Kong Kong Lives
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, PG, 105 m, 1986
Directed by John Guillermin. Stars Brain Kerwin, Linda Hamilton, John Ashton, et al.

King Kong Lives is an unexciting and all-around junky follow-up to Dino De Laurentiis’ 1976 version of King Kong, which itself was roundly panned back in the day but I always found to be a bravura re-imagining of the Merian C. Cooper classic. Although it took over ten years for the folks at DEG to deliver King Kong Lives, the picture’s brainless goings-on suggest that its team of writers didn’t spend more than a smoke break knocking out its script. (It would have made more sense to simply redo Son of Kong; it had a fun story but left an awful lot of room for improvement.) I suppose the studio honchos weren’t too proud of the end product either for they dumped the thing into theatres with nary a trumpet blast. (Bad move that: King Kong Lives died at the box office, grossing a paltry 4.7 million domestically.) Though De Laurentiis and his smartly dressed crew couldn’t persuade Jessica Lange or Jeff Bridges to reunite with the Eighth Wonder of the World, they did manage to rehire director John Guillermin. Having a visionary like Guillermin back behind the camera should’ve been enough to turn King Kong Lives into a good time, but the man who helmed such popular entertainments as The Blue Max and The Towering Inferno and Death on the Nile seems uncharacteristically removed here, if not downright bored. Never before have I seen a franchise with so much potential fall apart so quickly; a few budget cuts (such as taking on a caterer who didn’t know how to make a proper chocolate banana stick) was all it took for the mighty Kong to cease his fearless roar. And that’s true in more ways than one: The weird and utterly terrifying bellow that the sound department came up with for the monster in the first film has been replaced with a growl that could just as well be coming out of the yap of a dog. King Kong Lives is also sans composer John Barry, though the score that John Scott has come up with for this sequel is not without its charms. (I only wish the orchestra’s performance was as full and dreamy as what I heard on The Monster Movie Music Album.) It gets things off to a promising start, even though the action it’s emphasizing is as ludicrous as what we bore witness to in A*P*E and The Mighty Gorga.

Almost certainly because DEG wasn’t willing to spend the scratch on designing sets and costumes that were evocative of the good ol’ Carter years, King Kong Lives takes place a full decade after the events of King Kong. Incredibly, the beast to Lange’s beauty didn’t really cross the Styx after he fell from the top of the World Trade Center; he’s been laid up all the while at the Atlantic Institute. The fretful suits there have invested untold millions in keeping Kong alive and kicking, but the poor thing’s been comatose for so long that he’s now in dire need of a blood transfusion. Of course, siphoning vital fluid from a thousand and one barrels full of rhesus monkeys won’t do; the donor must be a member of Kong’s species. The chief medico, Amy Franklin (played by vacant-eyed Linda Hamilton), gravely informs us, “Only one thing will save Kong now: a miracle.”

Well, Amy, here’s your miracle: An Indiana Jones-type adventurer, Hank Mitchell (Brian Kerwin), has gone and captured a giant female gorilla somewhere in Borneo. In exchange for a small fortune, he ships the orange-haired, saggy-breasted beast out to the institute so they can hook Kong up with some much-needed primate plasma. Seeing how Moses was in short pants when Kong last had jumbo nits picked out of his pelt by a member of the opposite sex, he just might want to get hooked up in another way, too. But he’s going to need a new ticker before he can do anything strenuous like that, so the medical staff fixes him up with an artificial heart the size of a Buick. The transplant scene is a howler of bizarre overkill; it goes on and on and on. The attention Guillermin and company pay to the operation may just be a way of padding out the wisp of a screenplay, but the whole thing is so unbelievably boring that it puts the audience under long before the picture finally gets moving. (I’m reminded of a similar piece of business in King of Kong Island where we’re shown every godforsaken detail of the surgery on an ape’s head—right down to the sterilization of the scalpel!)

When Kong comes to, he notices the scent of the female gorilla (who’s being held in a separate facility a good mile away) and turns barmy with desire. He breaks free of his restraints (when will those stupid humans learn that nothing can hold this monster?) and rescues his would-be inamorata, destroying millions of dollars worth of property in the process. The gorillas then make a dash for the country, eventually settling down at Honeymoon Ridge (yup, that’s the name) to pitch woo. Hank and Amy are not far behind, and as they take in the apes’ amorous activities, they become inspired to do a little rutting themselves. Naturally, the military (headed by a disagreeable colonel played by John Ashton) wants to put an end to all this monkey business. Kong eludes capture, but Lady Kong is taken down with some sort of gas and then carried away by a whirlybird. And now Kong’s on a mission to recover his mate, smashing to bits anything that gets in his way.

King Kong Lives isn’t all bad: the gorilla suits by Carlo Rambaldi are nothing if not realistic (I couldn’t make out any seams and that’s always a plus), though Kong does look a bit pudgy from certain angles. He’s not the blood-chilling sight that he was in King Kong; this is a kinder, gentler Kong. Still, he’s capable of doing some pretty nasty things when provoked. The most gruesome scene in this otherwise harmless PG-rated movie comes when Kong goes ape shit on a group of sadistic trappers. He literally breaks one redneck in half and then dines on another. After finishing his meal, Kong picks a baseball cap out of his teeth.   

August 13, 2009

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.