My Dad At The Movies

Return Of The Blog

Hi to all my readers. Thanks for being patient while the blog went into temporary hiatus due to the passing of my father. Time to get back into the swing of things on here but, for my first return post, I thought I’d post the eulogy which I wrote for and read at my father’s funeral. Normal review service will return tomorrow, with the belated Halloween post which was scheduled to go live before the bad stuff happened.

My Dad At The Movies

From as early as I can remember in my life and up to and including his final week on Earth, my dad didn’t always call me by my Christian name... he often called me Wings. When I was very young I asked him why he called me that and he said it comes from Wings Around The World, from the 1936 Alexander Korda movie Things To Come, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ 1933 novel The Shape Of Things To Come. And it would be true to say that the moving image is a huge part of my life, because it was a big part of my father’s life... and because of what he shared with me at a very young age. 

Probably before I could walk he was watching films and TV shows with me on our old black and white TV set and, before I was seven, we were already watching things like the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly musicals, Laurel And Hardy, Tom And Jerry, Abbott and Costello, the James Bond movies, Thunderbirds, Doctor Who, the Universal and Hammer horror movies and, of course, that memorable time when I was waking him back up late at night because King Kong was climbing the Empire State Building.

I remember him getting very excited when, in the early 1970s, the BBC had acquired the rights to the Flash Gordon serials and had edited the first one into a two part double bill, sandwiching a Hopalong Cassidy movie in between it. It would be safe to say our love of the Buster Crabbe serials never diminished and we would watch them again at least once a decade. 

Of course, my dad also had some complaints about the films he watched and, quite often, you would suddenly hear him proclaim “Knickers!” as he would then, at length, go on to explain that in real life, lifts didn’t have magically appearing trap doors in their roofs so the hero could escape from their threatening predicament. Similar exclamations and explanations would also come loudly whenever the main protagonist of a movie crawled into an air vent to circumvent the villain’s well laid plans. “Nope. They’re sealed tight for a reason, have machinery in them and are way too small to crawl through” would be the message there, each and every time somebody in a film would make the same, life saving mistake. 

There are many movie memories I have of my dad, too many to mention here but, suffice it to say, every time Johnny Weismuller comes on in a Tarzan film I will still shout "Ungawa!” like I did with my dad... and I’ll still watch King Kong try to outfox those planes each and every time. 

Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire

Peanuts Gal For
Monkey Magic

Godzilla X Kong -
The New Empire
Directed by Adam Wingard
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK Theatrical Cut

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Last week I went to the cinema to see Ghostbusters - Frozen Empire (reviewed here) in which a centuries long imprisoned creature is released and aims to turn the Earth into a new ice age. This week I saw Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire which, apart from having a superfluous X that makes it the most ridiculous and childish title for a Godzilla movie ever, deals with a centuries long imprisoned creature who is released back into the mix with his followers and big ice creature, with the intent of conquering the Earth by turning it into a new ice age. I bet the makers of this one were pretty miffed that the new Ghostbusters had a better title that they could have used themselves.

This one is, by my counts, the fifth in the sequence of the US Monsterverse franchise, comprising Godzilla (reviewed here), Kong - Skull Island (reviewed here), Godzilla King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), Godzilla VS Kong (reviewed here) and now this one. Not to mention the relatively recent Monarch TV series, which I haven’t got around to watching as yet. It carries over three characters from the previous movie, as played by the great Rebecca Hall reprising the role of the main scientist, the extremely cool Kaylee Hottle as her deaf/mute adopted Skull Island daughter and Brian Tyree Henry, providing comic relief as the vlogger who was helping out Millie Bobby Brown in the last movie.

And, not only is this installment in the franchise way better in most respects than Godzilla VS Kong, it’s also a very fun watch and I really rather enjoyed it. Now, given the critical and commercial success of the Academy Award winning Japanese movie Godzilla Minus One (reviewed here ) a few months ago, I was fully expecting to be able to say that the aforementioned movie was way better than this one. And... yeah okay, I am saying that... no comparison. I’d take a film like that one over this any day of the week. However, you have to remember that you really can’t cant compare the two. Godzilla Minus One is very much a serious film similar in tone to the original 1954 Gojira movie (reviewed here) and uses Godzilla as a surrogate for the post survivor trauma of the ‘failed’ kamikaze pilot who is the film’s main protagonist. It’s carrying a lot of weight and it does it beautifully.

In contrast to that, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire is very much in the style of the fun, mid 1960s to mid 1970s Toho Godzilla ‘monster romp’ movies... and as a lover of both kinds, I am quite happy with what the US filmmakers are able to achieve here, to be honest. It’s a different flavour of Godzilla but they are doing a much better job of that kind of brief here.

Now, the movie almost totally takes place in the Hollow Earth world discovered in the last film, asides from a few sequences where Godzilla and Kong manage to wreck part of Egypt and Brazil between them. And also one memorable moment where the movie’s other main protagonist, a monster veterinarian played by Dan Stevens, extracts Kong’s infected tooth with his helicopter and gives him a new, super duper tooth. Also, after a sequence where Kong suffers from frostbite in his right arm, due to reasons I won’t disclose, he cures it and gives him a new armoured glove so he can punch things better. So yay!

Also, Kaylee Hottle’s character ends up fulfilling the same role as The Peanuts did in the original Mothra films from the 1960s. She is the new human envoy to Mothra and she wakes her up to help out when Kong is trying to lure Godzilla into lending a hand in tackling their bigger problem. It’s nice stuff but, alas, she doesn’t sing the famous Mothra song... which would have been a nice touch.

And was that a shop sign depicting Gamera I saw for a second before Godzilla smashed through it? I’m pretty sure that’s what I saw... can anyone else confirm in the comments?

And it’s a film filled with good action, much better acting than you would expect and a fun storyline. My only real criticism is that the score by Antonio Di Lorio and Tom Holkenborg is bereft of any of the iconic Godzilla themes from the Toho series and, just fails miserably on that level. Every time you are expecting there to be a big Ifukube moment, the score does something which seems, I dunno, like a melody falling just short of the original to evade copyright payments. Which is a shame because, even the great Godzilla Minus One, which had a far superior score to this one, recognised the value in popping in Ifukube’s melodies into certain scenes. And to add insult to injury, the score to this one seems to be unavailable on a proper CD (which is a first for the films, it would be the only live action Godzilla theatrical release without CD representation to date). Shame on Watertower Records for not releasing it in the only physical format that real music lovers want. I hate this backwards decade, ignoring the essential physical media releases which should accompany these films.

Apart from the ‘knock off’ sounding scoring though, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire was way more entertaining than I was expecting it to be and, if you liked Kong VS Godzilla (I kinda didn’t think it was all that), then you should definitely love this one. Don’t expect to be seeing the same kind of story substance present in Godzilla Minus One though... two very different kinds of films.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 17 - Noblesse Oblige

Cops & Roburs

Tales Of The
Shadowmen 17
Noblesse Oblige
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier
& Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 97816493202478

Okay, it’s that time of the year again when I do a very small shout out of a review to what has now become my third Christmas reading ritual over the years, following the latest Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs novels (okay, don’t panic, I’ve not read the latest Reichs yet for various reasons but that review will hopefully be coming in a couple of months). That ritual is the devouring of the ‘second from latest’ Tales Of The Shadowmen collection from Black Coat Press... never quite up to date for a Christmas present because the latest one is never published until the middle of each December of the year.

So, December 2020’s collection is Volume 17 in the series, subtitled Noblesse Oblige and, like all the others before it, it contains a collection of short stories with the common thread of each writer taking two or more famous literary pulp or comic book characters and having them cross paths in a new tale. Because of the huge amount of different characters, many of them French, I don’t always get all of the references but, as in previous editions, there’s a handy guide to the origins of all the characters, objects and place names in a kind of index at the back for each story, which attributes these various appearances to the original writer who created them.

This volume has the usual interesting kinds of ‘mash ups’ (in the common, current parlance) and so you have characters like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty or Jules Verne’s Robur The Conqueror (you know, The Master Of The World) cropping up or at least mentioned in more than one of these tales. There are also, again as in previous volumes, the next story in ongoing arcs from various authors, acting as sequel segments to their stories in various editions of the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections. So, for example, The Revolution Begins Tonight by Nigel Malcom, which has people like Sexton Blake, The Nyctalope, Una Persson, Doctor Omega, Zenith and Judex fighting a corrupt government, transplanted into the future world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, is the fourth and final installment of this story arc.

