Rating Systems and That Darned Third Rule

I'm taking some time out of my busy Kong schedule to conclude the year, and my first three months of blogging, with a couple of features that I promised to post, but have thus far failed to fulfill. This would be the explanation of my #9 Ratings System, and the grand unveiling of the third of my Movie Attendance Mottos.

THE #9 RATINGS SYSTEM

I find that 4-and-5 numbered ratings systems, however starred, ticketed, monkeyed, breasted or whatever gimmick you might wish to employ to display it, are too truncated for my purposes. Too tight. I need room to spread out. The other standby is the #10 system, but I find that slightly too, too long. Roger Ebert goes with a #2 system on his show, thumbs up or thumbs down, but in his column he resorts to a 4 star system, which is actually a #7 system once you count his 1/2 ratings. I chose to roll with a system based on 9, with the list broken into three sections:

9: Classic

8: Excellent

7: Very Good

6: Good (Above Average)

5: Average

4: Bad (Below Average)

3: Very Bad

2: Bordering on Nauseating

1: Excruciatingly Awful

The center of this list is just that: it centers everything that goes on in the system. My assumption is that the bulk of films that are released are not actually good or even bad, but simply average. Average films for a populace that accepts mediocrity as a critical vanguard. It is where Chris Columbus films go to die, it is where 18-kid family movies can rest in pieces, and it is where the bulk of Julia Roberts' and Sandra Bullock's careers can gather dust for all eternity. (I say "the bulk" of their careers, for they do have good films on their resumes.) The worst place that a film can land on this list is not at #1, "Excruciatingly Awful" No, it is its being relegated to the middle of this list, the merely "Average" slot, for my next assumption is that if a film is actually bad, then there must be a certain level of interest in it. Not so with the average films; to me, the worst cinematic crime that a filmmaker can perpetrate on his audience is lulling them into numbing acceptance of subpar material. Hey, Hamlet, are you drilling for oil? No? Then why don't you stop boring?

That leaves 4 slots up, and 4 slots down; up for excellence, down for putrescence. On the low end of the scale, it might shock you to find out that a certain renowned "Bad Film" does not reside at the bottom of my ratings well. The truth of the matter is that Plan 9 From Outer Space is not the Worst Film of All Time. There are films of far greater incompetence out there, and despite what you may have been lead to believe over the years, Ed Wood did possess a certain rebel ingenuity in producing his pictures. They may seem haphazardly made, and they were, often on the fly, and it is the sheer gall and chutzpah that he used which comprise the reasons why I actually admire him. More filmmakers should be possessed of the sheer drive that he had to complete his poverty row affairs. So, Plan 9 does not get a 1 on my list; I actually rate it about a 3. It is a very bad film, but it is quite endearing in its naïveté, and there are far worse films to have to endure. (Manos: Hands of Fate is certainly one of them. I fully agree with MST3K's and EW's assessments.)

As for the good ratings slots, they are easy to figure out, but I must say that I have an awfully hard time letting a film make the jump to "Classic" status. Even films generally considered to be classics will often get short shrift at my hands, and even many films that I number amongst my favorites do not end up in that hallowed category.

I am still working out some of the details of the list, and am still undergoing a slow and monotonous renovation of my ratings on IMDB to fit its parameters. Anytime I see a picture anew, I reevaluate my rating to make sure that it is properly placed, and as I continue to list films on my sporadically posted Recently Rated Movies feature, all of the detailed films will have been changed or added to IMDB prior to posting (you may access my IMDB ratings but clicking on the link on the side of this page).

THE MOVIE ATTENDANCE MOTTOS

I had previously announced two of my Movie Attendance Mottos in a post over two months ago, and mentioned them only at that time because they pertained to the subject at hand. The third had not come into play with that subject. It is now time that I laid out all three together:

1. I Will See Any Movie At Least Once.2. I Will See Any Movie at Any Time (Barring Previous Engagement or Deathly Illness).3. I Must See A Film First Before Critiquing It.

Pretty basic summation of what keeps my movie-watching engine running. The first movie mainly makes me watch any movie that I am confronted with, whether buddies want to check out the latest action flick, or a niece wants me to watch a Hilary Duff movie with her. Rather than barring my eyes from different genres, styles, and actors (whether I actually have an interest in their work or not), it keeps things fresh and keeps me up on new trends in the cinema. It also means that I am more apt to check out that most likely crappy film that I pass on Sci-Fi or USA, but the truth is, you never know what you will discover until you actually check something out. Especially things off of your well-beaten path.

