Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY (2021) *
I am not exactly sure why I decided to watch Space Jam: A New Legacy on a Saturday afternoon, following hot on the heels of the Disney live-action films Midnight Madness and Condorman.

I mean, I am not the biggest fan of the original Space Jam from 1996, basically a feature-length advertisement for the greatness of Michael Jordan with Looney Tunes and Bill Murray and Wayne Knight and everybody else guest stars or glorified cameos. Never thought it was all that great even back during the height of the Chicago Bulls — Space Jam came out Nov. 15, 1996, just a few months after the Bulls put together a 72-10 regular season and won an NBA title — and it has aged worse. Of course, it seems to have a major cult following, but then again, so does Howard the Duck.

Also, I have never been much of a LeBron James fan, since his arrival upon the scene in 2002. I’ve never cared for his style of play, his flopping and floundering about like he’s been shot when selling a foul despite the fact that he’s easily the size of an NFL tight end and bigger than most NBA players, his celebratory antics, his aping Michael Jordan from the shoes, money, and the uniform number to the chalk toss and now his very own Space Jam movie, his ring chasing and team hopping, and his outright hijacking of ESPN for the last two decades. He’s arguably been even more omnipresent in our lives than Jordan, one of the most famous people in the world during his glory days in the ’90s, given the social media factor.

For example, I liked and shared one LeBron traveling GIF, and the Facebook algorithms just won’t show me any mercy in the two or three years since. LeBron this, LeBron that, just because I thought it was funny to see LeBron travel across the desert with basketball in hand. Now, I have to see a brilliant quote like this one, I don’t give a fuck what nobody think. I’m him. I get shit for making the right play. Four motherfuckers on me. Motherfucker wide open right here. We are a team and I trust them. Why wouldn’t I have thrown it to them? I don’t care about the results. What?

Anyway.

You guessed it, Space Jam: A New Legacy is a $150 million and 1-hour, 55-minute advertisement for the greatness of LeBron James.

You can even play a drinking game with A New Legacy: Take a swig of the sauce every time you hear King James. It’s a lot safer than drinking every time they say Carol Anne in Poltergeist III or Cheech and Chong utter Hey, man in Up in Smoke.

I found very little to like in A New Legacy. A lot of the movie felt like watching a mash up of the plots from Hook and Space Jam. Also, the Looney Tunes more or less serve LeBron James and his greatness, aside from very fleeting isolated moments that don’t add up to any of the Looney Tunes shorts like Duck Amuck or The Great Piggy Bank Robbery or Porky in Wackyland or You Ought to Be in Pictures or any number of the brilliant shorts of the ’40s and ’50s.

Wile E. Coyote proves though he could be ideal halftime entertainment.

I absolutely hated what they did with all the Warner Brothers intellectual properties: Turn them into fans in The Big Game that closes out the picture. I mean, seriously, do you take King Kong or Pennywise for a basketball fan? I don’t see Pennywise cheering for anything. Come on, man. I didn’t catch Dirty Harry or Rick Deckard or Stanley Kowalski or Jack Torrance or Pazuzu in the crowd, but I sincerely hope that doesn’t mean we’ll see them in Space Jam 3.

I must admit to rooting for the villains, or the goons, during A New Legacy and found the greatest entertainment when they dunked on LeBron real good in the first half.

Of course, I understood the second half would take a dramatic turn and give us a great big happy ending for LeBron and his celluloid family. Wasn’t it cast in stone?

I just hope that LeBron (and his legion of fans) do not try and count his victory in A New Legacy toward his NBA titles.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (1986) ***
I wanted to like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 considerably more than I did, because of the way director Tobe Hooper (1943-2017) and screenwriter Kit Carson (1941-2014) mixed in satire and dark comedy with all the material that seems like a prerequisite for a sequel to only one of the most infamous movies ever made, 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Unfortunately, though, leading lady Caroline Williams’ harried disc jockey Stretch — yes, even women from Texas have names that play right alongside Slim and Tex — spends a good 75 percent of her screen time screaming. Williams screams more than Fay Wray in The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong and Mystery of the Wax Museum combined, more than Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween and The Fog and Prom Night and Terror Train and Halloween II combined, and more than all the heroines combined who have faced Jason and Freddy and Michael over the last couple decades. Williams probably wishes they paid her by the scream.

All that infernal screaming begins to bog Massacre 2 down in the middle stretches of a film that both starts and finishes rather strongly.

