Rating of
1/4
One of the 1970s' biggest mistakes...
Indyfreak - wrote on 02/04/15
An apparently expensive yet strangely boring remake of the quintessential monster movie that does one thing right in one respect and that is the relationship between King Kong and his female captive. Here it's actually developed into a friendship of sorts. That said, the movie is bad. This was made in the same decade that films like Jaws, Star Wars, and Alien were produced yet it is sometimes sillier than the original King Kong.
No effort was made to utilize state of the art special effects to include dinosaurs for King Kong to fight (all we get is a rubber python). How the hell this won the Oscar for Best Special Effects (which it shared with the equally atrocious Logan's Run) is beyond me.
The cast is suitable yet still you feel like they're wasted. Jeff Bridges is the hero, a hippie scientist instead of a hardened sailor, and Jessica Lange does not actually give a performance here but her low-cut shorts do leave an impact of sorts. The focus of the plot is no longer the discovery of Kong's island home itself but instead that most dastardly evil of plot devices...the pitfalls of capitalism! The entire venture is a failed attempt at oil exploration and the climax is a publicity stunt for a gas station conglomerate. It's such a high-minded exercise in liberal pretentiousness that it makes me ashamed to consider myself one after watching it.
The film crew actually took a classic film and watered it down for purely satirical purposes yet went through the trouble of marketing it as an adrenaline rush of an action-packed adventure despite having almost no action or adventure or anything capable of sustaining one's adrenaline whatsoever.
It's like the 1970s version of Avatar but the spectacle is most absolutely positively NOT prepared to compensate viewers for the film's flaws.