The second rule means that I won't sneak out of showings of films at odd times when my friends are going, even if I don't really want to see a certain film. It's the "Well, why the hell not?" rule. I take a certain measure of pride in following through on this rule, and I have to be truly in pain to not go. (Sometimes, in the case of the first time I saw the modern version of The Mummy, I was in intense pain but jammed a bunch of prescribed painkillers down my throat and went anyway. When I saw the picture again a couple months later, I realized that I had been lucky to have slept through most of it the first time, and longed to have some of those painkillers back in my pocket.)

The third and last rule stemmed from a life spent ragging on my co-workers' choices of reading material: Danielle Steel, Harlequin romances, Harold Robbins, Nora Roberts, The Destroyer and Executioner serials, Patrick MacManus' outdoors larf-fests, and V.C. Andrews' (or rather, her ghostwriters') inexplicably popular incest novels. I read examples, sometimes more than one, of all these series or writers in a quest to ascertain exactly why they were all so popular, and especially with people that I had to deal with on a daily basis. A little research helped me understand the earthlings a little better, and supplied me with ample ammunition for future attacks on character and taste (if needed). (For the record, Nora Roberts is a pretty damn good writer, MacManus is intermittently amusing, and the Destroyer novels were more fun than I like to admit to having had reading them. The rest can suck it.) I eventually found my attacking the filmic choices of others to run counter to what I applied to literature, so I simply adapted that rule and added it to my list.

And there you have it...

Well, What'dya Know! A Little Kong! [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 8]

[Kong crazy? Read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4, Pt. 5, Pt. 6 and Pt. 7 too!]

My copy on VHS.

The general consensus regarding sequels is that they are invariably disappointing. The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather Part 2 are generally considered by most critics of note as being those rare exceptions, actually not just equaling their progenitors, but also slyly improving on their respective formulae in many ways.

Such is not the case with The Son of Kong, the quickie buck-grabber that RKO squatted out late in 1933 after Baby Kong's Big Daddy took the world for the biggest cinematic thrill ride yet seen at that point in history. It rides the usual course of sequels, especially those that attempt to follow the successful first film too quickly to grab those too appealing consumer dollars. The original King Kong took a couple years to plan and produce, so it is not surprising that a followup jammed into theatres only a few months later was not going to fulfill the promise of the first one.

The only real problem with this go-around is that The Son of Kong is just not King Kong. That's it. There is nothing overtly terrible about the film. It has the same producers, the same special effects team, and much of the same crew. The pedigree is the same, but The Son of Kong simply fails to fill the insanely huge footprints that were left in its predecessor's wake. The film itself is exactly a half hour shorter than King Kong, and because of this brevity, along with the slow build getting back to Skull Island, the main characters, and the viewers, are practically off the island as quickly as they arrived on it. And not by choice, as the film also leads to a sad and memorable ending, but one which shows off the cheapness with which the project was approached from the beginning. Producer and Kong co-creator Merian C. Cooper had little input in the production whatsoever, leaving the work almost solely to original co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack and stop-motion wizard Willis O'Brien, and with a much smaller budget to boot.

What is right with the film? The expected elements are there: Robert Armstrong is back as a now remorseful Carl Denham, finally taking the blame on himself for the elder Kong's death, as he should. (C'mon, Carl! I thought "'twas Beauty killed the Beast!" You really must have been in denial at the end of King Kong.) O'Brien's effects work is still impressive, if a bit short-cutted in a few scenes due to budget and time restrictions; Frank Reicher makes a welcome return as the loyal Captain Englehorn; and Victor Wong also shows up again as Charlie the Chinese cook, in an expanded role this time, with a good amount of fractured dialogue that should create expectedly nervous results for the modern viewer.

Due to a lack of Fay Wray, the Betty Boop-ish Helen Mack fills in as the cutie pie ingenue, who this time only has to befriend a much smaller (just twelve ft.) albino "baby" gorilla who is the supposed progeny of Kong. Where's is Kong's original intended mate in this film? Was Ann Darrow simply a fling, or are there nine months of post-NYC "outtakes" hidden somewhere? Mack also has to play love interest to Denham, something that wasn't even a consideration with Wray in the original film. The romance between Mack and Armstrong, though, is kept low-key and sweet, and adds to the film's aura of being a mere child's entertainment. Such a mood is in the same tone as the violence on the island, where the fights between the young Kong Jr. and Skull Island's monstrous denizens is quite as savage as the battles his father engaged in for the original.

