23 skidoo! Buy bonds! Flappers! Better dead than red! Four score and twenty years ago! Et tu, Brutus. Etc.
The plan is to hire a ship and have the crew sail him and his movie crew out to a distant island. On the island are natives who maintain a huge wall that surrounds the middle of the island. What's on the other side of that wall? Well, never you mind about that, buckaroo. Never you mind.
But he needs an actress to play the love interest in his film that has no other characters or script. And the movie studios won't let a girl go on a ship to a dangerous island because girls have cooties. So Carl finds a non-actress, a woman at a coffee shop named Ann Darrow (the girl, not the coffee shop) and offers her the job.
The First Mate, Jack Driscoll, is furious that a girl is on his ship and he yells at her a lot and she tries not to get her girl juice on him, but can't help it.
After six weeks, they reach the island, and Carl's crew sneak off the boat and creep up to see a bunch of natives doing a ritualistic dance. They are actually black actors, to my relief, and not white people with shoe polish. Carl films them from behind the bushes, planning to make them part of the movie...somehow...but they catch him and point their spears at the crew and say "oonga bonga" and Carl's AD fortunately speaks their pretend language and oongas back at them interprets that they want to rape and pillage all over the blonde girl.
Carl says no way, and they leave and go back on the boat. On the deck, Jack tells Ann he's glad she's safe and there's no way she's going back on the island to film anymore, no matter what Carl says. Then they crank the Olden Times WTF meter up to 11 with this exchange:
Ann: You care about me? But Jack, you hate women!
Jack: Yeah, but you ain't 'women'.
I...don't know.
So Jack leaves the deck and the natives appear over the side of the boat and grab Ann and pull her into the water. They go back to shore and tie her up and continue on, chanting and dancing and drafting socialistic health care bills and they tie her up and put her on the other side of the giant wall.
The chanting and dancing stops and they wait. Something approaches. What could it be?
Why it's a giant claymation ape-like thing! Ann sees it and screams her head off. King Kong grabs her and is magically able to instantly turn her into claymation, too! Amazing! He runs off with her.
Back on the boat, Jack goes to Ann's room too...say goodnight (?)...and knocks on the door. No answer. He discovers she's not on the ship and he Carl, and the movie crew row ashore and to rescue her. They go deep into the jungle and discover several scary dinosaurs who eat several of them. Meanwhile, Kong takes Ann back to his cave atop a cliff for a little private time. He looks in her eyes. Andy Serkis must be having an off day, because his expression is quite unreadable. Finally, he just leaves her there and goes stomping off randomly. He happens upon the men crossing a fallen tree that's made a makeshift bridge. He picks up the tree and flings it. Everyone goes flying and dies horribly, much as my GI Joes often did. Everyone but Carl and Jack ,that is. They've managed to jump off the tree before Kong threw it.
Carl goes back to the ship to get knockout gas, while Jack follows Kong's trail to try to rescue Ann. Kong fights several dino monsters who try to eat Ann and Ann screams a lot, constantly while he does so. When he's distracted, Jack rescues her and they run off. Kong stomps after them, and even after Jack and Ann run through the door in the wall, Kong busts through it, breaking the native's homes and eating them as spirit moves him.
But Carl saves the day by throwing the knockout gas and putting Kong out.
The ship's crew just want to leave, now, but Carl insists they tie up Kong and put him on the boat so they can make money off him back home. Somehow they do this, despite the logistics being totally impossible.
Back in New York, the elitist liberals all gather in their fancy clothes to come and gawk at the giant ape. Carl bills the show as "Beauty and the Beast" and opens the curtains on the world's biggest stage to reveal Kong all chained up. Don't worry, those chains will hold. Kong sees Ann and freaks out and breaks the chains and everyone runs and screams and Kong goes marching down the street and Jack and Ann run away and I guess go into a random building and talk about how they're totally safe now here on the twentieth floor. And Kong randomly climbs that same building, looking in all the windows for Ann. In one bit of hilarious dark comedy, he sees a woman asleep in her bed, and busts his hand through the window, grabs her, pulls her outside, sees that she's not Ann, and then casually tosses her to her death, screaming all the way. What a way to wake up. But then he finds Ann, and puts his hand through the window again. Jack tries to fight him off with a chair, but the chair breaks harmlessly and Jack goes splat on the floor. Heh. Stupid Jack.
So Kong grabs Ann and naturally climbs the Empire State Building because it's more dramatic than just running away and the planes come and shoot him down and Carl gets to say "it was beauty killed the beast" in a far less melodramatic reading than Jack Black's.
Review: Not anywhere near as bad as I was expecting. Kudos especially to whoever conceived of this now very familiar story. It's really quite fun and (at the time) very original. I had already seen Peter Jackson's movie, and it's a testament to the original story that Jackson basically didn't change anything at all. Although that did make this kind of boring to watch. The effects were...what they were. Not as bad as what I was expecting, either. And many times Kong ate people and picked them up and you could see they really went to the trouble to make a giant Kong head and hand, both of which had to move, and I'm sure that wasn't easy. The acting was a bit dodgy, and Fay Wray's scream was unbelievably annoying, though. It also wouldn't have hurt them to develop any other characters besides Jack, Carl, and Ann. But whatever. It's certainly watchable, over all.
Stars: Three out of five.
Next, "The Sound of Music" and then one I've been waiting for..."Dr. Strangelove".
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