King Kong (1976)
If this review seems more than a little lopsided, it’s because I’ve had to deal with nearly forty years of conflicting impressions about this movie. There’s the unfavorable opinion I got from it as a child, which stayed with me until I saw the movie again with adult eyes some 30 years later… and got a different, equally unfavorable impression.
I could simply say, “It’s dumb, but it certainly looks good. What harm could it do?” Then I realize: that’s probably just what Kong said.
Will Laughlin is the Braineater.
#1 by David Lee Ingersoll on June 1, 2016 - 3:37 pm
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I was 12 when I saw this. The lack of dinosaurs was just one reason that I was disappointed.
#2 by Jason Farrell on June 1, 2016 - 5:01 pm
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I never even thought of the lack of dinosaurs, but now that you brought it up, it’s really no wonder that the stakes seem so much lower on this one’s Skull Island sequence
#3 by lyzard on June 1, 2016 - 6:41 pm
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Apologies for pre-empting the “It blows!” blog-post heading, which would have gone nicely with your screenshot. 🙂
Your tie-in of Kong with Orca is correct, yet another example of Dino not recognising / not learning from his mistakes. What strikes me now is the fact that he didn’t go the “Free Willy” route with Orca, which have been an even more blatant echo of Kong—were orcas not being kept in captivity that early, or had it just not become controversial?
#4 by El Santo on June 2, 2016 - 11:15 am
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Wanda (the first orca in captivity, which survived all of one day under human care) was caught in 1961. Moby Doll and Namu followed in 1964 and 1965, and lived long enough to give their captors some idea what they ought to be doing. Wild capture of killer whales peaked in 1970, but very quickly got caught up in the building controversy over how we treated whales in general. The Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed as early as 1972, so De Laurentiis had to know which way the wind was blowing.
#5 by goddessoftransitory on June 2, 2016 - 2:05 am
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One scene from this film that (probably inadvertently) got really right was after they’ve got Kong in oil tanker and Grodin is gloating over his future of fame and fortune and Bridges says what he did was wrong. Grodin launches into a diatribe that winds up with “go back to the island! Ask the natives if they miss Kong.”
Jeff says that they probably miss him a lot, and a year from now that island will be full of burned out drunks. “When you took Kong you took away their god.”
That has happened in several isolated societies that have had sudden contact with a larger one that wanted something they had. The money and gimcracks handed over to a people that had no context for dealing with them did indeed lead to incredibly high percentages of alcoholism, drug abuse, and family system breakdown. I still am astonished that anybody had the wherewithal to write down and film that scene at all.
As for Lange, yes. Roger Ebert wrote that one of the toughest things for an intelligent performer to do is act dumber than they are; the problem being of course is either they can’t pull it off, exposing the script’s flaws, or they do it so well people assume they really are that stupid.
#6 by The Rev. on June 3, 2016 - 1:33 am
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Wonderful piece, Will!
I haven’t seen this since I was a kid; the only thing that stuck with me was Kong fighting the rubber snake. Didn’t he do the old jaw split to said snake? I seem to recall he did.
The “land plesiosaur” in the original has always been an outsized Tanystropheus to me. Because, yes, I was the kind of kid that knew what Tanystropheus was.
#7 by El Santo on June 3, 2016 - 9:08 am
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“The ‘land plesiosaur’ in the original has always been an outsized Tanystropheus to me.”
I, meanwhile, always thought of it as something like a giant Tetrapodophis. Sure, the actual Tetrapodophis hadn’t been discovered yet, but I knew that snakes and lizards shared a common ancestor, so it followed that somewhere back in prehistory, there had to be snakes with vestigial legs.
#8 by Blake on June 26, 2016 - 3:56 pm
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Apparently, the KING KONG remake was outgrossed by the Brucesploitation “classic” (there are other, far more entertaining examples of the sub-genre out there), EXIT THE DRAGON, ENTER THE TIGER, starring Bruce Li. That must be the salt in the wound.