The Son of Kong does have considerable, early '30s atmosphere, and for a good while in my youth, this was enough to convince me of its worthiness as a film. The low-rent vaudeville scenes at the beginning of the film almost seem like they were cut out of Freaks (which is a plus), and the murderous drunkard bastard of a villain is perfectly hissable and deserves his fate. While there is much less screen time, the battle scenes between little Kong and his fellow stop-motion opponents come one right after the other, which means the film moves pretty quickly and well through its final two-thirds. All of this appealed to me greatly in the summer of '77 when I first saw The Son of Kong as part of that afternoon monster matinee slot that I tuned into every weekday. Thanks to Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, I knew of the existence of The Son of Kong, but never thought I would get a chance to see it. Overall, the film is not a bad entertainment at all, and I quite like it.

It is just not Kong. No matter how many times it is attempted by various parties to equal that original film, or how they try to modernize the effects, costumes, acting, and everything, they all fail to match it. While I greatly enjoyed the new Peter Jackson version, and it has much that is of a high excellence, it is still a remake. While I was watching it, and even while loving most of what I was seeing, I was always aware that my feelings in watching it would be the same as when I watch The Son of Kong. That is, there would always be a sense that, as soon as I finished watching this other version, that I would probably have to return to the original to capture that full feeling when I saw it as a kid.

The Ballad of Kong is over... for now.

My Corns Always Hurt When They're Near A Monster! [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 7]

[Want more Kong? Read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4, Pt. 5, and Pt. 6 first!]

Let's get this straight right from the beginning: Even in a flat-out test of pure strength, Godzilla is going to nail King Kong to the wall. Godzilla, even in his clownish hero persona of the late '60s-early '70s, is still going to clean the clock with the mighty Kong. Godzilla, even at the lowest estimates of his height (say around 200') is still several times bigger than the true Kong, who ranges from 25 to 50 feet, depending on the scene in which he appears.

Remember, Godzilla is sung about in the theme song to the '70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series as being "40 stories high". Using ten feet as an average for a story in a building, that's 400 feet tall right there, people. Even at half that size, Godzilla can easily step on Kong and then scrape him off his foot onto Mt. Fuji, if he chose, and I haven't even begun to factor in his radioactive breath, which is far more effective in his current incarnation. [Editor's note: "current incarnation" referred to his status as of 2005. The most recent Godzilla film was Godzilla: Final Wars, where the Big G full-on blasts the American 'Zilla from 1998 into the Sydney Opera House in about 30 seconds of screen time. In that film, Godzilla kicked major ass.]

But, the Kong that Toho rented from RKO in the '60s was a different breed of cat... er, ape. He suddenly equaled Big G in height and strength, and mostly shrugged off the fiery blasts from the Japanese King of the Monsters. (Kong's arm catches on fire briefly at one point, which seems to bother him, but then he picks up the fight again.) I was shocked by this behavior when I saw the film not long after first watching the original Kong fall off the Empire State Building. In my head, Kong was dead, and then suddenly there was this ill-suited, scruffy imposter calling himself King Kong and fighting a giant octopod on a South Seas island, and eventually careening in and out of battles with the Big Green Guy around Tokyo. Even then, I noticed the decided lack of quality in the Toho version when measured against the RKO classic, and was especially disappointed in the use of the standard man-in-a-suit for Kong, rather than the far more impressive use of stop-motion animation. (I was already used to Godzilla being a guy in a suit; it was, and is, part of the charm of the character.)

No, this was not my Kong. This one was the same size as Godzilla! I already knew Godzilla to be of unimaginable proportions (around 150 feet tall in the '60s films), and suddenly the big ape that still had to climb laboriously up the Empire State Building was now going to be over a tenth of the size of it? To be sure, there is a plotline about some berries on Kong's island (that is never called Skull Island, so perhaps he is a further-removed offshoot of the species?) that allow the creatures to devour them to grow to monstrous sizes. Maybe this Kong was once normal Kong-sized and ate enough berries to be Godzilla-sized? (The berries also conveniently cause Kong to fall asleep, thus providing a plot device with which to transport the beast.) It also causes Kong to look constantly like he just woke up from a three-night bender.

Who designed me? Idiots...