And, while some of the combinations of characters are not as odd as they’ve sometimes been in the past... there are still some really nice homages to both the literary and certain cinematic variations of characters. For example, there’s a nice short tale called Only One... by Frank Schildiner about Boysie Oakes (aka The Liquidator, Rod Taylor played him in the movie version of the first book) being brought, by Elke Sommers’ character from the Bulldog Drummond movie Deadlier Than The Male, face to face with the Jean Marais 1960s cinematic incarnation of Fantômas. Or another in which ‘that woman’ from Sherlock Holmes, aka Irene Adler, brings about the downfall of the latest scheme by Robur... in a story called Master Of The Six Gun by Nathan Cabannis.

Perhaps my favourite stories this time around were the more involved and longer tales which spent a while building up the characters. For instance, John Peel’s The Child That Time Forgot, where the inhabitants of Verne’s travelling, mechanical island get caught on Skull Island in the late Nineteenth Century and one of those left behind ensures the survival of baby Kong. But I even enjoyed the ones where I really didn’t know the characters so well. Such as Randy Lofficier’s The Phantom Angel And The Dwarves Of Death, which has Sleeping Beauty, who is now living in the modern world with a fairyland community often hidden from human eyes, helping out a lady detective from a French police procedural TV series called Spiral, as they work to uncover the murderer of one of the seven dwarves.

Plus, as per usual, all kinds of appearances by the likes of Dr. Moreau, The Morlocks, The Liliputians, Dr. Fu Manchu, Rip Kirby, Maigret, Arsene Lupin and also, a brilliant little tale called Doctor’s Note by Matthew Dennion, in which Eric (aka The Phantom Of The Opera) seeks to have his deformity cured, seen first through the diary of Dr. Van Helsing and subsequently through the notes of Dr. Jekyll.

So, yeah, it’s all just delightful business as usual and, once again, I can do nothing else but recommend Tales Of The Shadowmen 17 - Noblesse Oblige to any readers who have a penchant for stories where old characters from different kinds of fiction and walks of life encounter each other. As always, these collections can be a bit hit and miss depending on your tastes, due to the wide variety of different writing styles and, I would say start from the first volume because there are often multi-part stories running through the various collections.

Godzilla VS Kong

Kaiju KO

Godzilla VS Kong
USA/Australia/Canada/India 2021
Directed by Adam Wingard
Warner Brothers

Warning: This review will have kaiju sized spoilers.

Oof! Godzilla VS Kong is something I’d been looking forward to for a while. The fourth in the new US Monsterverse movies and following on from the two good films in the series, Kong: Skull Island (reviewed here) and Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), I was probably expecting a lot more from it than it could maybe, in hindsight, have credibly delivered. Also, I’ve quite liked some of director Adam Wingard’s previous movies and, although I think it’s a bigger film than he’s used to heading up... I had a lot of confidence in him on this.

And I can certainly confirm that the film looks really nice and has some beautiful, bright colours and lots of ‘monster smack’ carnage on show. It also has returning performers from one of the previous installments in the form of  Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler reprising their roles from Godzilla - King Of The Monsters. They are joined by some equally cool people such as Alexander Skarsgård as a good guy scientist and one of my favourite modern actresses, Rebecca Hall. And it even has the return of one of my favourite, iconic kaiju characters who tends to turn up from time to time in the Godzilla movies over the years, Mecha-Godzilla. So, yeah, I should have probably got a lot more out of this than I did. It looks great, has lots of explosions and punching of things and has great actors delivering the lines. Terrible nonsense lines though so, that doesn’t help things along, to start with.

I think my biggest complaint after seeing it is that I just didn’t understand what the heck this movie was about at all. Now it doesn’t help I was being hit by ‘buffering’ every minute or so for a while (I don’t know why streaming is so popular in the UK when our internet infrastructure is so terrible trying to handle anything remotely HD) and I’m sure I would have responded to this much better if I’d seen it in a proper cinema (the only way a movie should be watched the first time)... but I’m not sure anything would have helped me comprehend the plot to this film, which re-positions Godzilla as the bad guy and then, at the end, says it’s alright because he was just attacking ‘company x’ because they were doing bad things. Nope. He was killing innocent people and destroying cities in the process and that’s not a cool look... Gojira was definitely back to his old 1954 self as far as I’m concerned. And the general comments shouted by the rest of the family as we were watching, echoing mine such as... “What’s going on?”, “What just happened?”, “Was there two of him in that shot... how?”, “Is someone going to come and explain why they’re doing this and what this means?”... well, I think they speak for themselves.

I know that, for some reason I couldn’t figure out, people needed to get Kong to get them to the centre of the Earth (you know, the old hollow Earth theory again) but something to do with the gravity shift was a danger but... it’s okay because Kong was with them and... sorry, what? And a ludicrous subplot that re-introduced a less than interesting redesign of Mecha-Godzilla when, frankly, after we saw a giant mechanical eyeball near the start of the movie, we really didn’t need it spelled out. And no Charles Dance in sight? We saw him as the main villain making off with a dead Ghidorah head in the post-credits of the last movie but here, the head is back but the villain isn’t. Like he just disappeared into the ether.

But we do have the Ghidorah head... now a skull. Because obviously, a human mind needs to make a connection with a Ghidorah head to be able to control the man-made Mecha-Godzilla right? I mean, what? Just what? And then, when the human brain is destroyed, this makes Mecha-G go off into its own rampage... why? Lots of whys and whats here because... I’m sorry but this movie’s plot is just absolute twaddle. And don’t get me started on how it’s set just a couple of years in our future but there’s no mention made of the Coronavirus. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be around for a while and it seems kinda stupid that Hollywood would think we would forget about that. Nobody is masking up in this film, for sure.

Also, I know the director and composer are probably huge fans of the original films in the respective franchises but, I felt the whole thing played out with a lot less respect than either monster deserved. Junkie XL’s score has one, possibly accidental, similarity to Ifukube’s five note power theme for The Big G which I noticed in one action scene and which I suspect was just serendipitous. The previous score by the great Bear McCreary was loaded with musical references to a whole host of Toho monster themes giving the leitmotifs associated with them their due in a fan pleasing score that really served the movie well. This new score is appropriate to the action but just feels like a wasted opportunity and gives no real reference to Ifukube, Sato, Koseki or even Max Steiner in its make up. It’s just another score which could have been ‘anything appropriate’ when it’s been demonstrated in the last film that a good, striking, use of the previous material as musical building blocks can be carried out very well. I felt like this was a major step backwards for these movies and it’s now the fourth in a series which, like the previous three, has absolutely no musical continuity with any of the others. It’s just egos doing their own thing when they could have served a more functional purpose for the good of the whole canon of works.

And, by the way, King Kong has been around since 1933 whereas Godzilla is a relatively new character from 1954. Show some respect... there’s no way, despite Kong being stripped of his royal nomenclature for these movies, that Godzilla would beat him to near death. Kong's more dexterous. It just beggars belief. And, although the shout out to certain other Kong and kaiju movies where human intervention is necessary to restart (or in some films replace) a slowing heart is appreciated, the circumstances which took us to that point felt somehow unacceptable to me.

And so there you have it. Godzilla VS Kong looks great, has made huge gains at the box office but, sadly, under all the hullabaloo it’s just an empty and somehow inarticulate shell of a movie masquerading as something much bigger than it actually is. I can enjoy the moments of monster carnage and will probably do so again on Blu Ray but, as a consequential entry in the entire body of work of both the King Kong and Godzilla franchises, it leaves no mark and is, perhaps, best left forgotten. I was, at the end of the last picture, looking forward to this franchise continuing but now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. Everything seems to be thrown away and the dots that are meant join the films together make a tenuous and unnecessary trail at best. I can’t recommend this one, to be honest.

King Kong Escapes

Kong Voyage

King Kong Escapes
Japan/USA 1967
Directed by Ishirô Honda
Toho/Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has spoilers.

So I took some time out from the Criterion Godzilla set to pop this one in. King Kong Escapes is a muddled but entertaining movie... alas, entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Now, I’ve no idea what the proper Japanese cut of the film is like but I suspect it’s not all that different because, although the film has actors like Rhodes Reason and Linda Miller in it, it was an American co-production and they all appeared in scenes with many of the Japanese actors such as Godzilla veterans Akira Takarada and Mie Hama (Hama was also a big star for the Bond film You Only Live Twice, reviewed by me here, by this point). Hama plays the main female villain who, in a fit of conscience towards the end, double crosses the main male villain of the piece, Hideyo Amamoto as the nefarious Dr. Who. Yeah, okay... not that Doctor Who. Another one, although, it has to be said, the costume and look of the character seems very much based on the William Hartnell incarnation of everybody’s favourite timelord at the time.

