Saturday night’s Warehouse Live screening of the 1925 silent film The Lost World, with the musical accompaniment of L.A.-based Cambodian rock bank Dengue Fever, has been the Cinema Arts Festival’s rockingest event.
The film itself is fairly campy. A group of Edwardian gentleman set out from London to explore claims that dinosaurs continue to exist in a remote region of Brazil. When they arrive at the “lost world,” they see flying pterodactyls, leaf-eating brontosauruses, hungry allosauruses, protective triceratops mothers—even a vaguely menacing ape man. But the dangers are kept at a distance from the humans.
That’s because animator Willis O’Brien was still learning his craft.
The future creator of King Kong was learning to make his little rubber models move and interact with each other, but he couldn’t yet put them together convincingly with people.
The finale is pretty great, however. In a strong anticipation of King Kong, the explorers bring a captured brontosaurus back to London, and damned if the beast doesn’t escape and rampage through the city. The creature falls into the Thames and swims away safely.
Maybe it was headed for Loch Ness.