Whatever the cause for his inflation, this suited version of King Kong battles Godzilla to what most Americans would consider to be a clear victory for the big gorilla, as he is the only one seen swimming off at film's end. There is no sign of the giant green monster at all across the surface of the ocean's waters. Of course, Godzilla is famously amphibious, and can walk or swim underwater without coming up for air for an amazingly long time, so to forget this point in order to declare a sure victory for the fuzzy primate with perpetual bedhead is foolish at best.

I had two copies of KKvG on VHS,
including this version.

For much of my life, I and much of the western world was under the belief that there were separately filmed outcomes to the battle for the American and Japanese markets, owing to Kong somehow being considered representative of America, and thus Americans would only accept an ending where Kong was the winner. While it is probably because the original movie Kong was filmed by an American studio, and merely as simple as that, there are some people who take perverse pride in claiming pop cultural figures as being their own kith and kin. I have indeed met many a person who have seen this silly kaiju film and exacted a firm measure of patriotism from its conclusion. I say they only can claim this due to the fact that America KILLED Kong; after all, Americans capture, ship and enslave Kong to perform against his will, and then Americans KILL him when he misbehaves. Setting aside parallels of the slave trade that is one of this country's many great shames, the way I see it, Kong only represents our country because his trophy head sits prominently on a wall in America's National Man Cave. So, if you rabid knee-jerk patriots need an easy victory to salute because you think one movie monster "killed" another movie monster, then you have more problems than just being... well, you.

It doesn't matter. In the Japanese release of King Kong vs. Godzilla, we not only hear King Kong roar in supposed triumph as he swims away toward the horizon, but we also hear Godzilla's roar one more time. As for me, I'm taking no political sides in the King Kong vs. Godzilla debate, except to say that the Kong in the movie is not the Kong that I love and that Godzilla in the film is the Godzilla that I love. I absolutely declare the ending a draw. The Myth of Two Endings is just that: a myth. There were never two endings; just one big ambiguous earthquake-and-tidal-wave-causing fall into the ocean by two monstrous titans of pop culture. And whoever said you can't love them both? Not me, clearly.



Long Live the Kings...

[To be continued in Part 8...]

Recently Rated Movies #10: Before the Kiss, A Recap...

Before I got lost in the Happy Holidays Blizzard of Insanity, and before I got mentally trapped yet again on Skull Island for the last month or so, I had been regularly posting my movie ratings. I've also been bad about keeping notes on the films that I've been watching, so I probably have left a handful of titles out.

It has now been almost a month since my last batch of freshly viewed titles, so I will make this quick and painless. Which means that, for once, I will say very little. I did have things to elaborate on for many of these movies, but that will now have to wait for a later time.

All I know right now, is that "I want to be a producer!"

The List:
Bride and Prejudice (2004) - 7
Pride and Prejudice (2005) - 7
King Kong (1933) (DVD) - 9
Son of Kong (1933) (DVD) - 6
Mighty Joe Young (1949) (DVD) - 8
Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) (Sundance) - 5
The Hulk (2003) (Sci-Fi) - 4
Millions (2005) (DVD) - 7
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) - 7
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982) (TCM) - 7
All of Me (1984) (TCM) - 7
FM (1978) (IFC) - 5
Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Movie (1998) (Sundance) - 6
Melvin and Howard (1980) (IFC) - 6
King Kong (2005) - 8
Up in Arms (1944) (TCM) - 5
The Kid From Brooklyn (1946) (TCM) - 6
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) (TCM) - 8
Kong of Atlantis (2004) (ToonDisney) - 4
A Song Is Born (1948) (TCM) - 6
The Producers (2005) - 7

Video Kong the Second [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 6]

[Did you know this is part of a series? Read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4 and Pt. 5 first!]

About a year after I finally acquired a prerecorded version of the 1933 King Kong on videotape, I ran into a second version, this time from a company called Nostalgia Merchant. As far as I can tell, a lot of Republic and RKO films came out under this label, and through the 1980s, I ended up with many of their tapes, including the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Thing From Another World, Mighty Joe Young, Son of Kong, the Randolph Scott version of The Last of the Mohicans, Invaders from Mars, and my very first copy of Citizen Kane.

It certainly wasn't the cover of this second copy that sold it to me. The cover was far more garishly colored than my RKO Classics tape; in fact, the cover beheld a colorization of the classic image of Kong's feet gripping the top of the Empire State Building, biplane in hand as he makes his last stand against any human that doesn't look and smell like the beauteous Fay Wray. I believe it was the muddy colors of the cover that provided the chief warning to me of how the proposed colorized Ted Turner version of King Kong would most likely look once it was threatened to be unleashed upon mankind.