Massacre 2 also features a Dennis Hopper performance that rates a distant fourth behind River’s Edge, Blue Velvet, and Hoosiers in the unofficial Hopper-portrays-an-epic-burnout-not-totally-unlike-himself (though, to be fair to Hopper, his Blue Velvet character goes beyond, way beyond, the pale of the normal cinematic psychopath) in 1986 competition.

Since Hopper (1936-2010) portrays former Texas Ranger and Sally and Franklin Hardesty-Enright’s uncle Lt. Boude ‘Lefty’ Enright and Cannon Films released Massacre 2, wouldn’t it have been absolutely fantastic if Cannon action hero Chuck Norris played the ranger pursuing vigilante justice against the ripped, twisted, absolutely positively deranged (not to mention cannibalistic) Sawyer family.

Both Chainsaw movies start with narration and an opening crawl.

The original: The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The sequel: On the afternoon of August 18, 1973, five young people in a Volkswagen van ran out of gas on a farm road in South Texas. Four of them were never seen again. The next morning the one survivor, Sally Hardesty-Enright, was picked up on a roadside, blood-caked and screaming murder. Sally said she had broken out of a window in Hell. The girl babbled a mad tale: a cannibal family in an isolated farmhouse … chainsawed fingers and bones … her brother, her friends hacked up for barbecue … chairs made of human skeletons … Then she sank into catatonia. Texas lawmen mounted a month-long manhunt, but could not locate the macabre farmhouse. They could find no killers and no victims. No facts; no crime. Officially, on the records, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre never happened. But during the last 13 years, over and over again reports of bizarre, grisly chainsaw mass-murders have persisted all across the state of Texas. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has not stopped. It haunts Texas. It seems to have no end.

Made on an estimated $80-140,000 production budget, the original deserves such descriptive phrases as grainy and gritty. Gory, no. Disturbing, yes definitely, terrifying, for sure, with a more than macabre sense of humor, especially during the best dinner table scene this side of Tod Browning’s Freaks. I about lose it every time the family wants the 124-year-old Grandpa Sawyer to end Sally’s life with one crushing blow of a hammer and this cannibalistic codger just can’t find the strength to do it, ultimately giving Sally the opportunity for escape.

More than a decade later, Hooper wanted Massacre 2 to be a dark comedy, accentuating those elements from the original. Meanwhile, naturally, Cannon desired a finished product more along the lines of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or at least its shocking reputation.

The finished product plays more like a compromise.

Both films are reflective of the times they were made. The original, released on the first day of October 1974, came out in the midst of Richard Nixon’s resignation speech, the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down, the final year of the Vietnam War, the Oil Embargo 1973-74, and general discord in the land. The sequel, released on Aug. 22, 1986, gives us cannibals with ‘family values’ a few months before former Hollywood actor turned politician Ronald Reagan’s speech centered around the family unit and giddy excess in every single frame to produce a bigger but not better Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The original has this insidious way of getting underneath our skin and dominating our thought patterns, and none of the slicker sequels, remakes or imitations even come remotely close to its power to provoke.

NOTE: The parody of The Breakfast Club earns the film’s poster four stars.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

GODZILLA VS. KONG (2021) ****
Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong got it (mostly) right, especially compared with its immediate predecessor Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and that’s because the film wisely spends more time with protagonist Kong and antagonist Godzilla than its banal human characters and their petty dramas and squabbles and simply functional dialogue.

Also, unlike both Godzilla 2014 and King of the Monsters, we get monster fights shot in broad daylight or neon light. All the monsters and their incredible mayhem are clearly visible, and it makes a huge difference from the disappointing King of the Monsters. Thus, it seems that Wingard and Warner Brothers must have caught wind of the complaints about King of the Monsters, that we didn’t see Godzilla and King Ghidorah and Mothra enough and instead we had to squirm our way through too many family drama scenes involving father Kyle Chandler, mother Vera Farmiga, and daughter Millie Bobby Brown just to get to the monsters. Chandler and Brown return for Godzilla vs. Kong, Farmiga does not for an obvious reason from the end of King of the Monsters, and they’re sidelined for Godzilla and Kong, the nominal stars of the movie, just like they should. We have plenty of new human characters in Godzilla vs. Kong, as well, and they’re not all that important, not as important as Mechagodzilla anyway. Monsters rule Godzilla vs. Kong.

In other words, Godzilla vs. Kong gave me a damn good time at the movies.

