Review: King Kong

Palaeontologist Jeff Bridges and a stranded actress named ‘Dwan’ (Jessica Lange) are stowaways on a ship headed for a mysterious and remote island. Charles Grodin is a grumpy oil company bigwig heading the expedition, however things take an unexpected turn on arrival when Dwan is kidnapped by tribal locals who plan to use her as a sacrifice to their 40-foot ape god. Kong for his part seems rather fond of Dwan. John Randolph plays the ship’s captain, Rene Auberjonois plays Grodin’s resident science geek, whilst other members of the expedition are played by Ed Lauter, Julius Harris, and Jack O’Halloran. John Agar appears late and brief as the Mayor of New York.

 

Clumsy 1976 Dino De Laurentiis-produced miscalculation from director John Guillermin (“The Blue Max”, “The Towering Inferno”) simply isn’t up to snuff. Almost nothing works here, it’s dull (boy is it ever!), cheap-looking, stupid, laughable, and interminable. The only laudable quality here is the very fine score by John Barry (“Goldfinger”, “Robin and Marian”). Scripted by Lorenzo Semple Jr (“Pretty Poison”, “Flash Gordon”), the characters are stock, whilst the actors are either dreadful or dreadfully wasted. Worst of the lot are a painfully miscast Charles Grodin and a pathetic screen debut by a bubble-headed Jessica Lange, who probably should’ve never been given another chance after this sorry excuse for a performance. I know it’s a difficult task playing such an airheaded fantasy-girl character as ‘Dwan’ (seriously, that’s her name, it’s not a typo), but Lange just isn’t the Marilyn Monroe or Ursula Andress-type necessary to play such a character. Aside from “Tootsie” I’ve never been a fan of Lange, but here she’s bland, wooden, and unconvincing. Grodin meanwhile is just flat-out miscast. He has two modes here: Dull and frothing at the mouth. Both are awful and unconvincing coming from the otherwise solid lightweight comedic actor. Playing a selfish and opportunistic villain, Grodin doesn’t have the dramatic chops nor the scenery-chewing relish that might’ve helped him in the role. He’s boring and uninteresting. As essentially the hero of the piece, Jeff Bridges isn’t terrible, but his character strangely doesn’t register as strongly and prominently as it really should. So he ends up a bit forgettable, though at least he came out of this relatively unscathed perhaps as a result. The best work by far comes from Rene Auberjonois, who adds a bit of life and eccentricity to the film. Julius Harris is sorely wasted in a nothing role, whilst Ed Lauter and John Randolph fare slightly better in slightly larger roles.

 

It’s a shame that the characters are so thin because they’re all we have for so much of the film, which moves at a glacial pace. We’re eventually treated to the least convincing tribal nonsense scenes ever committed to film. So much so that “The Simpsons” barely had to do any lampooning when they parodied it years later. After 50 (too) long minutes, the title character arrives with crudely inserted crunchy sound FX that don’t fool anyone into thinking they’re not just seeing Rick Baker in a phony monkey suit walking around like…a guy in a phony monkey suit. Apparently Carol Rambaldi’s original gigantic mechanical ape creation proved unpersuasive to the producer and Baker’s much cheaper idea was used more often than not during filming. The close-ups are kinda OK (including some brief mechanical special effects of Rambaldi’s) but the rest…oof, Baker’s worst work including “Octaman”. I’ve never been a huge Baker fan (His work on “An American Werewolf in London” pales in comparison to Rob Bottin’s work on “The Howling”), but his work on “Gorillas in the Mist” and “Planet of the Apes” was truly exemplary, so to see what garbage he comes up with here is extremely disappointing. When the character is seen in motion, the illusion of enormity and any sense of reality is entirely obliterated by Baker’s unconvincing work. Even for a Saturday matinee fantasy like this, it still needs to work within its own reality, right? Baker fails to give the character any sense of weight to the supposedly enormous character. I’m sorry, but the sound FX aren’t enough, Baker himself needs to make the character’s physicality work. He has absolutely no idea about body language and posture inside that stupid suit, and it’s beyond obvious. It’s cheap and actually less convincing than the stop-motion work in the classic (and still definitive) 1933 version. I actually don’t even like the overall design of Kong here, either. The face (which I believe is Rambaldi’s creation) in particular is too silly-looking, almost juvenile. Combine that with some shitty projection work, the worst matte drawings you’ve ever seen, and Lange’s dopey performance, and this thing just doesn’t begin to work at all. There’s about 10 minutes here that doesn’t suck, the other 110 minutes of this awful, cheap monster movie is pretty worthless. Even those 10 minutes are in pieces.

 

Dreadfully disappointing, completely unconvincing, with only John Barry’s music score to recommend. 1976 audiences deserved a hell of a lot more than this bloated crap. It wasn’t a box-office flop, but how many people actually liked it? I’d rather watch the 1933 original or some of Toho’s 60s “Godzilla” films instead. At least there your expectations will largely be met, though their version of Kong (in “King Kong vs. Godzilla”) was a dud too, now that I think of it.

 

Rating: D