This movie made my brain hurt.
Okay, before I say anything else, every time an ape smiled in this movie I wanted to put a pot over my head and beat on it with a serving ladle. But no matter. The Kongs have become a family of epic grinners, you just have to deal with it. The scariest thing is that that's not even the worst part of this movie. It is dangerous ground to make a sequel that involves a movie monster getting romantically involved. They did it with Child's Play and it transformed the early camp horror films into pure comedy. Child's Play was no longer even in the same genre as it started out in. King Kong Lives doesn't even deserve to be in the same GENRE, even of the 1976 film, which was very well made, much less the 1933 classic.The movie opens with the ending of the 1976 film, with Kong climbing and being shot down from the World Trade Center. This movie (surprise) takes place ten years later. I guess Kong has been in some sort of coma for ten years, and as the movie starts a lot of scientists are in the process of performing a heart transplant on him. Next thing you know, he's ripping electrodes off and jumping up for the windows in the roof, then lifting himself up bodily by the bars on those windows despite just having had his rib cage sawn open and a plastic heart the size of a Volkswagen installed.
Now, this was hard, but I managed to accept that he was able to do that. I know virtually nothing about primates, much less 50 foot tall primates. Who am I to judge his healing speed? But given that I had accepted his remarkable ability to recover from a barrage of anti-aircraft gunshot wounds from helicopters on all sides, then a fall that would have reduced all of his organs to mush, then a historic heart transplant, and THEN display a miraculous mending of the sternum, I found it more than a little odd how easily he was undone when he bumped his head on a rock later in the movie. One clever individual in the film tries to convince Amy (Linda Hamilton) to just forget about him because "outside his environment, he would not be able to acquire enough protein to survive."
PROTEIN!!
Nevermind the fact that there's a 10,000-pound gorilla corpse floating downriver, let's just go home because he won't be able to find enough protein to survive! That's OUTSTANDING science, my friend! Then again, the Kongs have not only found love, but they have mastered the art of invisibility, so it's not surprising that he didn't want to be bothered with a search. The Kongs are like freaking ninjas!
At the beginning, Hank, the big game hunter that some nutcase refers to as Indiana Jones, lays down on some foliage to take a nap, not noticing that there is a 50 foot gorilla less than 20 feet away from him until she tries to pick him up. This guy is no Indiana Jones. Later in the film, some golfer hits King Kong in the face with a golf ball before he notices that there's a gigantic gorilla standing on the course. I'm guessing he wasn't looking where he was hitting the ball.
Yes. It's true.
King Kong.
Gets hit.
With a golf ball.
It is odd indeed that it necessitates an entire army of troops, tanks, and helicopters to find King Kong and Mrs. Kong, who one guy in a helicopter with a searchlight could easily find since they tower over the trees. And you guessed it, Kong manages to sneak up on the entire Army, too. While they're standing watch. Looking for King Kong. Nice work, soldiers. These guys are dumber than the law enforcement in First Blood.
At one point a lot of rednecks get into boats to go hunt down Kong, and some military jerk goes, "What is this, Deliverance?" No, sir. The rednecks were in the woods in Deliverance, not the boats. This is far worse, this is Gator Bait!
And Hank, the golfers, and the military are not the only people suffering from vision loss in the movie. At one point Amy nearly falls over a waterfall while she and Hank are walking across a rickety wooden bridge (in a sad, sad homage to the Temple of Doom), and when she gets back up she frantically asks, "Where's the heart rate monitor??" Apparently unable to see its bulky mass sitting two feet away from her. Somebody get this woman some binoculars!
The movie almost gets meaningful when Kong is frantic to get out of captivity and get to the female that he can smell nearby. Forget about any stupid sex jokes, any ape is going to want to mate after being held in captivity. Then it turns out that they just want to go lounge in the woods grabassing and massaging each other. At one point Mighty Jane Young starts licking a wound Kong has somehow gotten on his knee, and he puts his arm around her and grins. The only thing missing is a barrel of beer in his other hand.
Ultimately, of course, we are forced to meet Son of Kong, a human-sized ape which, having come from Mrs. Kong, makes about as much sense as a human woman giving birth to a child the size of like, a grape.
In the movie's defense, we do get to see Linda Hamilton topless for exactly two fifteenths of a second, but director John Guillermin, who also directed the massively superior 1976 remake, has not even managed to produce a grape.
He's given birth to a raisin.
A rotten one.
score 2/10
Anonymous_Maxine 28 January 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1010504/35574
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