I’ve read and heard complaints that Godzilla vs. Kong features too many ridiculous and just plain inexplicable plot elements and developments. What? No way! That’s what I wanted more from Godzilla ’14 and King of the Monsters, to just be silly and ridiculous occasionally and display a lighter touch, esp. King of the Monsters.

The best Godzilla movies work for different reasons: The original 1954 classic has a darker, somber tone unlike any other Godzilla and introduces one of the great movie monsters; Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) and Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) are off-the-wall and so far off-the-wall they could be in another house; Godzilla ’14 gave us a serious Godzilla movie with legitimate actors and it took many of us by surprise, especially with memories of the previous American Godzilla picture.

I’ve watched most all of the 36 Godzilla films — 32 from Japan’s Toho Studios, four from America — and I currently recommend 28 of them, except for Godzilla vs. Gigan (a close miss), All Monsters Attack and Son of Godzilla, and the 1998 Godzilla, the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel cinematic dregs from Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin that should have been fed to the Smog Monster.

We’ve had many fewer Kong movies over the years, but I’ve loved most of them. The 1933 original remains one of my touchstone movie experiences and it’s something that I am compelled to put on every once in a while just to be dazzled and amazed all over again. I’ll enthusiastically or vehemently defend the 1976 and 2005 remakes, the 1933 sequel could have been so much greater had it not been rushed into release during the same calendar year as the original film, I’ve not seen King Kong Lives from 1986, and I enjoyed Kong: Skull Island more than King of the Monsters, though go figure I gave them both the same three-star rating. Okay, okay, Skull Island edges closer to three-and-a-half and King of the Monsters two-and-a-half, but who needs all that nuance. Apparently, there’s 12 films overall in the King Kong franchise, including the Toho productions King Kong vs. Godzilla and King Kong Escapes. I love King Kong Escapes for most of the reasons I love Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, and they’re all gloriously ridiculous and preposterous. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What better space than here and better time than now to put in a word for Marv Newland’s 1969 classic animated short Bambi Meets Godzilla and King Kong knockoff films King Kung Fu and the Shaw Brothers’ The Mighty Peking Man, the former the only monster movie filmed in Wichita, Kansas, and the latter comes to us from dudes known for The One-Armed Swordsman and Five Fingers of Death though they also brought us The Super Inframan and Hammer co-production The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. We’re still giving the middle finger to A*P*E and I would be remiss to not mention The Most Dangerous Game from 1932 that was filmed on some of the same sets as King Kong and includes King Kong stars Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong in a dangerous adventure saga on an island and Mighty Joe Young from 1949 with the same creative team as King Kong — Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack — as well as Armstrong, splendid work from The Lost World and King Kong special effects pioneer Willis O’Brien (assisted by Ray Harryhausen), and a surprisingly touching and involving friendship at the heart of the picture.

The original King Kong vs. Godzilla needed upgraded because, let’s face it, its success or failure hinges on whether or not viewers embrace or reject the cheesy special effects, the preposterous plot, the horrific dubbing (at least in the American version). On first viewing, I rejected King Kong vs. Godzilla yet I’ve warmed to it just a little bit more every time on subsequent viewings. I watched it as the start of a mini-marathon the night before seeing Godzilla vs. Kong in theaters and it remained good, solid fun. Still, though, it’s not some masterpiece that should never be remade and remodeled, like, for example, Psycho (oops, Gus Van Sant didn’t get that memo) and 2001.

I appreciate the nods that Godzilla vs. Kong makes to King Kong vs. Godzilla and King Kong Escapes (I hope a future installment makes room for Mechani-Kong), as well as other elements seen before during Pacific Rim and Tron. Guess what? I have enjoyed Pacific Rim and Tron, films which their critics have dismissed for being cheesy, as well and Godzilla vs. Kong joins their ranks.

— BONUS: I read three reviews of Godzilla vs. Kong before seeing the movie. Two of them reminded me that Emmerich and Devlin inserted characters based on Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel in their Godzilla, but they didn’t have the guts or the nuts to have Mayor Ebert and Gene stomped out by their bad CGI monster.

You don’t even have to read the full review by Armond White to feel like saying Lighten up, Francis. On Apr. 2, White proclaimed Godzilla vs. Kong to be the Shiny Dud of the Week, because it (in White’s words) cheapens the moviegoing habit thru mindless spectacle and shameless formula. Several hours later, White shared his review again and hyped it, If you have a mind, Godzilla vs. Kong is not the movie for you. Ah, it’s mindless entertainment, I see, but, hey wait, my prefrontal and limbic regions of the neocortex, particularly the orbitofrontal region of the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and the insular cortex, especially object to White’s review.

