In the beginning, God said, Let there be Willis… Eight years before Willis O’Brien brought KING KONG (1933) to life with his brilliant stop-motion animation, he used that innovative technique on his very first feature, THE LOST WORLD (1925), a silent movie based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book (released 1912), in which scientists discover prehistoric animals on an Amazonian … Read More
SON OF KONG
Throwing out the baby with the floodwater. SON OF KONG trades on one outstanding moment that will haunt you forever. Trouble is, it takes five-thousand swishy B-movie moments to arrive there. The moment which almost erases all the shoddy filmmaking that comes before it, is in the film’s heart-breaking climax, when the Son of Kong desperately raises Denham above his … Read More
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG
If KING KONG and Disney had a deformed baby… Ever seen one of those tragic movies that you loved but just wished wished wished it could’ve ended differently? Like SCARFACE or KING KONG or ROMEO AND JULIET? Well, if you wondered how KING KONG might’ve looked with a happy ending, look no further than MIGHTY JOE YOUNG. Produced by the … Read More
KING KONG VS. GODZILLA
King Kong versus King Of The Monsters in a battle to the meh! It’s Halloween. One of your idiot friends is in an ape costume walking around upright like a human, not making the slightest attempt to emulate an ape, and another idiot friend is dressed as an alligator and his long tail has knocked over the snacks table more … Read More
THE LOST WORLD 1960
Stay Lost. Dinosaurs! Uh, no, just komodos and iguanas with horns and spikes duct-taped to them…. Didn’t matter when you were ten. And THE LOST WORLD (the second film adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle‘s 1912 novel) is definitely FOR ten-year-olds, seemingly made BY ten-year-olds. Been decades since I read the book, but screenwriter-director Irwin Allen takes Conan Doyle’s exciting meat … Read More
KING KONG
The King Is Dead! Long Live The King! There must be a country song that goes – How can something so good become something so bad? Unleashed on an unsuspecting Depression-era American public when “talkies” were not yet five years old, with old Masters like Chaplin still releasing silent films and heroes like Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and John Wayne … Read More
THE VALLEY OF GWANGI
That Old Black Magic Called – Dynamation. Sunday afternoon, 12 years old, television in brightly sunlit family room, ice cream with a big spoon – any wonder that this film is a cult classic, when these are the types of memories it conjures? In the old Mexican west, cowboys discover living dinosaurs in a lost valley and bring an allosaur … Read More