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hyped garbage

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Best movie ever!

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

An expedition to find oil on a remote tropical island discovers a giant ape (simian expert Rick Baker in a pretty convincing gorilla suit) instead.Director John Guillermin gives this picture an impressive sense of scope, keeps the enjoyable story moving along at a steady pace, and stages the exciting climax atop the World Trade Center with flair and skill. Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s bright, but uneven script cleverly updates the premise with then timely and topical references to the oil crisis, the porno chic fad, the astrology craze, and the feminist movement which now date the movie in a charming way as well as offers the inspired touch of reducing Kong to a commodity that's crassly exploited by a greedy major corporation. However, the campy humor produces more groans than laughs while the variable special effects are strictly hit or miss throughout (Kong's dramatic entrance rates as a definite rousing highlight while his fight with a huge fake snake fails to pass muster).Fortunately, the sturdy acting by the fine cast helps a lot: A hirsute Jeff Bridges contributes a likable performance as decent and humane hippie paleontologist Jack Prescott, Jessica Lange makes an appealing cinematic debut as the sweetly ditsy Dwan, and Charles Grodin pours on the slimy snark as smarmy and unscrupulous oil company executive Fred Wilson, plus there are sound supporting contributions from John Randolph as the venerable Captain Ross, Rene Auberjonois as nerdy scientist Bagley, Julius Harris as the tough Boan, Jack O'Halloran as the dim-witted Joe Perko, Dennis Fimple as the goofy Sunfish, and Ed Lauter as the gruff Carnahan. John Barry's majestic orchestral score hits the stirring spot. Richard H. Kline's sumptuous widescreen cinematography provides a breathtaking glossy look. By no means a perfect film, but certainly not anywhere near as bad as its undeservedly poor reputation suggests.

For the amount of money spent on this fiasco, you'd think there would be some quality movie making involved...but no, this turned out to be the cheap way out.The producers got the cheapest actors they could find, spent little on special effects, and modernized the story to include an Oil Company AND a super tanker, heh heh...Oh, they must have searched a long time to get a high school screen writer too, there's a line in there, "Holy Smoke", that had me laughing when they saw the huge stockade...This one is the bottom of the barrel for entertainment...

King Kong 1976 is a film I've always avoided up until now due to some bad reports about it since it first came out. It came up on TV recently and I watched it tonight and it really was the most pleasant surprise of a put-down movie I've seen since Waterworld, which I enjoyed equally. Two movies then that are very misjudged. King Kong not only looks great, it looks big in every way, not just the gorilla, but the sets, the scope, the stunning scenery, big in every way. Jessica Lange in her first picture is amazingly good (in fact I just read she won the Golden Globe for best newcomer) and Jeff Bridges is his usual reliable hero, so two strong leads here. I did spot John Agar right at the end who I haven't seen since his 40's heyday so that was a surprise. I know the picture is now 41 years old but it just looked terrific to me so seven stars from me. I love the original and also the Naomi Watt's more recent one but this stands up extremely well against the others which I really didn't expect. Highly recommended if you, like me, have been avoiding it.

A new iteration of the giant ape tormenting humans hit the screen in 1976 with a different, yet similar, storyline. In this edition, an exploratory crew searches for a large oil find. Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin) runs the expedition betting a lot of money that there would be land amidst a cloud of fog somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean. Sneaking aboard the vessel is Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), a paleontologist, interested in the rumor surrounding the island. Picking up lost in the ocean is a young actress Dwan (Jessica Lange) who is at first in shock after surviving yacht explosion but determined to join the search crew as they land on the island. The group encounters the native people performing a ceremony and chanting "Kong". Like in the original film, the islanders see the golden-haired woman and offer to trade six of their women but the explorers refuse and return to the boat. Dwan is captured and used as the new center of the ceremony. When the beast shows up, it's apparent that they used a monkey suit that is filmed to look large. Kong grabs Dwan and takes her off into the jungle as the explorers mount a rescue led by Jack.Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com