That much-discussed issue of the day was looming in the near future, but for the moment I had a decision to make regarding a second edition of Kong. It was actually a no-brainer, and the decision was made for me by one simple declaration on the video's cover: "THE ORIGINAL UNCUT VERSION." My RKO tape only said "ORIGINAL STUDIO EDITION," and if you know me at all, you would realize that there is a world of difference in those statements, even if the running time has remained the same on every edition of Kong that I have ever owned (100 minutes). No, I had to make sure that there wasn't a single scene that I was missing, and thus I purchased a second edition of the movie.

Talking about picture quality differences on separate editions of videotapes is something that I am not going to get into, as I was always at the mercy in those days of whatever televisions and decks that I could either cheaply afford or that were given to me. To elaborate on it would be fruitless, as I would always run this VCR or that into the ground at a fantastically high rate due to my huge consumption of film viewings. I went through VCRs like candy, if indeed I had ever gone through candy like that. I cannot recall if I ever found a difference between the two tapes, because both had the restored scenes that I was not privy to when I viewed the film as a youth: mainly many of the more supposedly "racist" or "shocking" shots from when Kong goes apeshit on the native village, along with a handful of other minor scene outtakes.

What this led me to discover was that I wasn't so much interested in finding the best quality Kong cut, but rather had turned into a minor Kong collector. So, it was also a no-brainer when the frightening Ted Turner brought out his first Kong edition in 1988. Luckily for me, it was not the much-feared colorized version, but a tape which declared boldly on the cover: "NEW ARCHIVAL VERSION. PRODUCED FROM A ONE-OF-A-KIND MASTER PRINT. IMPROVED FOOTAGE! HI-FI-STEREO! STATE-OF-THE-ART AUDIO!" Roll out the hyperbole carpet, why don't ya, Teddy Boy! Sheesh!

I said that I wouldn't discuss individual tape differences, and I will continue to hold to that statement. But this tape did somehow look better than the previous ones, though that could have been due to my switch to a much larger and better television, VCR, and stereo system at the exact same time that the Turner tape was released. As a matter of fact, this edition of Kong was the inaugural tape for my new system, "Hi-Fi-Stereo" and "State-of-the-Art Audio" included. My memory of this tape is tainted by that experience, and while I still possess both it and the RKO Classics version, my Nostalgia Merchant copy somehow has gotten misplaced over the years, so I am unable to run a comparison (not that I would now that I finally have the DVD release). [Note: The Nostalgia Merchant image of King Kong at the top of this page was found on Ebay; the other NM covers are my actual copies.]

By the time I had three separate copies of Kong, I had to make a decision. My collection was already taking up so much room I had little space left for new titles. It was either continue on collecting new editions, or call it quits. Calling it "good" was exactly what I did: even when Turner came out with a 60th Anniversary Edition in 1993, I resisted temptation (though it was really, really hard). No matter how much you love a movie, you have to draw a line. Three copies of any movie is more than enough for me.

As for that apocalypse-bringing colorized version? I saw it one afternoon on WTBS, Turner's famous Atlanta station, and it was OK. It was strange seeing it all dressed up in oddball shades, but the argument that is often used against colorization, that of interference with the filmmakers' decision to film it in either black-and-white or color, never seemed to be an issue with Kong. Merian C. Cooper was one of the earliest proponents of the Technicolor process, and it was his interest in its development that convinced Selznick to film Gone With the Wind in color. So, certainly Cooper would have relished the chance to film Kong in full color if it were a viable option at the time, which it really wasn't in 1933. Color films were relatively rare at that time. (As opposed to Casablanca, which it would have been a crime to colorize though Turner kept threatening to do so, as it was made in 1942, had a director -- Michael Curtiz -- who had already made a few color films, and was clearly designed to be filmed in black-and-white).

(I still believe Turner should do time for even considering colorizing Casablanca. Or at least for owning the Atlanta Braves...)

[To be continued in Part 7...]

Video Kong the First [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 5]

[Stop! Have you read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3 or Pt. 4? Well, you should...]

After the summer of 1977 and the couple of summers that followed, where I saw it regularly a couple of times a year, I only ran into King Kong sporadically after that. Odd televised airings of the movie on Saturday afternoons or late night here and there. But with the addition of cable television to my life, I would search constantly for a viewing of the movie, and finally captured the great beast on videotape when I recorded a WTBS airing. This tape became like unto a holy object for me for the next few years, as poor a quality as it happened to be, and I cherished it wholeheartedly. That is, I did until 1985.