That being said, Who is a carry over from the source material of this film... which isn’t really, as many may suspect, a sequel to King Kong Vs Godzilla (which it’s often marketed as and which you can find reviewed here). Instead, it’s a big screen adaptation of a Rankin/Bass King Kong cartoon of the time... it’s also the last time Toho had the rights to use the character, unfortunately.

The film is... well it’s kinda terrible, despite being directed by Godzilla veteran Ishirô Honda and having a, somewhat slow and ponderous score by Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube. It’s fun though but, alas, the humour on this one is completely at the expense of the cast and crew, it has to be said. The dialogue and plot are... well I guess like something you’d find in a cartoon of the time and the effects work is, surprisingly, mostly abysmal.

I mean, take the ‘not so bad’ actress Linda Miller (she only appeared in three movies and one TV episode but, one of those movies was The Green Slime... reviewed here). Here she is being picked up by a badly 'matted in' giant hand against a live action plate but, as soon as we see her in the hands of the, truly ridiculous looking King Kong man in suit (possibly even worse than the version from King Kong VS Godzilla) in long shot she is a lifeless, plastic doll which, throughout the movie, only has one costume. Now, Ms Miller gets picked up by her new pal Kong fairly frequently throughout the movie, it has to be said but, although one of her costumes does look a  little like the one on the rigid doll in the hands of the ‘suit-mation’ Kong, most of the time she’s wearing something different. It doesn’t matter to the special effects guys though... if she’s wearing white or some other colour, when it cuts back to the doll in the hand... she’s back to wearing yellow. Not only that but, through the course of the movie (and depending how wet she gets in a scene... she takes a dive into the ocean before being picked up by Kong at one point), she has a kind of ‘dirty blonde’ hair. However, when she’s seen in long shot in Kong’s fist, that really is going to change to a vibrant redhead on the doll, for sure.

Other things about the ridiculous effects are the fact that, when our heroes go to check out Kong’s island near the start of the movie, the strange hover ship they use is nicely designed but, honestly, you can clearly see the wires as it’s lifted over the tank of water standing in for the sea. Added to some truly boring fight scenes and this iteration of Kong really is nothing to write home about. The fight Kong has with a dinosaur is fairly ludicrous but I think that one, at least, was played for laughs. However, there’s a big set up battle in the movie and you’re waiting for it to happen and, when it does... well, more on that in a moment.

So the other big hangover from the cartoon series was the invention of the giant robot Kong facsimile, Mechani-Kong. He’s introduced into the plot line to mine for ‘Substance X’ for the villains before the ‘real’ Kong even enters the movie and, all the way through you’re just waiting for the battle between these two titans to unfold. When it does... well it takes place in Tokyo, mostly with a kind of ‘climbing dual’ as the two Kongs climb something which looks remotely like the Eifel Tower (except we’re in Tokyo) and... well... it’s a bit anti-climactic, it has to be said. But, even so, there’s a lot of fun to be had about the idea of this head to head and, ridiculously bad as it is, it still holds a curious entertainment value (this is like the fourth or fifth time I’ve watched this movie in different formats over the decades).

The Mechani-Kong from the cartoon show and made flesh... err... steel here was presumably the inspiration for the similar looking, semi-regular villain Mecha-Godzilla who made his first appearances in the Showa Era films Godzilla VS Mecha-Godzilla in 1974 and the final film in that first cycle, Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla. So some good came out of this movie in regards to that element at least and, either way you look at it, Mechani-Kong certainly looks great and makes for some good photos and artwork. More than his hairy co-star at any rate... who seems to have a permanently manic look about him with his huge, staring eyes.

And... yeah, that’s really all I’ve got to say about King Kong Escapes. A fun but insubstantial piece which has so far been given, it has to be said, a truly insubstantial Blu Ray release. The transfer is okay but you can only watch this in the English dub and, talk about bare bones. I’d moan about the extras if there were any but... remember some of those early DVDs which, when you put the film in the player, didn’t have any kind of menu and just went straight into ‘the movie is now playing, deal with it’ mode? Well let’s just say that this is the first Blu Ray I’ve had which does just that. No menu, just a quick copyright notice and then the film starts playing. Universal really should take a leaf out of the book of Criterion, Severin, Arrow, Indicator, Blue Underground and various other labels who know how to market films like this. I’m hoping somebody will get the smart idea of releasing limited edition kaiju sets with the proper Japanese versions of films like this and Frankenstein Conquers The World in them, crammed with extras pertinent to the subject matter. Until that time comes, alas, we’re stuck with what I would call substandard releases like this and, yeah, I’m glad I only spent £6 on this edition is all I’m saying. If you can get it cheaper, it’s worth a quick look.

Kong Unmade

Ape Expectations

Kong Unmade -
The Lost Films Of Skull Island
Written by John Lemay
Bicep Books ISBN: 9781798077993

I’m guessing that not many of my readers will remember the Batman VS Godzilla movie, where Adam West’s character is shown footage from King Kong Vs Godzilla to learn how to defeat The Big G. Or the 1934 Tarzan VS King Kong motion picture? Or how about the couple of King Kong movies that England’s famous Hammer studios tried to make?

Not to worry if you don’t. These films obviously never happened but are certainly among the many attractions in John Lemay’s entertaining resource, Kong Unmade - The Lost Films Of Skull Island.

This epic tome, like the other ‘lost films’ book I reviewed relatively recently, Harryhausen - The Lost Movies (you can read my review here) doesn’t just tackle the ‘completely lost’ films of the expected subject matter. In the case of Lemay’s book, we also get reviews and development stories for existing Kong related features including, of course, the original film and its direct remakes but, also, classic rip offs like The Mighty Peking Man and Konga.

There are, of course, a far amount of lost films in here too... the main meat, so to speak and, I suspect it’s the inclusion of all of these that will be of most interest to people compelled to pick this one up. And it is, to be clear, a fairly entertaining and informative romp through the beloved ape’s vanished film career.

The book starts off with the lost film Creation, which fans of the cinema and animation of Willis O’ Brien will no doubt already be aware of. This, of course, along with his finished version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as a direct result of this failed project, would lead to the original motion picture King Kong. Creation itself was, it seems, half cribbed from the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Caspak trilogy, The Land That Time Forgot (which was also made into a film, along with its first sequel, in the 1970s of course). Where relevant, Lemay points out where scenes from various lost projects have been reworked by either the original creators or other producers into movies which did see the light of day, albeit not necessarily having anything to do with King Kong by the time they did. This in itself makes for some interesting reading... as do the various copyright issues regarding both the movie and the separate copyright status of Edgar Wallace’s novelisation (which actually pre-dated the movie in terms of release to the world at large) and the consequences for ‘would be’ directors down through the decades.

It also includes films like the puppet Kong remake The Lost Island, which would have had Mae West voicing Ann Darrow and Groucho Marx voicing Carl Denham. This production was abandoned due to rising costs but some photos still survive and, what was probably the most famous one (even I can remember it from books from the 1970s) is used as the cover to this edition of Kong Unmade. Like the cover shot, I’ve only ever seen black and white stills from this half finished production but if it had been finished it would have been the first 'one reel' movie to be shot in Technicolour so... yeah, would have liked to have seen that one.

Among the many surprising revelations Lemay nonchalantly drops into his book is the fate of a proposed 1940s movie, Abbot and Costello Meet King Kong. This would have been awesome but was eventually abandoned and, instead, became two other Abbot and Costello films, one which did indeed have an ape in one scene and the other being Abbot and Costello Meet Captain Kidd which, apparently, still features Skull Island in the finished film but, alas, it isn’t populated by either dinosaurs or Kong himself.

Another interesting production is the one which was trying to beat Dino De Laurentis’ 1976 remake into cinemas but eventually got called off before shooting had actually started. This was to be called The Legend Of King Kong and was due to star Robert Redford (or Nick Nolte if Redford walked) in the Jack Driscoll role and Peter Falk as a much less sympathetic version of Carl Denham. There’s a quite long chapter which summarises the full script and it really does make for some interesting reading.

Other items of note might be the inclusion of some of the Italian posters for the Godzilla movie Destroy All Monsters, which all seemed to somehow break copyright law and depict King Kong on them... he certainly isn’t anywhere to be found in the film itself although Toho Studios did try and make some other King Kong movies asides from their existing King Kong Versus Godzilla and its sequel King Kong Escapes. Not to mention the 1958 stab at King Kong VS Frankenstein.

