1976's King Kong was billed by producer Dino DeLaurentis as "The Most Exciting original movie of all time". Nothing like setting the bar high.....
A very young Jeff Bridges stars as a college professor on a quest to get to Skull Island who stows away on the Petrox Explorer. Charles Grodin is Fred Wilson, a senior exec at oil company Petrox, heading to Skull Island in search of huge oil reserves. In her first film role, Jessica Lange is really dreadful as Dwan, who they come across floating in a life raft on their journey. These three arrive at the island to discover giant ape KING KONG, who is played 99% of the time by makeup artist Rick Baker in a monkey suit. At the time, MUCH was made of the huge full KONG size robot built for the movie. The dirty secret is that its in the movie for about a total of ten seconds and it looks pretty bad. Jeff Bridges is great as usual, Lange is just horrible (and I think she's a great actress now, but whew, what a start) stuck spouting bad 70's dialogue calling Kong a male chauvinist ape. The climax atop the twin towers and inside the World Trade Center have a haunting quality now, post 9-11. This goofy, expensive movie has its moments, but compared to the original and Peter Jackson's amazing 2005 remake, its just a silly guy dressed up in a bad monkey suit! A big old hairy C+.
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