king kong

Well, I finally sat down and watched my five dollar copy of the original King Kong. I wasn't expecting much... maybe some cool stop-motion effects and some crappy acting in between. Boy, was I wrong. I'd say this is easily superior to Jackson's remake.

I was expecting some awesome old school special effects interspersed with a lot of boredom but I actually found this creaky black-and-white movie to be far less dull than Peter Jackson's recent remake. Sure, Jackson's action sequences and the effects work done by his Weta workshop are really good stuff, but everything else in that film was bloated and overdone and too dull. And the things I assumed Jackson had put in just to be cool were actually straight out of the original too!

The beginning of the 1933 King Kong is quick to set things up and doesn't waste too much time in getting to the island... we're introduced to our three principal characters and the mysterious and primitive world they're heading for without too much irrelevant back story. Piece by piece we're shown this disturbing and enigmatic island, from the strange wall to the savage natives, until the mighty King Kong is revealed in all his glory - every bit as impressive 80 years on as it must've been at the time of it's release. The island teems with primitive monsters... tyranosaurs and giant salamanders, pterodactyls, stegosaurs, water-dwelling dinosaurs. Kong and his captors fight them all. It's great stuff, and the way the actors are edited into these scenes works surprisingly well.

And excuse the further comparisons, but the sequences where Kong runs amok in New York are a lot snappier than Jackson's remake too... it's quick to get to the point and Kong's fateful climbing of the Empire State Building is memorable for good reason. And there's no bloody ice-skating!

Things that surprised me or that I found strange... Kong is a lot less of a 'noble beast' here than he has been presented elsewhere. Any sympathy for Kong is entirely a subtext and only alluded to in the film's final moments... the cruelty of man is never directly referenced and the character of Carl Denham - who is pretty much responsible for all the carnage and death in the film - remains unpunished and is never shown in a negative light in response to his actions!

Kong is also a lot more violent in this film than I expected him to be... he shakes a bunch of humans off a log so that they fall to their death, picks up people and chews on them until they die, stomps on people until they are well and truly squashed, picks people out of high-rise appartments and drops them, and kills a dinosaur by breaking it's jaw open (and then plays with the limp jaws afterwards).

Anyway, this film stands up very well... it has plenty of action, thrills, spills and crazy monsters going apeshit at each other, and it's actually lot more even and smoothly-plotted than the 2005 version. Go find it for five dollars!

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