The Lost World

The granddaddy of all monster movies — and the film that proved stop-motion animation could carry a feature. Willis O'Brien's groundbreaking special effects bring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's lost plateau of living dinosaurs to startling life: brontosaurs lumber through prehistoric forests, an allosaurus battles a triceratops, and a rampaging brontosaurus escapes to terrorize London in a climax that directly inspired King Kong eight years later. The human story — an expedition led by the irascible Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery, magnificently bombastic) — is serviceable adventure fare, but it's O'Brien's creatures that steal the show. His painstaking frame-by-frame animation gave these rubber-and-wire models genuine personality and weight, inventing a visual effects tradition that runs directly through Ray Harryhausen to Jurassic Park.