Review of Season One:
I started off hating THE LOST WORLD, an ultra cheap and cheerful adaptation of the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lost world novel, but halfway through the first season I realised I was enjoying it after all. It turns out to be a campy, action-packed adventure series clearly modelled on XENA: WARRIOR SUCCESS and made by an enthusiastic Australian cast and crew. The characters and plot have little to do with the original book; instead, this is an adventure-of-the-week format as a small group of adventurers (and a random Sheena-style character) are trapped in a prehistoric plateau.
The characters are underwritten with the exception of Marguerite, played to the hilt by Rachel Blakely as a proto feminist, and very good she is too. Seeing what they come up with each time is a lot of fun: this packs in Moreau-style experiments, Burroughs-style ape man attacks, the usual JURASSIC PARK-inspired bad CGI dinosaur attacks, random Arthurian and Egyptian societies, sacrifice, tribal warfare, time travel and even a Fulci tribute at one point. The kitchen sink approach, then, but somehow it works.
Review of Season Two:
Season 2 carries on the same trend as the first, with some increasingly relaxed and cheesy episodes as the writers feel more confident about putting random spins on the premise. The characters remain single-dimensional, although there's a lot of romance from the Marguerite and Roxton characters; thankfully the former remains her usual defiant self. Various stories include dreams of returning home, evil clothing, possession a la THE EVIL DEAD, a skeleton fight tribute straight out of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, killer plants, and even an exploding airship cliffhanger climax. It's occasionally really cheesy - the acting in the episode where they turn into animals is really bad, for example - but overall, fun.
Review of Season Three:
The third and final season feels increasingly outlandish so it's little surprise that it was cancelled - on a cliffhanger, no less. This is very much an episodic plot-of-the-week show by now, at the same time flirting with on/off romantic guff between Roxton and Marguerite and introducing a few new characters in a bid to keep it fresh. The writers seem willing to throw any idea they can think of into the fray, so there are episodes based on time travel, ouija boards, blue ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper, WW1, westerns, ice ages, the Chinese Tong, you name it. It's all rather ridiculous by this point, and we can only imagine how things would have devolved from here.
I started off hating THE LOST WORLD, an ultra cheap and cheerful adaptation of the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lost world novel, but halfway through the first season I realised I was enjoying it after all. It turns out to be a campy, action-packed adventure series clearly modelled on XENA: WARRIOR SUCCESS and made by an enthusiastic Australian cast and crew. The characters and plot have little to do with the original book; instead, this is an adventure-of-the-week format as a small group of adventurers (and a random Sheena-style character) are trapped in a prehistoric plateau.
The characters are underwritten with the exception of Marguerite, played to the hilt by Rachel Blakely as a proto feminist, and very good she is too. Seeing what they come up with each time is a lot of fun: this packs in Moreau-style experiments, Burroughs-style ape man attacks, the usual JURASSIC PARK-inspired bad CGI dinosaur attacks, random Arthurian and Egyptian societies, sacrifice, tribal warfare, time travel and even a Fulci tribute at one point. The kitchen sink approach, then, but somehow it works.
Review of Season Two:
Season 2 carries on the same trend as the first, with some increasingly relaxed and cheesy episodes as the writers feel more confident about putting random spins on the premise. The characters remain single-dimensional, although there's a lot of romance from the Marguerite and Roxton characters; thankfully the former remains her usual defiant self. Various stories include dreams of returning home, evil clothing, possession a la THE EVIL DEAD, a skeleton fight tribute straight out of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, killer plants, and even an exploding airship cliffhanger climax. It's occasionally really cheesy - the acting in the episode where they turn into animals is really bad, for example - but overall, fun.
Review of Season Three:
The third and final season feels increasingly outlandish so it's little surprise that it was cancelled - on a cliffhanger, no less. This is very much an episodic plot-of-the-week show by now, at the same time flirting with on/off romantic guff between Roxton and Marguerite and introducing a few new characters in a bid to keep it fresh. The writers seem willing to throw any idea they can think of into the fray, so there are episodes based on time travel, ouija boards, blue ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper, WW1, westerns, ice ages, the Chinese Tong, you name it. It's all rather ridiculous by this point, and we can only imagine how things would have devolved from here.