Well so it said on the side of a bus down here in that there London.

Fuck off it is!

This really is the daddy of all Dino movies and an interesting antique I picked up for only £3 on DVD. The story is pretty much what you would expect. Challenger goes off in search of fabled lost world of dinosaurs, Dinos chase people around a bit, cub reporter falls in love with girl, volcano erupts, dinos stampede, Challenger brings Brotosaurus back to London where it escapes and smashes the place up a bit.

All very familiar stuff but what makes this movie interesting is that it was the first film to do so. The script is by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from his own novel.

The stop-motion creature effects are by Willis O'Brien who later animated King Kong. Given their vintage O'Brien's effects are really quite good and the creatures featured include a pterandon, an allosaurus and some horned dinosaurs, along with the afore mentioned brontosaurus.

Given the film's vintage (it is of course silent) there are some wild bits of gurning to camera and a white person blacked up to look like a native porter, but otherwise not a badly paced action thriller, which clearly influenced King Kong nearly a decade on and most subsequent Dino pictures from the plain daft Doug McClure Edgar Rice Burroughs flicks of the mid 70s to Jurassic Park and its sequels.

As a footnote I believe it was also the first film to be shown as an in-flight movie on an Imperial Airways flight way back in 1925

Since moving into our new swanky offices here in London's West End we have all been on the look out for passing celebs.

I'm not doing rubbish having only clocked up TV historian Dan Cruikshank and Dennis Norden. Mind you I have seen Dennis Norden three times.