There’s also a truly great section on an aborted TV animated project called Kid Kong reproducing loads of Robert Lamb’s original sketches for the proposed show, which has some nice work in it.

In addition, some of the history behind some of the famous, released ‘inspired by’ films that did make it to the silver screen is also very welcome and entertaining. Take the ‘British King Kong’ movie Konga, for example. I learned from this book that a few nights shooting in Croydon culminated with the last night which the director had earmarked for all the gunplay and explosions, after he’d bribed the local chief of police to secure permission. This last night’s shoot resulted in 300 or so emergency phone calls to the police from the general public but the director managed to smooth things over from being prosecuted by sending flowers and chocolates to all of the people who had called in. So that’s an interesting story... I should probably get around to rewatching that one for this blog sometime soon. It’s been well over four decades since I last saw it and I think I bought a Blu Ray in a sale at some point.

So anyway... not much else to say here other than John Lemay makes the whole thing very entertaining and goes into a lot of detail on various productions where he’s able to. I could have happily heard a lot more about the Batman Vs Godzilla project, to tell you the truth, like how come it was 1965 when the show didn’t come out until 1966? I guess it must have been mooted fairly early on in the show’s development but there’s obviously not enough material and, due to it being more about Godzilla than the little bit of Kong footage, it’s been placed in one of the book's four appendix sections instead. Still, Kong Unmade - The Lost Films Of Skull Island is another great treasure of a book for any cineastes or even casual film fans who I’m assuming know the importance and influence of the 1933 King Kong (reviewed by me here) and the huge footprints it made in the annals of cinema. Definitely one for the film lover’s book shelves, for sure.

Harryhausen - The Lost Movies

Stopped Motion

Harryhausen -
The Lost Movies
by John Walsh
Titan Books ISBN: 978-1789091106

Many viewers of fantasy cinema love the stop motion worlds created for the screen by the late, great Ray Harryhausen in films such as The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here). However, do you remember Ray Harryhausen’s 1959 movie version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars... in Cinerama, no less? Or how about his 1969 version of Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian character?

If you’re scratching your head and thinking quizzically about that then don’t worry, you’re not losing your mind and tripping into some fantastic alternative reality. These are film projects that were planned at the time and never came to pass and, fascinating as they are, this is just scratching the surface of John Walsh’s new book Harryhausen - The Lost Movies.

Written by the current gatekeeper, so to speak, of the legacy of this remarkable stop motion animator and film maker extraordinaire, this book is a nicely illustrated look at the many different projects which are the fabulous “what if?” periods of Ray Harryhausen’s life... mostly but, not always, coupled with his producing partner Charles H. Schneer, of course. And as you can imagine, it’s a treasure trove of lost projects that, in some cases most regrettably, never came to pass. It’s also a source of some quite surprising things, when you look at some of the cinematic treasures which were possibly ‘in the mix’ for Harryhausen’s attention.

Starting off with quote testimonies about the frequency of lost projects the average film maker has to regrettably turn his back on by five famous movie directors... Guillermo Del Toro, John Landis, John Boorman, Mike Hodges and Nicholas Meyer... the book goes through the life’s work of missed or passed on opportunities of the great man chronologically and with chapters set into periods of his work.

The book takes the works of three categories of ‘lost film’(and occasional TV show or series of short films like the proposed 1950 Baron Munchausen shorts) as it goes along with the different types designated thusly:

Projects turned down by Ray - these are ones which, for some reason or another, Ray either wasn’t interested in or saw some huge problems which might scupper the project and so didn’t spend too much time on them. For the Conan movie, for example, Ray knew he wanted to do it ‘straight’ to the tone of the original pulps and was pushing to go for a violent, gory approach for the subject matter... something he didn’t usually entertain as a good route with his work but, for this project, he thought that would be the right choice. Regrettably, various producers didn’t think a fantasy film with that level of violence would be deemed commercial enough for the cinema on the expected release year of 1973 (once all the animated creature sequences were done) so the project didn’t go ahead.

And it’s an impressive and surprising list of projects that Ray turned down, many of them which you could see would have benefitted from Ray’s golden touch and would have made sense if he’d taken them on. They include among them, such famous titles as The Giant Claw, Night/Curse Of The Demon, King Kong Vs Frankenstein, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, The Land That Time Forgot, The Hobbit (in 1974), Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (although that lovely shot of him standing next to the stop motion version of the Tauntaun at ILM is reproduced in this book), The Princess Bride, an early version of the X-Men and David Lynch’s version of Dune. An impressive list of projects to pass on to be sure but there are many others mentioned in this book and in some cases it also talks about who approached him for which project and the reasons why Ray turned them down.

Projects that Ray was developing - these were propositions to make into a film project but which didn’t get finished for one reason or another and they run the gamut from the book being able to show just a single surviving sketch such as a proposed 1948 version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher to having a load of surviving artwork plus assembled models ready to be animated and, in the case of some of the projects (and I guess you’ll need to scour YouTube to see some of these), actual test footage of the models in preparation for filming.

Alas, for some of these projects such as a proposed 1954 version of H. G Wells’ The Time Machine, no preliminary sketches have survived.For others of these though, you can get a real glimpse, sometimes more than a glimpse, of what might have been. For instance, Ray’s version of War Of The Worlds would have included the proper tripods from the book and not what George Pal ended up doing with his movie version. Or the much mooted Sinbad Goes To Mars project.

And then there’s a third category of films, where the movie was made by Ray and is another jewel in his filmography but sequences were either developed but not shot for these or just left on the cutting room floor. So a sequence where two Cyclopses fight each other in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad was storyboarded out (the book is full of Harryhausen’s illustrations and models of these kinds of things, by the way) but never made it into the final version. Also, scenes with snakes (and also in the case of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad... rats) were cut out from most of the films where they were originally to be included, purely because Charles H. Schneer had a phobia about them and so he always eliminated those scenes first. One has to wonder how the Medusa in Clash Of The Titans got past him. Interestingly, a decade after the film came out, a young 17 year old fan sent a homemade mask of the Cyclops from that film to Harryhausen and Ray responded with an encouraging letter. Ladies and gentlemen, that young fan grew up to be the famous Hollywood creature creator Rick Baker.

And some of the commentary on these existing films contain their own surprises...

So sure, the scene in The Three Worlds of Gulliver where the title character fights a devil homunculus never made it to the cameras but, apparently neither did Danny Kaye, who was wanted for Gulliver but couldn’t get Sam Goldwyn to release him from his contract to shoot the movie.

Or the fact that for The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, Christopher Lee was originally wanted for the main villain of the movie, a part that went to the then unknown Tom Baker (and which brought him to the attention of the producers of the show that shot him to international fame).  Also from this movie, Orson Welles was apparently wanted for the role of The Oracle but an uncredited and completely unrecognisable Robert Shaw plays the role in the final film. As for the Valley Of The Vipers scene originally slated for the movie... well, you can bet Schneer got rid of that one too.

Also, I have to say that, judging from the storyboards in this book, the unused Shadow Men who created the Minoton from Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger would have been a really scary thing for children to view and, perhaps, should have stayed in the movie.

Fans of Hammer movies will also find much of interest in here with the unmade projects like When The Earth Cracked Open (one of the famous 'pre-posters' for that film is reprinted in this tome) and their attempt to make their own King Kong movie.

As for Clash Of The Titans, one of my least favourites of Harryhausen’s ouevre, it explains why the death of Medusa in the film is so different from the one in the Look-In graphic novel sold at the time of the film’s release. However, regarding this motion picture, the most interesting but, also, the most frustrating revelation of this book is the discovery made by the writer when researching this. That is the discovery of a TDK blank cassette on which is recorded John Barry’s rejected demo score for the film. I would love to hear this... as would a lot of people but, I’ve no idea what condition the tape is in or if it could be preserved for a commercial release. It must be a fascinating listening experience though. 

And that’s me done with this book for now. There are a heck of a lot of dead movies covered here and there’s many more you can read about in Harryhausen - The Lost movies. John Walsh has conceived and written a really fascinating book which gives a real insight into what some of these productions might have had going for them, with plenty of the original illustrations and models reproduced here too. A real dream of a book for certain readers, I’m sure and something most cinephiles of a certain kind will want to immerse themselves in. Definitely worth a read.

