KING OF THE LOST WORLD (2005)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

KING OF THE LOST WORLD was clearly designed to "mockbust" the big-budget KING KONG of 2005. But it seems that the producers at The Asylum company were a little more cautious than usual, because on occasion the owners of the franchise built upon the 1933 KONG have become litigious. Thus even though there's a giant ape in the advertising, he doesn't play a central role in the narrative. What the writers did to avoid lawsuits was to mash together elements of the original KONG and the public domain Conan Doyle book THE LOST WORLD. with maybe a touch or two from the 1925 movie adaptation of the Doyle book, which many consider animator Willis O'Brien's dry-run for KONG.

Come to think of it, another major influence was the teleseries LOST, which had burst upon American audiences the year before. So this film is the WORLD based on LOST, complete with a bunch of castaways stranded on an isolated island. None of the characters, unlike those of the TV show, are at all memorable, despite the fact that the four with the most lines are given the last names of the Doyle heroes: Challenger, Roxton, Malone and Summerlee. (Summerlee gets a sex-change, BTW.) 

While the survivors spend roughly half the film getting eaten by or running from giant monsters like pterodactyls and giant scorpions, Challenger (Bruce Boxleitner, given top billing as compensation for lending the film his name recognition) has some mysterious secret, and toward the end, when no one cares anymore, it's revealed that he's a government agent looking for a lost nuclear bomb, which is used to wipe the Mysterious Island off the map.

The big KONG elements are not the giant ape, who's present for only a few minutes, but the natives who intend to sacrifice the castaways to their giant (unnamed) ape god. To help avoid accusations of racism, though, the island's inhabitants are not Natives of Color, but the mostly white descendants of another group of airline-crash victims, who formed their weird society for, who knows what reasons. The natives are the source of the film's one amusing scene, when Challenger gets "challenged" by a ferocious island-girl who is for some other reason a mistress of skilled stick-fighting.

Aside from the terminal weirdness of the stick-fighting scene, and the almost accidental homage to KING KONG's cinematic precursor, KING OF THE LOST WORLD should remain a world well lost.