Web-based film critic James Berardinelli finished his review, I wonder how my eight-year-old self would have reacted to Godzilla vs. Kong. There was a time when I gobbled up anything with monsters, irrespective of the quality of special effects. I didn’t care about the level of destruction and took it as a necessity that the movie would sometimes become bogged down by focusing on underdeveloped humans and their silly concerns. I suspect I might have loved this film in all its overproduced glory. But what works for an eight-year-old doesn’t always work for someone who has evolved to expect more.

Personally, the 42-year-old me is ecstatic the 38-year-old director Wingard and the screenwriting team of 41-year-old Eric Pearson and presumably-40ish-year-old Max Borenstein decided to focus more on Kong and Godzilla and less on inane humans. They could have gone even further. I’d love a Jurassic Park movie, for example, to feature only dinosaurs and prehistoric life — no banal or venal human beings to muddle and bungle it all up — and this ideal dinosaur movie would be made in the style of Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty and Richard Linklater’s Slacker.

I find myself closer to Matt Zoller Seitz’s rave on RogerEbert.com, which had me at Godzilla vs. Kong is a crowd-pleasing, smash-’em-up monster flick and a straight-up action picture par excellence. It is a fairy tale and a science-fiction exploration film, a Western, a pro wrestling extravaganza, a conspiracy thriller, a Frankenstein movie, a heartwarming drama about animals and their human pals, and, in spots, a voluptuously wacky spectacle that plays as if the creation sequence in The Tree of Life had been subcontracted to the makers of Yellow Submarine.

Yeah, Godzilla vs. Kong got it about 90 percent right.

King Kong Escapes (1967)

KING KONG ESCAPES (1967) ****
I must be a sucker for movies like King Kong Escapes, but I just can’t help myself when it features so many awesome characters, plot details, and scenes.

Of course, we have the title character who’s obviously back from King Kong vs. Godzilla, one of Japan’s biggest Solid Gold hits of the early ’60s.

King Kong Escapes, a Toho Studios and Rankin/Bass Productions co-production, topped King Kong vs. Godzilla for me and I’d like to share how it did just that.

Not only do we have the iconic man-in-a-suit Kong, rather than the Willis O’Brien stop motion Kong from the immortal King Kong, the one that started it all, but we have Mechani-Kong, a giant robot double of Kong that first appeared in the 1966 animated TV series The King Kong Show (hence the Rankin/Bass involvement) and returned for live-action duty in King Kong Escapes.

King Kong Escapes also gives us Gorosaurus and a giant sea serpent, and Kong battles them near their home Mondo Island. See, Kong’s become obviously smitten with the lovely nurse Susan Watson (Linda Miller) and he’ll take on any beast to protect her. She holds sway on the big lug, and that naturally puts her life in danger from the bad guys. Kong saves her several times over the course of a 100-minute spectacular. All in a day’s work.

I believe it’s the human villains who put King Kong Escapes over into greatness for me — the evil mad scientist Dr. Who (not that Doctor Who) and the shady representative of an unknown Asian nation, Madame Piranha. She’s also called Madame X, but I’m sticking with Madame Piranha because I like that name better and she’s played by the pretty Mie Hama. 1967 proved to be a vintage year for Hama, who turned 24 that year and played Kissy Suzuki in the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. I believe Madame Piranha wins over Kissy Suzuki and ditto for their respective films. Madame Piranha, in fact, belongs right up there with Pussy Galore and Princess Dragon Mom.

Anyway, back to Dr. Who, played by the veteran character actor Hideyo Amamoto (1926-2003). He’s a cross between, I don’t know, Dracula (it’s the cape) and a Bond megalomaniac. He’s one of those characters that we absolutely love to hate and we savor his inevitable demise late in the picture. He’s so vain, so darn smart, so reckless, so persistent, so evil. Dr. Who created Mechani-Kong and when it fails him about 30 minutes into King Kong Escapes, Dr. Who captures first Kong and then Susan Watson, Commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason), and Lt. Commander Jiro Nomura (Akira Takarada), Watson’s human interest. Needless to say, Kong and Mechani-Kong and Watson and gang escape from Dr. Who and his henchmen, which leads us to a battle royale atop Tokyo Tower.