Batman The Golden Age Vol 1

Bat Out Of Hell

Batman The Golden Age Vol 1
by Bob Kane, Bill Finger + Various
DC Comics
ISBN: 978-1401263331

Okay, so I enjoyed my little jaunt into the Golden Age tales of Wonder Woman so much recently (reviewed here) that I decided to maybe start familiarising myself (and refamiliarising, to a certain extent) with some of the early strips of other characters in the DC universe. So it’s onto Batman and, though I’d read a fair few tales of the early Batman comics as part of one of the expensive The Batman Archives collections, the big stumbling block of those old, very pricey editions was that they were fixated on just one title... in that case the Batman stories that appeared chronologically in Detective Comics. However, when various superheroes became popular, fairly quickly at the dawn of the phenomenon (Batman is kind of an honourary superhero because, in fact, he has no super powers at all), there was often a second title brought out dedicated solely to the title character and also the odd special issue of something else. So, for example, Wonder Woman would have self contained stories running concurrently in Sensation Comics and, later, Wonder Woman.

When I read The Batman Archives Volume 1 around a decade ago, this really foxed me because when The Joker popped up in the Detective Comics reprints, it was clear that he’d already had at least one (it turns out a fair few) appearance against Batman before, which weren't part of that same reprint tome. What these new Golden Age reprints do is to republish the stories involving the title character from all the comics which carried them in a chronological order... so if something refers back to a previous story (as I know it will here in a specific story in volume 2 or 3 when they get to it), you’ve definitely already read that one. So Batman - The Golden Age includes chronological reprints from Detective Comics, Batman and, in this case, a story featured in a promotional comic of collected stories to tie in with the 1940 New York Worlds Fair showcasing various DC heroes. Batman - The Golden Age reprints all the Batman stories from roughly the first year of his appearance, spanning 1939 - 1940.

Now, a few years ago people on Twitter were getting kinda irked that the version of Batman at the cinema was not a kid friendly version... that he was a darker character. Well, kid friendly these days is a very relative term and I got quite annoyed by people saying this stuff on Twitter (they didn’t feel they could take their kids to see movies like Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice... reviewed here) because my memory of Batman was that he always was the dark, vigilante of the DC universe and it was people like Frank Miller in the 1980s (with his much celebrated The Dark Knight Returns) who were merely trying to return him to his roots.

Now let me make something clear here. The other day I was thinking about all the stuff which used to be pitched to general family audiences on 1970s TV and I realised there’s no way on Earth half of the stuff I watched as a youngster would get passed by the censors these days, when everything at the moment seems to be veering towards a much more prudish, dreadfully PC and somewhat Victorian set of values (underground reaction and alternatives to those values, also, it seems). And it strikes me when I read something like pulp novels written in the 1930s or, indeed, these old Batman comics from the 1940s, that kids back then were even less bothered by, or mollycoddled to, the bleak, violent realities of life... which were obviously plundered for their entertainment value and reflected back in the art form. So these comics were more than kid friendly enough... they were just very grim and violent (for a while, there’s a big sea change within the first year here) and... maybe that’s the way things should be today. Who knows? However, somebody obviously didn’t think these were good reading for youngsters (in more than a decade before the comic book witch hunts of the 1950s which would lead to the creation of the Comics Code Authority) as you’ll see when I get to the introduction of a certain character. It all makes for very interesting ‘in between the lines’ reading though...

In Batman's very first appearance in Detective Comics Issue 27, we have a somewhat different looking character from the one most audiences are more familiar with these days. The masked head is more rounded with longer ears and a generally more sinister, edgy and well defined look to him. This look would remain for around half a year or more and it’s easily my favourite version of the character. This isn’t an ‘origin’ story in any way, shape or form... with the writer wisely deciding to hit the ground running to see if the character was successful before going into the more convoluted origins, I would expect. Actually, I wish this practice of eschewing where the character came from was something more modern movies did with these kinds of figures. After all... nobody seems to have much trouble accepting antagonists with no explanation in zombie movies.

It’s not until his seventh appearance in November 1939, The Batman Wars Against The Dirigible Of Doom, that we get the first crack at his origin story... which doesn’t really differ much from modern retellings (as it does with some famous comic book characters) although he definitely had no Alfred The Butler around to help him in this instance. That character doesn’t appear at all in this first year.

And, in his first story, his secret identity is kept a complete secret from the reader for a while, building up the mystery until, on the very last panel of the last page, he is revealed as Bruce Wayne. And, for some reason, it’s very rare in the stories that, once Batman is knocked unconscious (as he often is), anyone thinks to take his mask off and see who he really is. It just doesn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind at this point. But there’s a lot of other interesting stuff going on with this ‘dark’ character in this and subsequent stories...

In the first issue, for example, the villain accidentally falls backwards into a vat of acid and, while The Batman is not exactly responsible for his death this time around, he does make the comment that it was... “A fitting end for his crime.” In his second story, he casually summersaults an attacking villain off a rooftop to his death. In another adventure he deliberately throws one heavy onto another bad guy’s sword to kill him. In yet another story, he is feigning unconsciousness and is left with a guard while the main villain brings a disintegrator gun to melt him. When he is alone with the guard, he knocks him out, changes costumes with him and deliberately allows the guard to be melted to death in his place. So, yes, this is a much darker avenger than even people like Frank Miller in the 1980s were getting away with for a while.

As you would expect, various elements of the Batman mythos we recognise today are either not present or are not yet fully formed. It takes a fair few issues, for instance, to name the police chief as Commissioner Gordon. Another missing component is the Batmobile, as it came to evolve into. Here, he seems to sport a number of different cars, over the first year, of differing colours... often alternating between red and black. In Batman’s fourth appearance, the red car is drawn a little longer and is referred to as... “his specially built, high-powered auto.” So they were getting there.

Oddly enough, he had a batplane from very early on but, directly contradicting the accompanying text, the plane was more often than not a helicopter or autogyro. It took a little while over this first year for the Batplane to be rendered as... well... a plane. That being said, the way he uses his helicopter is somewhat questionable in regards to the story dynamics. For example, in a completely cloudless sky, he sets his ‘plane’ to hover above the villain’s lair and ‘disguises’ it by billowing a big black cloud of smoke to hide it. Conspicuous much? The villains react thusly... Villain 1: “A black cloud.” Villain 2: “Yeah, looks like rain.” Oh... so that’s alright then.

There’s also a Metropolis Insane Asylum rather than Arkham Asylum and the city is not once referred to as Gotham City as yet. Given the name of the asylum, one wonders if these early stories were meant to be set in the same city as Superman or whether that was merely a coincidence and the writers were just looking at an alternative term for a city.

Even from fairly early on, the art and practice of the early comic book industry, where I guess they thought people really weren’t paying that much attention and throwing them out after reading them, is in evidence. They’re already recycling exact poses copied from earlier issues several times in that first year, and placing them in panels in new stories. Also, the first two pages of Batman Issue 1 is a complete steel, being a straight reprint of the origin story already run in Detective Comics but with different colours used.

Another take away from this first year is that the earlier stories were full of non-scientific phenomena. For instance, we have a monk who keeps a giant gorilla and pet werewolves. We have a shape shifting vampire villain. We have a man with literally no face at one point and, when Batman enters the gardens of the villains who have stolen this man’s face, he sees flowers with living human faces on them. So I think it’s fair to say that these stories were not written with a worry about straying from a good, scientific foundation... which is something Batman was more known as in later decades... something of a ‘science detective’ like Doc Savage.

And then, in Batman’s 12th appearance, we have the first story featuring Robin The Boy Wonder and the tone of Batman comics are completely changed. Someone must have thought these things were getting too mean spirited because, once Robin becomes a regular feature of the strip, it’s not just the look of the Batman character which changes into something more like the Batman we know today. This is a Batman and Robin team with a big commitment to not taking life where possible... so a complete sea change for the character, it seems to me (although, to be fair, Robin does kick a guy off a metal girder to his death at one point, in self defence). Sometimes the violence still does happen and Batman seems somewhat contradictory in his responses. After happily letting two asylum patients maul each other two death earlier in the same issue, he later states at one point... “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary.” What the heck? This is from a story where Batman is gunning down a giant man with a very strong cultural reference to the ending of King Kong. Interestingly, this is a solo Batman story which had been advertised a few issues before but was delayed for publication until after the addition of Robin, by the looks of things. It’s one of the few post-Robin stories here without The Boy Wonder in it. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that bizarre character contradiction comes from adding different text in the speech bubble to what had originally been in there for the original scheduled publication.

