Right behind any projected Hollywood blockbuster come the knock-offs. In the case of Jurassic Park, Roger Corman crafted Carnosaur, a solid schlock gore fest directly ripping the premise of Spielberg's adaptation. With Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong, we've been given King of the Lost World.
Billing itself as "The epic story that inspired King Kong and Jurassic Park," King of the Lost World is neither. How this could have "inspired" anything is a mystery since it rips off every hidden/lost island movie ever made.
It all starts with one of the worst plane crashes you'll ever witness on film. After blowing up and taking part of a mountainside with it, the cast and crew are revealed on a plane that doesn't even have so much as a spark spewing from it. It's the miracle of a B-movie budget that anyone survived.
Of course, the newest inhabitants to the island are welcomed by being devoured one by one. Giant spiders, scorpions, man-eating vines, a giant gorilla, natives, and a few dragons (which makes about as much sense as saying this inspired anything) pick off the crash victims slowly but surely.
Outside of the vines, everything is done via low budget computer-generated effects. Low budget may not even suffice here. The giant gorilla, whose mug is plastered on the front of the box, snags around eight minutes total of screen time. That's a positive aspect, as it's impossible to tell what's going on. Excessive motion blur, impossible physics, choppy animation, and the fact that the monkey ends up out of frame half the time don't help.
The human characters have been plucked from every other "island" movie you've seen: The mysterious stranger that holds the key to the entire film (played straight by Bruce Boxleitner), the hero type (Jeff Denton), the stuck up girl, and of course the group that refuses to go along with the most common sense plan of escape. Given the studio's other recent attempts at ripping off Hollywood blockbusters (Pirates of Treasure Island), it's no surprise how this turned out. 
Aside from compression artifacts coming through a few too many times, this is a solid transfer. It's soft and lacking slightly in detail, but for a lower budgeted production, this is decent transfer work. In actuality, the transfer ends up hurting the film since the special effects become painfully obvious, more so than they would have with an awful picture. 
Article comments
1 - Dave Nalle
The idea that this inspired King Kong is almost certainly because the movie is based (loosely) on the Arthur Conan Doyle novel The Lost World which almost certainly WAS the primary inspiration for King Kong and all of the other lost world literature and movies of the 20th century. There have been numerous movies and TV series based directly on the Conan Doyle classic, and it is arguably one of the most influential fantasy novels of all time.
Dave
2 - Matt Paprocki
Oh, I know that, but the marketing material makes it sound like THIS VERY MOVIE has inspired Kong and JP. That, and besides the whole lost island thing, there's nothing here from any of the the stories or movies.
3 - Dave Nalle
Well, they DO want to sell videos, Matt.
dave
4 - Matt Paprocki
Yeah, but blatantly misleading your audience isn't a way to earn viewers.
5 - Foywonder
Get ready because next week The Asylum releases SNAKES ON A TRAIN