I admit upfront that King Kong Escapes is silly, preposterous, and outright bloody ridiculous, in everything from its plot to its English dubbing, but it came as such a rejuvenation to my spirit after I watched The Gorilla, The Screaming Skull, The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, and The Curse of the Aztec Mummy earlier that same day, four exploitation films that if added together still did not provide as much entertainment value as King Kong Escapes.

The Vampire Bat (1933)

THE VAMPIRE BAT (1933) ***
The Vampire Bat would otherwise be a forgotten horror entry were it not for the presence of four members of the Horror Movie Hall of Fame, three of them surefire first ballot inductees.

Fay Wray (1907-2004) earned her claim to be the First Lady of Horror and the first scream queen through her work alone in the 1933 classic King Kong. Ann Darrow gave Wray instantaneous immortality, but she also starred in Doctor X, The Most Dangerous Game, The Vampire Bat, and Mystery of the Wax Museum in a year period leading up to King Kong. She was no one-hit wonder.

Lionel Atwill (1885-1946) appeared in a variety of horror movie roles over a 15-year period, in such entries as Doctor X, The Vampire Bat, Mystery of the Wax Museum, Mark of the Vampire, Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, and House of Dracula. He generally played a mad doctor or an authority figure, be it Inspector Krogh (Son of Frankenstein) or the Mayor (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man). Atwill essayed an inspector in several Universal horror flicks.

Salina, Kansas born Dwight Frye (1899-1943) received a tribute nearly 30 years after his death when Alice Cooper released “Ballad of Dwight Fry” on the 1971 album Love It to Death, one of those classic Cooper morbid ballads / epics. Babe Ruth once said that he was paid more than Herbert Hoover because he had a better year than the President and Frye should have been able to say the same in 1931, between his roles in Dracula and Frankenstein, but it’s doubtful Universal paid a supporting actor in any movie more than the greatest home run hitter. Renfield’s presence certainly would have made the Kamala Harris-Mike Pence vice-presidential debate more interesting.

Melvyn Douglas (1901-81) enjoyed a 50-year acting career and he won Academy Awards for his supporting performances in Hud and Being There, but he earned his spot in the hallowed halls of horror history by appearing in the 1932 classic The Old Dark House.

In other words, Wray, Atwill, Frye, and Douglas elevate The Vampire Bat.

Son of Kong (1933)

SON OF KONG

Son of Kong (1933) Two stars

Released on Mar. 7, 1933, in New York City and a month later nationally, King Kong quickly took the nation by storm and became a cinematic landmark.

Nine months later, incredibly, RKO released the sequel Son of Kong and Hollywood did not make another Kong picture for more than 40 years.

Son of Kong just might be Hollywood’s first rush job and one of its first sequels*. It is a pleasant enough movie to watch, but obviously it’s not a patch on an all-time classic. I’ve watched the original numerous times, but I doubt I’ll want to return to Son of Kong a second time.

That’s because it’s virtually dull as dishwater. It takes approximately 45 minutes to get to our title character. That’s way too long for a movie that lasts only 69 minutes. Despite the return of Carl Denham, the most interesting human character in King Kong, played by the reliably entertaining Robert Armstrong, Son of Kong does not maintain the interest level high enough for a Kong movie. Of course, the original set the bar incredibly high.

They give Denham a potential romantic interest, because lovebirds Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) and John Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) quite naturally did not return for the sequel after their harrowing experiences, and Helen Mack’s Helene Peterson epitomizes the movie as a whole, since she’s pleasant but dull. She’s a singer, not an actress like the lovely Miss Darrow, and gets a production number. Again, pleasant but dull.

Kong co-directors Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C.Cooper returned as director and producer. Special effects guru Willis O’Brien and composer Max Steiner also returned, as did some of the supporting cast.

They were on a tight budget, an even tighter schedule, and they obviously knew there was no way they could topple King Kong. Armstrong himself preferred Son of Kong, but that’s because Denham received greater character arc. He’s probably the only person to ever prefer Son over its father. Both the son and the sequel are kinder, gentler — not good for a creature feature.

Sequels very rarely even approach their predecessors, and that was true in 1933 every bit as it is this very day.

For every Bride of Frankenstein and The Empire Strikes Back, we have a million failures and footnotes, like Son of Kong.