I hate to use the language of the Batman’s foes here but this newer, conscientious version of the Batman really was a boy scout. In Batman Issue 1, he breaks the fourth wall to deliver to the readers this message... “Well, kids. There’s your proof. Crooks are yellow without their guns! Don’t go around admiring them. Rather, do your best in fighting them and all their kind.”  Which is definitely a comic with a strong moral message methinks. I also found it very interesting how the writers keep pushing the idea of building gyms and other community centres for youths to keep them occupied and stop them getting into crime. This is exactly the same kind of thing I’m hearing now in London as the crime rate rises over here due to various issues... spend more money on keeping the kids occupied and focused (not that there’s any money left to be able to do that with over here).

Actually, the breaking the fourth wall thing becomes more of a thing too, on occasion. For example, at the end of the story in the 1940 New York Worlds Fair Comics issue, Bruce and Dick talk directly to their readers to urge them to visit the New York World’s Fair. The power of 'in-panel' advertising.

Funnily enough, one of Batman’s most vicious villains also makes his debut in Batman Issue 1. The Joker is, by my count, the third regularly occurring villain in these comics, after Hugo Strange and Catwoman. Actually, Catwoman is known only as 'The Cat' in early issues and she hasn’t yet acquired the name of Selina Kyle (or any fixed identity, it has to be said). Funnily enough, even from The Cat’s first appearance, Batman was already ‘accidentally’ letting her escape and making his sexual attraction to her known to the readers. Which is much earlier than I’d expected. In her second appearance she also manages to make an enemy of The Joker, which is kinda interesting.

One of the great things about reading these early comics is trying to catch the cultural references of the time and how they influenced the strip or were cherry picked to be a part of them. I’ve already mentioned the King Kong homage in one issue but when a character called Boss Zulch is introduced, he seems to finish almost every sentence he utters with the word “see?” which is obviously picked up from Edward G. Robinson’s character in the film Little Caesar. Also, one reaction to a pirate radio broadcast by The Joker goes thusly... ““Haw! That’s just a gag - like that fellow who scared everybody with that story about Mars the last time. Ha! Ha! Pay no attention to it dear.” So Orson Welles’ ground breaking documentary style radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds, which panicked half of America, was obviously still very much on everybody’s minds at the time.

Also in regard to influences, you can see just how one of my favourite pulp characters, Doc Savage, directly impacted on and influenced the Batman character by this point, as the supernatural stuff is mostly dropped and scientific stuff starts. Mention of brain surgery to cure criminal ways, for instance, or using an infra red lamp to read invisible markers left on a villain’s footprints to trail him. This would eventually lead to Batman’s later title as The World’s Greatest Detective, at some point, I guess... was that the 1970s or before then? I can’t remember.

Anyway, that’s the first year or so of Batman encapsulated in Batman - The Golden Age Vol 1 and, honestly, if you’re a Batman fan and want to know more about the character’s roots and how he evolved and changed, even in his first 12 months, then this is a really good place to start. Essential reading for me and I shall definitely be picking up the second volume at some point to re-read one of my favourite Batman stories from that era (which I have reprinted in an old 1970s Detective Comics Giant)... The Case Of The Carbon Copy Crimes.

Ready Player One

Refer Madness

Ready Player One
2018 USA Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

Ready Player One is the second new Spielberg film I’ve seen at cinemas this year... the first being The Post released back in January in the UK (you can read my review here). I’ve always quite liked Spielberg’s cinema with the odd few exceptions and this one is... well it’s neither bad nor great. It’s also got a lot of information crowding out almost every frame so I’m not sure if one viewing is enough to process it all. That being said, I’m not sure I’d care to sit through it all for a second viewing so I’m currently locked in kind of a Mexican stand off with this film.

It’s based on the best selling and highly recommended novel of the same title (that title being a general call to arms for those of us who remember it on all those arcade games of the late 1970s and 1980s) by Ernest Cline, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Well, I say highly recommended... one of my friends recommended I read this a few years ago and I just never got the ‘to be read’ pile low enough to add it. So I’m not exactly ‘in the know’ about how faithful an adaptation it is... all I knew before going in was that it heavily references lots of pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s (and a few other eras too, as it turned out). However, as it happens, my friend Teresa, who was the one who recommended it to me, also saw this the same night I did and she messaged me the next morning saying that it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the book. So... there you go. Maybe I will get around to reading it at some point.

The film stars Tye Sheridan as main protagonist Wade Watts, the brilliant Olivia Cooke (so good in The Limehouse Golem, which I reviewed here) and the wonderful Mark Rylance as Halliday, the inventor of the virtual reality world The Oasis, where most of the film takes place. It also stars Simon Pegg as Halliday’s former partner and Rogue One’s bad guy Ben Mendelsohn as the main antagonist here.

The plot is fairly simplistic...

In the relatively near future, people are plugged in most of the time to their computer simulated VR world The Oasis, where anything can happen. I’m not sure how the economy of this world works... I suspect it’s all much better explained in the novel... but Wade lives in the equivalent of a slum and he, like many others, are looking for three keys hidden by the creator of the games after his death. This ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory-like’ incentive to inherit and control The Oasis is a world wide obsession but the puzzles to finding the keys are not so easy to work out unless you really get inside the mind of the creator. Wade and his virtual friends are among those looking but the stakes are high as the underhanded IOI corporation has hundreds of people on their payroll  looking for the same clues in order to inherit The Oasis and monetised it, turning it into an advertisers delight. They will stop at nothing to get the prize and... that’s the plot in a nutshell.

And along the way you’ll meet and not have nearly have enough time to spot all of the gazillions of cultural references scattered around the film in small or sometimes very large cameos. You’ll see Batman, the Back To The Future Delorean, the 1960s TV Batmobile, King Kong, The Iron Giant and so much more. Including a starring sequence from... Mechagodzilla... and this was my favourite surprise of the film even though it wasn’t a man in a suit but a much more flexibly moving CGI equivalent.

There are many nice touches but I’m a little bit puzzled as to why Alan Silvestri’s score is being touted as totally original and non-referential musically when, frankly, there are a number of famous musical moments which refer back to stuff as much as the movie does visually. For example, a nice idea of a ‘Zemeckis cube’ which reverses time for a period has a moment from Silvestri’s own Back To The Future scores and at one point during the sequence where The Iron Giant fights Mechagodzilla, we hear Akira Ifikube’s famous Godzilla march woven into the score. I’m actually not the biggest fan of Silvestri to be honest (although I did love his score for The Mummy Returns) but it’s nicely done and, though referential, it’s not nearly as overcooked as it might have been and it holds its own with the images and gives them the required lift.

In all honesty, this movie does play out pretty much, in terms of the plot goals too, like you’re watching a fast speed, live action version of The Lego Movie (reviewed here) but it has a little less charm, perhaps. There are quite a few dull moments in terms of the action choreography too but there are also some great sequences worth going to see it for.

The first run through of ‘the race’ near the start of the movie, for instance, deserves all the enthusiastic film reviewer roller coaster analogies it might get because it really does feel powerful and big (and just about followable, in terms of the way it’s edited). Another favourite sequence is where the characters have to go into the Overlook hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s famous adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. This was really well done and, in terms of the music, does have some of Wendy Carlos’ score from the movie (frustratingly still unreleased commercially on CD... although a ‘promotional’ boot does exist). This sequence is nice and also was one of the best for making me think I did, indeed, spot a key Spielbergian signature when I saw The Post earlier in the year...

To explain, I realised that sometimes, instead of following the main protagonist, the camera will suddenly split away and start following one of the other characters instead for a sequence before returning to the rest of the plot. Kind of like a little detour but one which helps highlight the next story thread/motive for the main characters to pick up on later and this is exactly what happens in The Shining sequence here (and in a few other places too, I might hasten to add). We take a bit of a ride with one of the other characters as they’re subjected to some of the famous set pieces of Kubrick’s masterpiece and, frankly, it left me wondering how Spielberg could get away with showing all this stuff from The Shining here in a film which has a 12A rating when I’m pretty sure it’s these same sequences that would have earned Kubrick’s film an X certificate back in the day. Hmmm... not sure what’s happening here.

