![]() Jeff Bridges plays Jack Prescott, an environmentalist type of guy who has stowed away on board the boat and acts as the conscience of the film, while Jessica Lange, in her film debut, is an aspiring model/actress named Dwan (not Dawn) who is found floating in a life raft near the expedition’s ship. His greedy intentions are worn on his sleeve, and I’d say he was a cartoon of a character if he didn’t feel spookily similar to people in the headlines today. Instead of a film crew headed to Skull Island, we have an oil industrialist, played by Charles Grodin, headed out on a ship in search of an island that he believes sits atop an endless supply of oil. Liberties have been taken with the core story, but not enough to change the iconic elements. It seems surprisingly relevant, and the effects aren’t nearly as dated as some naysayers would like to believe. Revisiting the movie for the purpose of writing about it here makes me wonder why this movie has been so lambasted. Between this and the other three movies about Kong I mentioned in the paragraph above, this one has the lowest audience score. As long as I can remember, this has been the red-headed step-ape of the King Kong canon, either being dismissed as too dated or written off as just awful cinema. ![]() That doesn’t really seem to be the case with the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis production, though. When it comes to the Big Guy, we usually take what we like and ignore what we don’t. ![]() Even Kong: Skull Island raises the bar in technical achievement while jettisoning much of the tragedy surrounding the core of this story. The 2005 Peter Jackson movie gives us unparalleled emotion in the expressions of Kong and some wild monster fights, but is perhaps overwrought and excessive with all the business surrounding it. We place the antique stop motion effects in their proper context and move on, ignoring that pretty much every human in the movie is so awful that the ape is the only character we can relate to in good conscience. ![]() We admire that movie for giving life to the creature in the first place. Yes, the original is so classic that it has entered into the realm of “holy film” and seems beyond reproach. Though the story has been told and retold again and again on movie screens, I don’t think any of the versions of King Kong have necessarily been a home run. Flawed but ambitious, there’s a lot to admire about the 1976 version of King Kong.
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