*United Artists released Don Q, Son of Zorro in 1925, a sequel to the 1920 classic Mark of Zorro. Swashbuckler supreme Douglas Fairbanks starred in both films. Son of Zorro also predates Son of Kong, Son of Frankenstein, Son of Godzilla, and Son of the Mask. To be fair, though, the sound of a toilet flushing predates Son of the Mask.

The Mighty Peking Man (1977)

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977) ***

The Shaw Brothers (Runme 1901-85 and Run Run 1907-2014) have rarely ever let me down and they provided some of the greatest entertainments of all-time, like THE ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN, FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH, INFRA-MAN, THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, and CLAN OF THE WHITE LOTUS.

The Shaw Brothers did not (and still do not, in death) cheat us.

For example, in THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, their 1977 spin on King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, and Tarzan (not to mention Godzilla) that’s not quite peak but still good Shaw Brothers, we don’t have to wait very long whatsoever to see the title character. No, life is short, time is precious, so director Ho Meng-hua gives us our first monster encounter in the first minute of screen time. Okay, to be exact, it’s 1:45 into the movie, but that still beats most every other entry in this distinguished genre.

That establishes a tone for a very generous entertainment package. Find a copy and buy it for somebody, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN not only provides a sympathetic monster in the grand tradition, but also (in no particular order) a plucky explorer hero (Danny Lee) who’s been betrayed by his lover with his playboy brother so he’s drowning his sorrows in booze when he’s recruited for a jungle mission, a scantily-clad leading lady (Evelyne Kraft, a regular Swedish Fay Wray) who’s grown up with the animals in the jungle after her parents died in a plane crash (she’s been raised by the Mighty Peking Man, in fact), an earthquake, elephants, tigers and leopards (oh my!), a fight between a leopard and a snake, quicksand, vine swinging, flashbacks to key moments in both the hero’s and the leading lady’s life, callous and shady businessmen, heartless authority figures, mucho destruction of miniatures galore, and a grand finale that boggles the mind even after everything that came before.

My favorite scene, however, begins around the 33-minute mark.

It involves the Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude, a term made famous by the late Roger Ebert. Here’s the definition from Ebert: “Scene in which soft focus and slow motion are used while a would-be hit song is performed on the sound track and the lovers run through a pastoral setting. Common from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s; replaced in 1980s with the Semi-Obligatory Music Video.”

The Simon and Garfunkel songs in THE GRADUATE epitomize the Semi-OLI.

The one in THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN rates below Louis Armstrong singing “We Have All the Time in the World” over George Lazenby and Diane Rigg in ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE and the foreboding use of Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in Clint Eastwood’s PLAY MISTY FOR ME. Ebert himself said Eastwood filmed the first Semi-OLI that works.

In THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, our hero and leading lady embrace and lock lips for the first time (watch her eyes after this first kiss) and they unleash the awesomely banal love song “Could It Be I’m in Love, Maybe.”

This is one helluva old-fashioned love song and one helluva Semi-OLI.

I mean, I believe it’s the only Semi-OLI in the history of motion pictures to incorporate a leopard.

Not only that, but the leading lady seems more interested in the leopard than our poor, poor hero. You really sympathize for this guy even more after this scene.

Let’s get back to those lyrics for a second here.

“The love you gave me then showed me a thing or two / I guess I saw it in your eyes / And the look of love upon your face is too hard to disguise / Maybe just a smile will say [cannot make out, even after watching this scene 500 times] / Could it be I’m in love (Maybe? Baby?)” (To hell with it, I already chose “Maybe.” Why does life have to be so difficult?)

“I can’t begin to say what makes me feel like this / I never knew what love could do / But if this is love, it’s here to stay / [Don’t want to make this part out] / So all I have to hear is I’ll give it all to you.”

There’s more lyrics, but we all catch the drift and there’s not any need to drown in banality.

It all totals about 3:30 of pure junk food cinema bliss.

I definitely love it because it’s so utterly ridiculous.

Then again, utterly ridiculous describes THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN.

I should end this review with a consideration of the ending of THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN. Just imagine the ending of KING KONG times 10 times 10.

King Kung Fu (1976)

KING KUNG FU (1976) Three stars

The Empire State Building, completed just a couple years earlier, played a key role in the 1933 classic KING KONG. At this very moment, we can picture Kong fighting off them darn airplanes from the highest spot in the modern world. Very few endings in movie history can even approach the final minutes in KING KONG. Remains awesome nearly 90 years later.