All in all, Ready Player One is not a bad movie and it does have some lovely moments. It’s also a bit lumbering and, frankly, could have done with being trimmed by a good half an hour or more, I reckon. However, it’s quite possibly something which might grow on me a little more at a later date so I’m not ruling out a revisit at some point in the next few years. It’s certainly nowhere near to being one of Spielberg’s best films, as far as I’m concerned but it’s still a heck of a lot better than stuff like ET and AI, that’s for sure. I suspect I’m a little too old for a lot of the references but it will be a nice nostalgia rush for people in their late 30s is my guess. Give it a go if there’s nothing else going on, is my advice.

Kong - Skull Island

Kong-A-Thon, Live In Bone, Sea Skull

Kong - Skull Island
USA 2017 Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts
UK cinema release print.

See, this is why I love watching the odd movie every now and again. You never know when something’s going to surprise you and be an absolutely brilliant helping of cinematic art and entertainment.

I had really low expectations for this film.

The thing is, and if you read my last review you’ll already know this, I have a lot of respect and admiration for the original 1933 King Kong movie (and you can find that review just here). Most of the other movies to either feature King Kong as a character in a different storyline (such as this one) or trying to remake the original have, for the most part, been a little entertaining but mostly dull. I think my favourite of the bunch of movies to utilise the character over the intervening years since the wonderful 1933 version has been the second of the Toho Kong movies from 1967, King Kong Escapes. And, frankly, how could you not like a movie where a giant ape has to fight a giant mechanical simulacrum of itself... that’s always going to be a winning formula.

So I was pretty surprised when this new movie, Kong - Skull Island, turned out to be, pretty much, the best of the US Kong movies since the original. I went to a 3D IMAX showing of the movie at my local Cineworld and ended up having one of the best movie experiences I’ve had in a while.

The film is actually not a remake of the original as such and, if you were following the poster campaign and the not so great trailers then you’ll know the marketing people were very much trying to channel the look and feel of Apocalypse Now (the brilliant Vietnam war epic which takes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as its source material and then embellishes it with... almost everything else in the movie). I can see the temptation of selling the movie in this way... this film is set in 1973 when the Vietnam war ended and there are a lot of military helicopters and loud late 1960s/early 1970s rock songs blaring out as diegetic music on the soundtrack. That’s about where the similarities end here though... John C. Reilly is not channeling Dennis Hopper’s character from Coppola’s classic movie and Kong himself is certainly no Kurtz.

This movie does its own thing and, it does it very well, it has to be said.

It looks great, for a start. It’s also big and loud and has a very fast pace to it. This is not a film about bringing Kong back from Skull Island, either. You won’t see any rampages through the concrete jungle of New york in this movie. As the title implies, the majority of this film takes place on Kong’s home turf and the motivations that drive the characters are a little different too. There’s also a great cast which should have tipped me off, from just the quality of the actors involved here, that this movie was worth a look. You have John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and the aforementioned John C. Reilly, to name just a few. And the way certain people are introduced into the story and allowed to develop a little before being thrown together, albeit quite quickly, is a wonderful example of character depth through brevity captured on film. Also, that whole backlash against Brie Larson’s character when the first images were released on the internet last year is totally unfounded. She may be fleshed in quick but she’s a very strong character, without being an in your face, kick-ass femme fatale and I really appreciated her inclusion as a photojournalist on this one.

If you want to look for parallels to the original King Kong, you could say the character played by John Goodman is a very distant cypher of the Robert Armstrong character and this is further enhanced by the costume design for him... but he’s not that close a comparison and neither are Hiddleston and Larson close comparisons to Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray either, for that matter. That being said, Larson’s Mason Weaver character does have a special relationship with Kong in this movie but it’s handled slightly differently while still, at some moments, being totally poignant... so I was really pleased with how this turned out.

Kong himself, actually, is great work and he reminds me much more of the 1933 Kong, despite being about six time taller and the audience will probably find an emotional connection with him (or at least this audience member did). He’s not just surrounded by a fantastic human cast either... there are some nasty species of wildlife on this island and some of them make the mythical lost spider pit sequence from the original King Kong sound tame in comparison. I was amazed this only got a 12A rating over here... I would have thought a 15 rating may have been more appropriate. There’s one sequence where a character played by Toby Kebbel (who also motion captures Kong for this movie too) sits down on a log and... ah, no way I’m spoiling this one for you but I honestly didn’t see that one coming.

A minor criticism would be in some of the scripting. It would be true to say that this film belongs to the ‘Person A says there’s absolutely no way he’s doing [insert appropriate stupid thing]... cut to a shot of Person A then doing the aforementioned stupid thing’ school of film-making and I did face palm at that cringeworthy point in the movie. While other parts of the screenplay seem quite cliché-free and tight. Almost like there’s a clear division noticeable between the multiple writers of this thing. However, like I said, a minor criticism.

I’d heard bad reports about Henry Jackman’s score to the film but, heck, I certainly don’t know why. Not only is it a good match for the monster mayhem in the movie but it’s also pretty exciting stuff. Granted it’s no Max Steiner Kong score... or even Akira Ifikube or John Barry... but it’s pretty cool and I’m suitably angry that I can’t listen to it away from the movie as, so far, there’s only a download version available. Let’s all hope that Watertower Music comes to their senses soon and release a proper CD into the wild. I really want to get this one.

From it’s opening logo audio homage to the original movie which, it turns out, dovetails nicely into an opening sequence set in 1944 (which almost plays out like a mini version of John Boorman’s Hell In The Pacific) through to a truly exciting post-credits sequence (which is supposed to set the movie up as a prequel to a big movie which came out a few years ago but which, given the characters involved in this 'must see' end sequence, really feels more like it would only work as a reboot when we get to the timeline of the next movie), Kong - Skull Island constantly demonstrates that it’s a truly entertaining blockbuster movie. I really can’t recommend this film enough to anyone who loves monster movies and Kong in particular. Don’t miss seeing this spectacle at the cinema or you might just regret it. And like I implied just now, stay past the end credits if you want to see a big hint at where the next film in the franchise is going. I can’t wait. 

King Kong

Kong At Heart

King Kong
USA 1933
Directed by Merian C. Cooper and  Ernest B. Schoedsack
RKO Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B
(FOPP Records Exclusive)

I must have been five or six years old, back in the early 1970s, when my father announced that a film he’d been telling me about all through my infancy, King Kong, was getting a rare transmission on TV by the BBC very late one night at the weekend (in those days, you had to wait several years for a film to be repeated on TV again). The deal was this: If I promised to go to sleep, my dad would bring the small, portable, black & white TV we had up to my parents bedroom and he would wake me just before it started. Then I could clamber into the bed between my parents and watch the movie... and that’s what happened. My parents did this and promptly went to sleep again, either side of me, with my bleary eyed dad telling me to shake him awake when Kong started climbing the Empire State Building. Which, of course, I did... and it’s long been remembered in my family, that enthusiastic cry in the middle of the night of “Quick! Wake up! He’s climbing the..” etc.

King Kong was a film which stuck with me all my life. I even went to the cinema at the Angel, Edmonton, a few years later, for the Dino De Laurentis remake. My parents and I all left the cinema scratching our heads as to why there were no jet planes in that version like the posters depicted (and as seen clutched in my hand in the form of a tie-in, rubber King Kong). The De Laurentis version, though, is for another review sometime... and it wasn’t all that good anyhow. However, the 1933 original was, and still is, a classic... and I try and watch it every few years to remind myself how great it is. Something I’ve been neglecting to do over the last 7 years as I write this blog. But with the exclusive Fopp Records UK Blu Ray just released, presumably to tie in with the arrival of Kong: Skull Island in cinemas today (see my review next week), it seemed like it was time to revisit it again.

I could probably write half a book on this picture but, since there are already several books out there on the subject, I won’t go into too much detail in this review and just treat it like I would any other movie... with a certain amount of brevity.

The 1933 King Kong, if you’ve really never seen it before, is a truly great movie. It stars Bruce Cabot as Driscoll - the romantic male lead (of sorts), Robert Armstrong as the enthusiastic and foolhardy wildlife director Carl Denham (based, I believe, on uncredited director Meriam C. Cooper himself) and, billed above them both, Fay Wray as Ann Darrow, destined to be the ‘bride of Kong’, as Denham would have it. Over a year in the making and ahead of its time, it is also thought to be responsible for saving RKO pictures from bankruptcy, such was the box office take on this thing.

