Overall Rating
  Awesome: 18.18%
Worth A Look: 30.91%
Just Average: 20%
Pretty Crappy: 25.45%
Sucks: 5.45%
2 reviews, 43 user ratings
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| King Kong (1976) |
by John Smith
"DING DONG"
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Worth watching if only to see the Twin Towers in all their glory, this monster flick from the golden age of the glamourous disaster movie ("The Towering Inferno", "Airport" etc) also shows off blond beauties Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange at their youngest and sexiest.Before Lange turned into her eighties brittle bad girl ("Frances", "The Postman Always Rings Twice"), and long before she fell into her nineties schizo-freak sanity fringe dweller ("Cape Fear", "Blue Sky") she was a fidgety looker, wriggling around in a torn dress, in the clutches of a gigantic gorilla.
Lange plays the oddly named "Dwan", which you assume is a typo until the character announces that as an aspiring actress, she transposed the two middle letters of her name to make it more memorable. That's a misjudgement by "Dwan", as the only thing that her awkward made-up name reminds me of is the short, genderless "Billy Kwan" from "The Year Of Living Dangerously", or maybe someone out of "Tron". Also, a far cleverer explanation would have been that she thought "Dwan" was similar to the elegant "Swan".
As well, it turns out that it almost rhymes with the name of her unexpected leading man, "Kong", who thunders out of the jungle one night to make off with "Dwan", and take her to his favorite hidden jungle places, and once there, not eat her - but seduce her!
Bridges' "Jack" takes off in pursuit, and eventually a sedated "Kong" is brought back to New York in the cargo hold of an enormous container ship. But no-one's counted on mysterious "Dwan" becoming lovestruck by the great ape, and her curious swooning over the edge of his deep dark cage rouses him from his stupour. Apparently, "Kong"'s obsessively in love with "Dwan", and even though we never find out how or why his instincts are so confused - let's face it, what would their babies look like? - the next thing you know, ape and girl are straddling the roofs of the tallest towers in the world, and airplanes are buzzing about like crazy, trying to bring the monster crashing down.
Sound familiar?
It's awfully eerie to watch the climax of "King Kong 1976" since September 11, 2001. The theatrical grandeur of the towers was obvious from their completion - stationary manmade versions of Niagara Falls, they immediately became a setting for several authors, film makers and visionaries, who found them to be perfect visual or metaphoric backdrops.
When "Kong" hits the street, the pavement cracks up like an eggshell, and everyone gathers to look down at the debris, look up at the towers, and oooh and aaah like mad.
Since September 11, many people have commented that that day's events were "like a movie". What doesn't get acknowledged near as often is how a lot of us watched it with the same excitement we'd always felt when we'd looked at big buildings, and contemplated the thrill of things falling off them, or of them burning or collapsing.Like "Making Love" (1982), this is a film that would hold little value if it hadn't been for unforseen subsequent disastrous historical events that make it, in hindsight, a piece of pop culture to treasure.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=2311&reviewer=305
originally posted: 11/17/02 21:20:56
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USA
02-Dec-1976 (PG)
DVD: 22-Nov-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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