SOURCE: Steyn, Mark. “Carry on Killing.” Spectator 279, no. 8816 (19 July 1997): 39-40.

In the following review, Steyn comments on the frenetic pace of The Lost World: Jurassic Park and states that “Spielberg's films are turning into his dinosaurs: big, brutal, but with no imagination.”

A couple of months ago, a dog in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, attacked a neighbour's chicken. Under the town's rigorous ‘three strikes, you're dead’ law, he was sentenced to die, prompting a local outcry and mounting pressure on the state's governor to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. At this point, various legal experts weighed in, arguing that, under the state's constitution, the governor's power of clemency extended only to human beings on death row, not to any other species. Tired of having to carry the cost of feeding the inmate during these constitutional arguments, the municipal authorities reversed their decision and gave the dog 48 hours to...