The story sets Driscoll, Denham and the lovely Ann Darrow on a voyage of mystery to Skull Island, following a “funny little map” Denham got from a Norwegian seaman depicting uncharted territory, so he can make the greatest natural history documentary ever... once he’s discovered the secret of the legend of ‘Kong’. When they arrive and blonde haired Ann is kidnapped by the natives to be a sacrificial offering for Kong, they soon discover that the secret is he’s a 50ft giant ape (actually, the height varies throughout the film depending on the models used and trying to pin down a specific size is... problematic at best). Kong snatches Ann so Driscoll, Denham and a group of highly expendable sailors go after them, fighting off the prehistoric wildlife which somehow still lives and prospers on the island. Then, when Driscoll rescues Ann and inadvertently lures Kong back with them, Denham knocks him out with gas bombs and they take Kong back to New York to be a money spinning attraction. Fans of Doc Savage may like to pause and remember that, according to Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Doc actually invented those gas bombs (And if you want to read about another, more personal encounter between The Man Of Bronze and Kong then you might like this review here).

Of course, once Kong is returned to New York the flashbulbs from the cameras of the press cause him to break his bonds and chaos ensues. I won’t elaborate on the ending, just in case you’ve not seen it, but there’s always a lot of sympathy for Kong and audiences have been feeling sorry for the poor creature ever since the first previews. Actually, in an attempt to make the character even more sympathetic, once the studios realised just how upset the paying public were about what happens to Kong in the last reel, the subsequent cinema re-releases had the scenes of Kong eating and trampling people, for the most part, removed from the cut (from about 1934 onwards, is my understanding) until they were finally restored to the prints sometime in the 1980s or 90s (I forget which, sorry).

I remember watching it around 15 or so years ago and noticing something about one of the shots of the sailors running through the jungle. And this is a warning to all of you kids who fear getting old because... I can’t quite remember what it was exactly I spotted, even though I only watched it again the other day and couldn’t catch it this time around on the new Warner Blu Ray. However, I’m pretty sure there’s evidence actually within the film itself to prove the existence of a scene which was famously, if you believe the stories,  excised from the movie after the very first premiere screening. I’m sure there’s a place where the continuity doesn’t quite make sense and, also, there is a bit of a linger on an empty composition... as if the shot has been deliberately truncated before something specific happened in it.

Of course, the scene I’m talking about is the legendary, some would say fabled, lost spider pit scene. The story goes that, in the film up until and including the preview/premier screening, there is a scene somewhere on Skull Island where some of the sailors fall into a pit (possibly at the aftermath of the log sequence but I’m not so convinced of that) and they are eaten by giant spiders. Apparently the scene was so horrifying that it was all the audience were talking about from that point on and it stopped the movie dead (in some accounts the story goes that the audience were laughing at it because the bulging eyes of the spiders looked so ridiculous but... take your pick, the result is the same). The footage was removed (if you believe from all the circumstantial evidence, like me, that it did, indeed, exist) and has never been seen again.

Will it ever turn up? Well if you’d have asked me 8 years ago then I would have said there’s no way we’ll ever see it. Then something wonderful happened and somebody found the rest of the footage, more or less, of the long lost, complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis... something I never expected to hear of in my lifetime (and you can read that review here). So, unlikely as it is that we will ever get to see the lost Spider Pit sequence (other than in Peter Jackson’s reconstruction he attempted for a special feature on a previous DVD of this thing... which I believe is ported on this new version somewhere), I’m not ruling it out completely. Movie miracles do happen and I even hear there’s rumour a print of London After Midnight might have turned up somewhere (which, again, I’ll take with a pinch of salt until I actually see it).

One of the things which is really good about Kong is the special effects work supervised by Willis O’ Brien. I believe famous stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen was an apprentice to this man at some point in his life but, even though I love Harryhausen’s work dearly, I feel the stuff achieved in this 1933 version of King Kong is far greater, at least in terms of model work. The way the animators looked at how an ape would behave is quite amazing and this was all built into Kong’s personality. For example, when he fights a Tyrannosaurus Rex and breaks it’s jaw, he plays with the broken jaw until he’s satisfied it’s dead... some good ape behaviour observation there. The dinosaurs in this, however, are not quite as good, to my mind, as the ones in Willis O’ Brien’s work on the 1925 silent film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyles first Professor Challenger story, The Lost World. In that one, you can actually see the saliva dripping from the jaws of the giant reptiles and they seem, just a little bit more realistic than the ones seen eight years later in Kong. Although, that being said, the ones in Kong are still pretty great.

One of the things the animators couldn’t get away from was leaving their mark on the model Kong. That is to say, often you will see his fur moving all over the place as if the wind is ruffling it from several directions all at once. This is because as each frame was shot, the animators had to grab the model somewhere and left their finger marks in the soft fur. Personally, I think this is great because it really shows the personal touch on the thing. You're not going to mistake this stuff for CGI anytime soon.

There’s not quite as much rear projection work or superimposed opticals in this movie as you might think either... although for the longest time I’d always assumed most of it was done this way. However, some of the stuff where the models and live action match up is so good and, now I know how it’s done it all makes perfect sense why it seems so, well, seamless. What it is for some of the time is that the live action stuff is seen in what appears to be a little, cordoned off area away from the rest of the screen, like in the entrance of a cave or under vegetation etc. However, rather than try to superimpose the live action over the top of it, the animators did something very clever. They processed the film out as prints the right size to go against the models, however many sheets per frame, to get the right speed against the models. And then the paper was placed on as part of the model shoot and the print changed every time the models were moved. So the live footage is a hard copy in front of the camera being used in exactly the same way that a child may draw a stick figure in the corner pages of a sketch book and then use it as a flick book. It’s clever stuff and it completely fooled me, I have to say. Of course, you also have the tell tale moments where a live action person will crawl behind a foreground object like a rock or a tree and then emerge from the other side as a puppet so Kong can grab them or, you know, a dinosaur could eat them... but this kind of spotting game is also a fun way to pass the film.

The other great technical accomplishment and, if movie legend is correct, a bit of a game changer... is Max Steiner’s original score, which has been credited many times with returning film score music to film. Silent movies had many scores especially composed for them and sent to theatres as an accompaniment but, when talkies came out from 1927 and onwards, film music died a death because directors assumed that the music would seem too unnatural to accompany films that had speech and sound effects. Any music from that point on in talkies, up until this movie (and a couple of others, I'll get there in a minute), had to be seen as an on-screen source, like a radio, grammophone or band playing in a room, to justify its presence. However, Steiners score to King Kong, which uses lots of 'Mickey Mousing' in its genetic make-up (that’s where the musical expression is emphasised to 'ape' the actions and incidents on screen, in various ways), not to mention also scoring atmosphere and making musical metaphors when required, is a phenomenal piece of work and its the reason why many/all film studios started using a musical score in their films... once it had been proved it could be done.

Of course, saying that, Steiner also wrote a score for a film which both Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong were simultaneously shooting on the same sets as Kong during the evenings, The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds Of Zaroff) and, presumably because Kong took over a year to finish - and no wonder with all those effects shots - The Most Dangerous Game hit cinemas the year before. So I’ve always wondered why it’s King Kong that has always been the one which people took note of in this regard. Although... well I guess it’s because it was such a big picture to make the point on. I’m pretty sure, if I recall correctly, that the 1932 Universal movie The Mummy had a little bit of underscore at the opening of the film too but, like I said, it’s Kong that seemed to do the trick in regards to music. Johnny Williams even puts a little homage to Steiner’s score to this in a scene in his score for the second Jurassic Park film, The Lost World, although that dinosaur book and film bears no relationship to the original dinosaur book and film (although I’m absolutely certain writer Michael Crichton named his novel in homage to Conan Doyle’s literary work).

Regarding this new release. I was hoping to paraphrase Carl Denham and say “They’ll have to think of a lot of new adjectives when I get back” from watching this new Blu Ray transfer but the film still seems a little grainy to me and I don’t think it has any new extras which weren’t on the previous DVD release of the movie. This makes me wonder if Warner Bros, a studio which is not exactly known for spending any money on anything, have maybe just gone and ported over their previous transfer from DVD rather than shell out for a brand new remaster. I have no idea to be honest. That being said, I could certainly tell that the leading actress wasn’t wearing a bra in a lot of her shots from this edition so... yeah, it’s not a bad job at all.

And there you have it. I’m not going to rattle on about this release anymore because... well, I’d be here all day. I’m pretty sure that if you are in any way a fan of cinema then you would have almost certainly seen the original 1933 movie. If not... you really should rectify that immediately. There’s a reason why this movie is so worshipped in the film community and there’s a reason why various film makers try to either periodically remake it or use the central character to their own ends in a spin off project. Take a trip to Skull Island and give the original 1933 version of King Kong a look. It’s a journey you won’t regret.