I have one question. A five word question with no real answer: why was this movie made?
If you didn’t get it from the title, King Kong apparently lived from being shot up by helicopters and dropped from the world trade center in the last movie. Because that’s how it works.
The plot of this movie is dumber than you would expect. Some institute claimed Kong and worked for over a decade on trying to bring him to full health. The lead scientist is played by Linda Hamilton. This movie came out two years after the first Terminator, where she played Sarah Connor. Remember how good she was in that movie? Or how awesome she was in the sequel? Well, throw away all previous notions of her having any talent (in fact, do that for everyone in this movie) because she doesn’t act alongside gorillas even remotely as well she does evil killer robots. And you read that correctly- gorillas. Plural. More than one.
There is another Kong in this movie. ‘Lady Kong’, they call her. I don’t know where she came from! The movie never said she was on the same island they found the first Kong. In fact, the place they find her doesn’t look anything like that island! It could be somewhere in the Amazon, for all we know! Either the movie never specified, or I was still getting over the shock value of how bad this all is and I didn’t notice. And do you know how you can tell it’s a female Kong? They gave her gorilla boobs. Nasty, saggy, ugly gorilla boobs with nipples. And she sounds like she was voiced by a guy sick with bronchitis, lung cancer and throat cancer, who smokes 3 packs of cigarettes and 2 cigars a day.
So obviously, they take… ‘Lady Kong’... to captivity and use her blood to get King Kong back to full health. But of course, it wouldn’t be a monster movie without the monsters getting loose and finding each other. Like how the previous movie pinned the EVIL OIL CORPORATION as the bad guy, the bad guys here are the BIG BAD MILITARY. Of course the military is portrayed as stupidly and brash as possible. Speaking of which, the military uses quite a bit of firepower to try and kill Kong. Simple bullets from airplanes were enough to kill the ape in the 1933 movie, and choppers took him down in 1976… but in this movie, he destroys a legion of tanks and trucks and helicopters and everything! A little consistency in his strength would be nice.
The whole movie is just a cluster of stupid scene after stupid scene. The characters are annoying, the story is unholy, and the special effects… still being done wrong. They’re still guys in suits. Even ‘Lady Kong’ is played by a guy, and it’s really awkward when you see the apes in a (supposedly) ‘tender moment’.
Once again, the budget was probably blown on getting actual tanks and trucks and choppers for several scenes. They should have focused on making the animals look better. The suit work isn’t any better than it was before, and while the faces on the apes are expressive in wide ranges, it just looks… weird. And bad. And awkward. And unnatural. It would have looked a lot better in stop motion. It’d look more appealing, for one thing, and it would give it a certain charm that those movies have. It might not make the movie great, but it’s always nice to see stop motion. Heck, just four years prior, there WAS a monster movie in which the monster was done (fairly darn well, I might add) in stop motion. That movie was Q: The Winged Serpent. I have yet to see it entirely, but from what I have seen, it looks a hell of a lot better than King Kong Lives!
(SPOILERS ahead, but do you really care?)
The best part about this movie is the end. Not only do the end credits finally roll, releasing the viewer from the painful torture session, but Kong actually dies in the end! For real! He stays dead! But this is also what makes this movie so awful. If you watch the original, and even the 2005 Peter Jackson remake (trust me, I’ll get to that one soon), you don’t really want Kong to die. The whole point is to like the ape to the point that you’re rooting for him! But this movie makes you hate his existence! It tries to make you feel for him and ‘Lady Kong’ but it fails utterly!!
There isn’t much more to say about this movie, really. The characters are awful, the story is so bad it’s not even laughable, the soundtrack is boring and uninspired, and the special effects are still so freakishly wrong. It was made 10 years after the atrocity of 1976, so there was no reason to even think it might have some improvement. It’s just worse. The only other good thing I can think to say about it is… I don’t know, I think for a brief second, you see Linda Hamilton’s boobs… but the movie is so bad that it doesn’t change a darn thing. Don’t watch this under any circumstances. It’s free on YouTube, but you’ll still be wasting moments of your life you could be spending doing something much more productive… like sitting in an albatross nest singing ACDC while crocheting an image of Saddam Hussein eating toast.
FINAL RATING: 2 / 50
STORY: 0 / 5
ACTING: 0 / 5
CHARACTERS: 0 / 5
SPECIAL EFFECTS: 2 / 5
ACTION: 0 / 5
SOUNDTRACK: 0 / 5
TONE: 0 / 5
ENJOYABILITY: 0 / 5
REWATCH VALUE: 0 / 5
OWNING VALUE: 0 / 5
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