Can you believe that they actually remade “King Kong” in 1976? Believe it or not, they did and it’s one of those movies that deserve a passing if you don’t want to watch it. Why, you may ask? Here is why:
Ever wondered what a “truly” bad movie looks like? You might have already seen them. The greatest work of entirely unwelcome (to say nothing of awful) remakes of classics, Dino de Laurentiis’ “King Kong” is a strikingly broad mixture of truly miserable works. You name an area of filmmaking and it’s poorly represented here. Final verdict: when people use the saying “so bad it’s good,” this one is precisely the kind of garbage they’re talking about.
Where to start? Maybe Jessica Lange is a good silly place to start. Scott Weinberg from filmcritic.com said in his review, “she’s so bad here that I’m stunned she somehow survived to become one of America’s best actresses.” Movies as bad as this one have hurt more than one leading lady’s career. Pricing just as goofily are Jeff Bridges (as the anthropologist protagonist) and Charles Grodin (as the mandatory capitalist), though both give performances perfectly in sync with a movie this enthusiastically campy.
Special effects….yeah, right. The only thing more hilariously hilarious than the monkey effects in this movie is the fact that they somehow earned an Academy Award! (And it’s not just because of outdated technology. These effects truly are bad.) Weinberg commented, “Try not to catapult popcorn out of your nostrils as Kong attempts to give Lange (stupidly named “Dwan” here) an industrial-strength blow dry, and be sure to keep an eye out for the chintziest-looking giant snake this side of Anaconda.”
The dialogue borders on mysterious mockery, the “modernizations” to the source movie are inaccurate at best, plain old stupid at worst. Weinberg mentioned, “The editing is scattershot and static, the musical score is bombastic and repetitive,” and the cinematography…actually is not that awful. More is the pity that DP Richard Kline’s camerawork is swamped in such a goofball flick.
Weinberg goes on to say, “The word “goofball” is why I can unmercifully trash a movie like this, yet still like it in a perverse sort of way.” To say this one doesn’t measure up to the original film goes without saying, but if you actually enjoy Ed Wood movies and the sort of movies usually seen on “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” odds are you’ll have an enjoyable time laughing at this failure.
Like I have mentioned before, if you want to give this one a passing, do so, you will not regret it at all. This one just slaps the original one in the face for being so good and trying to top that one when they should’ve known that you can’t beat something that everyone loves. I can’t give them credit for trying, but this one is just going to have you question, “Why,” throughout the entire runtime of the movie. That’s exactly what I was thinking when I was watching it and the plot was just ridiculous.
Now there is something hard to believe, they actually made a sequel to this movie. Want to know how it was, if it was better or worse than this one? Stay tuned tomorrow in the continuation of “Kong-a-thon.”
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