Meanwhile, our gorilla King Kung Fu takes shapely Pizza Hut waitress Rae Fay to the top of the Holiday Inn Plaza, the tallest building in Wichita at a majestic height of 262 feet, for the grand finale of KING KUNG FU. King Kung Fu battles a stop-motion helicopter piloted by a police captain with a bad John Wayne impersonation. Awesome, in a completely different way.

You win some, you lose some, and often times it seems like Kansas loses on the cultural front, while New York City wins and wins again and again and wins forever more.

Both the Empire State and the Holiday Inn are no longer their cities’ tallest buildings. Heck, the latter is not even the Holiday Inn any more, it’s the 250 Douglas Place Apartments (a.k.a. the Garvey Center). They both are doing quite well for themselves, however, with the Empire State Building in the news in late 2019 for $165 million renovation and being a top tourist destination.

The duo of producer Bob Walterscheid and director Lance D. Hayes started filming KING KUNG FU in 1974 and finished in 1976, but it took another 11 years for Walterscheid to wrangle up the necessary funds to complete the editing on this half-King Kong, half-Kung Fu spoof that has its tongue planted firmly within its cheek. Hell, maybe every cheek in Wichita.

I watched the Korean KING KONG rip-off A*P*E and KING KUNG FU within basically the same 24-hour period.

Objectively, both are “bad” movies, but there’s a world of difference in what both achieve.

A*P*E plays exactly like a cheap, cynical KING KONG rip-off and it’s quite telling that its most famous scene is of the title character flipping the bird.

KING KUNG FU, meanwhile, feels more like a labor of love, an affectionate tribute to King Kong and Kung Fu. Plus, it has this undeniable goofball charm as it tries every lowbrow gag, at least one per minute. Most fail, others succeed, but that’s part and parcel with any sense of humor. I laughed out loud a few times during KING KUNG FU and that’s definitely far more than what I can say for A*P*E.

I laughed at the “Simian Scope” gag at the beginning of KING KUNG FU. This is the first and last movie filmed in “Simian Scope.” We’ve had many variations on CinemaScope over the years: The Shaw Brothers’ “Shaw Scope” being my all-time favorite. Also worth seeking out: The Shaw Brothers released their own take on KING KONG in 1977, MIGHTY PEKING MAN.

I laughed at the John Wayne impersonation, which eradicates the whole “bad” judgment I wrote a few paragraphs back about that impersonation since I believe it was intended to be funny … and … (for a third time) I laughed. We could have used even more scenes with this character played by Tom Leahy, a favorite in the Wichita area for his many years of work in radio and television. Since we have a subordinate officer surnamed Pilgrim, well, you can already guess about half of the dialogue from Mr. Leahy as Captain J.W. Duke. Leahy died in 2010.

The plot: Two would-be reporters Bo (Billy Schwartz) and Herman (Tim McGill) hatch a master plan to free King Kung Fu, a great big gorilla from China whose goodwill tour of the United States stops in Wichita and the Sedgwick County Zoo. Of course, having seen KING KONG, Bo and Herman bait King Kung Fu with Rae Fay (not Fay Wray or Link Wray, for that matter). Sounds like Bo and Herman want to make a movie, one with a happy ending.

Unfortunately, the movie drags just a little bit in the middle section. Plain and simple, it takes way too long for King Kung Fu to be unleashed on Wichita. We get too many scenes with Bo and Herman and their slapstick shenanigans, as the filmmakers seem to have forgotten their own title. Granted, Bo and Herman are likeable oddballs, but they do push endurance levels to breaking point with their schtick in this middle section.

Because we want to see King Kung Fu wreak good-natured havoc on the Old Cowtown Museum, the Joyland Amusement Park (no longer in operation), and Lawrence-Dumont Stadium (demolished for a new facility that will host a new Triple-A franchise named The Wichita Wind Surge, beginning 2020). These scenes are worth their weight in gold.

Never mind Bo’s line, “… Me as the karater and him as the karatee.”

Or the genius in Washington who says, “As you can see, Wichita is located in the center of this great country of ours and it means quite simply we have him surrounded.” That look on his face when he says “It means quite simply we have him surrounded,” I mean, wow, if you watch it now it would be great preparation for the next electoral season.

Guess it should be mentioned King Kung Fu utters dialogue like “I gotta make like a banana and split.” I once told somebody, “Why don’t you make like Michael Jackson and just beat it!”

