Category: 1976

King Kong (1976)

KING KONG 1976

KING KONG (1976) Three-and-a-half stars
Of course this 1976 KING KONG cannot hold a candle to the 1933 version, one of the all-time screen classics.

If and when you and I can get past that fact, admittedly not an easy hurdle, the 1976 version stands out for being a great entertainment.

Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange are improvements over Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray, respectively, in the male and female leads and Charles Grodin’s not far below what Robert Armstrong did in a similar role.

Of course, you can immediately tell when this movie was made by all the contemporaneous dialogue (especially from Lange) and Grodin plays an executive with Petrox Corporation, a fictional American oil company referencing the “pet rock” phenomenon. This KONG is more bound to 1976 than the original is to 1933.

Beset with production issues of a wide variety, including a complicated legal battle between Paramount, Universal, RKO, and the Cooper estate before filming even started (at one point, both Paramount and Universal had KONG projects lined up), and a first-time leading lady, as well as practical effects that often look more dated than what Willis O’Brien accomplished in 1933, KONG 1976 still works on a basic level.

It is fun.

The stories around the film, though, are more interesting than the finished product and help explain why the hype for the film took on epic proportions before its December 17 premiere.

Italian producer Dino DeLaurentiis (1919-2010) had the Carl Denham quotes in real life: “No one cry when JAWS die,” he said in Time. “But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. Intellectuals gonna love Kong. Even film buffs who love the first Kong gonna love ours.”

Or how about this one about Barbra Streisand told by Roger Ebert: “It’s-a no good, have two monsters in one movie.”

Unfortunately, when Meryl Streep auditioned for the Jessica Lange part, Dino said to his son in Italian that she was “too ugly” for the role; Streep understood Italian and replied in Italian to Dino, “I’m sorry I’m not beautiful enough to be in KING KONG.” We are printing legends, and that only seems appropriate for KING KONG.

Dino talked more smack about JAWS with ORCA THE KILLER WHALE (1977).

Gotta love Dino, whose mouth bit off more than his productions could chew.

Rather than Universal’s competing KONG movie (not released until Peter Jackson’s remake in 2005), the public first received A*P*E, an American / South Korean co-production with its Grade Z special effects, an early appearance for future TV mother Joanna (“Growing Pains”) Kerns, and an infamous shot where the ape uses the middle finger to show his disgust with the helicopters shooting at him.

Either that or he’s just showing his disgust at being trapped in that damn gorilla suit in a shitty movie.

A*P*E would later be topped, in the KING KONG ripoff department, by the Shaw Brothers’ MIGHTY PEKING MAN, the best of the King Kong ripoffs.

There’s also KING KUNG FU from 1976, where a gorilla trained in martial arts wreaks havoc on Wichita, Kansas. Financial constraints forced the makers into not being able to finish their film until 1987.

A*P*E invaded movie screens in October 1976, beating DeLaurentiis’ KONG by a good two months. MIGHTY PEKING MAN came out April 10, 1977, and Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures re-released the film on April 23, 1999.

Carlo Rambaldi, Glen Robinson, and Frank Van der Veer won a Special Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the visual effects in KING KONG, believe it or not.

Legendary make-up artist Rick Baker played Kong, or he’s the man in the ape suit. The original plan had been for KONG ’76 to feature a 40-foot high mechanical ape, but that mechanical monster worked even less than Bruce the Shark in JAWS. JAWS director Steven Spielberg worked around the frequent mechanical failure to make an even better film than if the mechanical shark had been fully operational.

That’s not exactly the case with KONG ’76, partially because musical cues would not be a proper substitute for an ape like John Williams’ musical score proved to be for the shark or even Harry Manfredini’s score for the psycho killer in FRIDAY THE 13TH.

In other words, you have to see the ape.

“KING KONG offered the one chance to do a really perfect gorilla suit,” Baker said. “With the money and the time, it could have been outstanding. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. There were compromises and enforced deadlines.”

Let’s face it, KONG director John Guillermin, he’s no Spielberg.

At the same time, though, I give KONG ’76 and JAWS both three-and-a-half stars. Why?

