era. I happen to hugely admire the Ivan Tors film and TV projects. This is possibly a script from the 1950s, as it was co-written by actor Richard Carlson, who made SF films with Tors in the 1950s. It's certainly creaky stuff that seems outdated even by the mid-1960s when it was made. It's far more a fantasy than the usual Tors material, which strove for believability and achieved it. This doesn't. The animal sequences, which were always top-notch in Tors films thanks to trainer Ralph Helfer (inventor of affection training), but here they are awkwardly shot and silly. The cast is likable but the script is just not up to making anything work to its advantage.

I obtained this title from a mate last year (2001). I had been after it for a while.Robin Hood star Richard Greene and family, including Luke Haplin from Flipper end up on an uncharted island in the South Seas and encounter dangers such as sabre tooth dogs and ostriches withfins attached. They end up shipwrecked when their boat gets destroyed in a storm and they build their own raft to escape at the end of the movie. Through all of this, they are being watched by natives who try and capture them, but they fail.I enjoyed this movie and is worth getting hold of if you are lucky.Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.