Believe it or not, KING KUNG FU received a ‘G’ rating. Not many movies are ‘G.’ The Washington Post ran “Rated ‘G’ — For Gone?” in 1992, because a ‘G’ rating became at some point a kiss of death just like X or NC-17 on the other extreme of taste. Disney animated movies survive a ‘G,’ no problem, but little else can break through the stigma associated with ‘G.’

This ‘G’ rating was not a mistake for KING KUNG FU, like, for example, it was for the 1968 Hammer film DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE. There’s no blood in KING KUNG FU.

You might never look at Wichita quite the same way again after seeing KING KUNG FU.

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963)

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (1963) Three stars

The Japanese champion Godzilla had last appeared in GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN in 1955 or in the American version GIGANTIS, THE FIRE MONSTER in 1959.

The American champion King Kong (guess we claim the big lug, though we kidnapped him from Skull Island and brought him to the Big Apple) had last appeared in SON OF KONG in 1933. Yes, they rushed out a sequel nine months after the seminal KING KONG.

With a title like KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, maybe we can take a guess at the content of the third GODZILLA and third KING KONG film. Three is the magic number, right? At least it was in Japan, where its success at the box office inspired Toho to continue the Godzilla series.

Both monsters appear in color for the first time.

Like a lot of Jackie Chan films, the Godzilla films appeared in radically different forms when they invaded America after their original release.

It started with the very first GODZILLA in 1954, released two years later in America as GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. This new version excised 16 minutes of footage from the original, mainly the political, social, and anti-nuclear themes so vital to the Japanese version. Remember that GODZILLA came out less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The American producers sponsored new footage and inserted American journalist Steve Martin (Raymond Burr), used mostly in flashbacks and voice-over narration. Japanese-American actors and look-alikes had to be used to attempt to make it seem like Martin had been in the original film. Martin speaks into a tape recorder, “George, here in Tokyo, time has been turned back two million years. This is my report as it happens. The prehistoric monster the Japanese call ‘Godzilla’ has just walked out of Tokyo Bay. He’s as tall as a 30-story building.”

In America, KING KONG VS. GODZILLA follows that KING OF THE MONSTERS format, as we get a series of talking head scenes before we finally get down to the heavy-duty monster battle royal in the let’s say last half. Several years ago, I wrote a negative review of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA because I wanted to yell at United Nations reporter Eric Carter to shut his big fat trap and just let the title characters fight. On the latest watch or two, after purchasing a VHS copy (GoodTimes big box, no less, with a blurb from Leonard Maltin, “Above average special effects”) recently, I enjoyed the film a lot more than I had before.

Now, I think of the Eric Carter and the blah, blah, blah gang as the wrestling commentators on a big pay-per-view hyping up Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant, for example. King Kong vs. Godzilla and Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant have equal stature in my estimation.

I just love monsters fighting and the Godzilla films delivered that for nearly a 15-year period beginning with KING KONG VS. GODZILLA and continuing through Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan, Ebirah, the Smog Monster, Gigan, Megalon, and Mechagodzilla. Technically, it started with GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN when Godzilla fought Anguirus … or when Kong battled a T-Rex in the original KONG.

What was the genesis of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA?

Stop motion animator pioneer Willis O’Brien (1886-1962), who did the work for both KONG films, created a story outline where Kong battled Frankenstein’s Monster. O’Brien gave the outline to producer John Beck to develop a project, but Beck took the project instead to Toho behind O’Brien’s back. The rest is history, including Frankenstein’s Monster.

Some of us are probably thinking right about now that it does not seem like a fair fight between Kong and Godzilla. Over the years, Godzilla’s size has varied greatly from 164 feet tall in 1954 to 492 feet tall 60 years later. Kong, meanwhile, stands at 24 feet at his highest height in 1933. KING KONG VS. GODZILLA makes Kong 147 feet tall.

Machine gun fire topples Kong from the Empire State Building, while Godzilla seems virtually indestructible despite the best efforts of the military. Well, let’s just say that lightning gives Kong incredible powers; later in the Godzilla series, lightning would have the same effect on Godzilla. Maybe one day we’ll have a film combining Frankenstein’s Monster, Godzilla, King Kong, and Jason Voorhees, and we’ll call it LIGHTNING STRIKES.

A legend grew up around KING KONG VS. GODZILLA that Kong won in the American version and Godzilla won in the Japanese version. That’s not true. I mean, for crying out loud, Kong gets top billing in the title.