A) Because life (and my brain) work in mysterious ways.

B) Because star ratings are basically arbitrary.

C) Because both films tap into the same primordial appeal and work as great entertainments for a couple hours each.

The Omen (1976)

DAY 7, THE OMEN

THE OMEN (1976) One-and-a-half stars
The British have a great word to describe all THE OMEN movies: “bollocks.”

We can also substitute “poppycock,” “hogwash,” and “balderdash,” some of the best words in the English language.

THE OMEN movies are nothing more than an excuse to watch familiar and sometimes big-name performers be systematically eliminated in bizarre, gruesome ways. Sounds great, eh?

Not when the audience gets bludgeoned with the great significance of it all, unlike the average exploitation movie. We have some frenzied overacting, a whole lot of pretension, a relentless musical score, and a ridiculous storyline that’s like a Satanist soap opera.

Sometimes I like all of those elements in a movie but THE OMEN movies lay it on so damn thick with them all that I just balk and become an unrepentant nonbeliever.

Off the top of my old noggin, only THE AMITYVILLE HORROR movies compete with THE OMEN series for my least favorite horror series.

I’ll quote from the IMDb for a handy plot summary: “Robert and Katherine Thorn seem to have it all. They are happily married and he is the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, but they want nothing more than to have children. When Katherine has a stillborn child, Robert is approached by a priest at the hospital who suggests that they take a healthy newborn whose mother has just died in childbirth. Without telling his wife he agrees. After relocating to London, strange events (and the ominous warnings of a priest) lead him to believe that the child he took from that Italian hospital is evil incarnate.”

Robert and Katherine Thorn are played by Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, respectively, and they’re our leading big names. Peck naturally plays the great reluctant believer and every OMEN and AMITYVILLE HORROR movie needs one main character to constantly postpone the inevitable. What will it take to convince Peck’s Robert Thorn that his son’s the Antichrist? Unfortunately for us and the movie, it will take a whole helluva lot to convince Robert Thorn. I lost patience with Thorn (and the movie) long, long before he takes action down the home stretch.

Mainly it’s because THE OMEN and its sequels gave birth to what I call “The Omen Syndrome” or any time any character figures out a dread secret and either spills the beans or merely plans to, you can just bet your bottom dollar that in the next few minutes that character will be killed in the most unpleasant way possible. THE OMEN movies all played on this basic scenario time and time again. That makes them deadly predictable, and that’s when you earn a syndrome named after you.

To be fair, THE OMEN does have a few effective moments, but they all probably add up to 10-15 minutes of screen time and we’re talking about a movie that lasts nearly two hours. Those 10-15 minutes amount to the death scenes and the moments of danger, but the rest of the movie irritated me to no end unlike, for example, THE EXORCIST, a film that involved me from beginning to end. Because of the few effective moments, I have awarded the first OMEN movie 1/2 star more than its sequels.

At this point, I’d rather talk about the actors who played Damien in the first three OMEN movies.

English actor Harvey Stephens played the devil child and it was his first role. I mean, wow, where the Hell do you go from playing the Antichrist? Stephens only took on two more film roles: Young Emil in the 1980 TV movie “Gauguin the Savage” and Tabloid Reporter No. 3 in THE OMEN remake (2006). In 2017, Stephens received a suspended prison sentence for his 2016 road rage attack on a pair of cyclists; Mr. Stephens knocked one cyclist unconscious with a punch and punched the other cyclist several times in the face. Stephens received sentences of 14 months, suspended for two years.

Brazilian-born English actor Jonathan Scott-Taylor played a teenage Damien in the first sequel that’s set in Chicago (before John Hughes) and stars William Holden and Lee Grant in the Peck and Remick parts. Scott-Taylor’s career peaked with Damien and his last film performance came in a 1985 movie named SHADEY.

New Zealand actor Sam Neill took on Damien for THE FINAL CONFLICT and he’s the only one of the three actors to sustain a film career. We’ve seen Neill in everything from DEAD CALM and THE PIANO to THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and JURASSIC PARK.

By the way, isn’t anybody who names their child Damien just asking for it?