I had started out working in the Hallmark warehouse of a news agency in Alaska (or rather, the news agency in Alaska, and in a moment of superlative marketing clarity, such a business happened to be named the Alaska News Agency). Actually, I worked for the Book Cache, a chain of stores that were owned by the same people who owned ANA (and which would eventually, through a morass of corporate gobbledygook which I don't wish to go into any further than I have, sadly go the way of the dodo). Hallmark held a large presence in the bookstores, but I had recently been swept into a new position: that of the Hardback Returns Manager. The title was B.S. though; since there was only one person in the department for 98% of the time, it wasn't really a management position, unless you count the sometime rather unruly stacks of books, which required supreme management on my part.

While I still worked in the Hallmark warehouse, we had started carrying two series of cheap VHS tape lines. The first line was from a company called Outlet Book Company, who then and now specialized in bargain books. I did not know it at the time, but the movies were what is known as public domain titles, ranging from Chaney's Phantom of the Opera to Lugosi and the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla to Joan Crawford in Rain to Charles Laughton in The Beachcomber. The quality proved to be sometimes substandard, but such is the way with public domain movies. You get what you don't pay for... the tapes were cheap because the movies were cheap. The boxes looked all the same, and comprised of oversized plastic shells that popped loud when you unstuck the plastic from each side. The design of the covers only showed titles on the front and descriptions with a brief cast listing on the back, and were gray and generic.

The second installment of movies, a few months later, came from another bargain book specialty company called Crown, which, while I didn't know it then, actually owned Outlet. (And eventually, Random House would purchase Crown, and thus Outlet, and make it a subsidiary in 1988.) So, really, this was a line within a line. Once again, the movies were still public domain, but at least had actual pictures from the movie on the cover, and had morphed into the size and shape that nearly all VHS tapes had taken on by that point: little video rectangles, compact and neat. The boxes were not quite as generic as the Outlet ones, thanks to the covers having a variety of colors, though the pictures used on them were in black and white. It looks pretty silly now, but I actually found the somewhat "pop art" aesthetic pleasing to the eye.

Many of the titles were the same as with the initial Outlet batch, but there were some surprises: Walk in the Sun stood out for me. Best of all on this go-around though, there was not only a few early English Hitchcock thrillers, none of which I had seen yet, but also a copy of Godzilla vs. Megalon (without Belushi, I was sad to discover, but dubbed in English... though since I saw it initially on TV this way, it was not a problem).

We had some success with these runs of videos, and the decision was made to venture into carrying a larger selection of videotapes in our stores. When the studios started concentrating on retail sales of videotapes, moving beyond the rental market, there were no Best Buy or Suncoast-type stores yet in our state. The rental stores were slow to pick up on the first-run sales market, but we dove into it wholeheartedly at our stores. We made most of our sales on first release titles like when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial first came out on video. We would several hundreds of copies of those titles in a very short amount of time. But at some of our bigger stores, we carried around a hundred titles or so (not counting local Alaskan videos), finding out which movie titles sold regularly, and restocked them from our warehouse. 

As a side gig to my regular work, because I was the movie buff in the building, I was given control over the warehouse stock for a period. I would eventually become the buyer, along with audiocassettes, in a very short time. While she didn't want me to go crazy, I was given almost free rein by my boss to order whatever I felt we should carry. This was all around 1985. And RKO had just released King Kong onto video.

Of course, apart from getting my own copy, I just had to carry King Kong in our stores. When Paramount released a handful of Godzilla titles like Monster Zero and its ilk, I convinced my boss that we should carry them as an experiment. (They ending up selling pretty well for a couple of years.) But Kong was a no-brainer. We had to carry it. It was a bonafide, acclaimed classic and there was a lot of publicity about its release. Beyond wanting to get one for myself, I wanted the whole world to have access to getting their own copy, and felt strongly we should be selling it. 

The videocassette was proclaimed on the cover as the "Original Studio Edition," put out under RKO's "Film Classics Series," and was led with the famous shot of Kong on top of the Empire State Building facing the onslaught of the biplanes. On the back was the shot of Kong about to charge through the gates of the Skull Island wall. I don't know how many copies we sold, but we ended up carrying multiple editions of King Kong throughout the handful of years that I ran the video line for the Book Cache stores. Whatever changes in taste or preference our customers had in that time, I always made sure to keep the mighty Kong in stock. Kong wasn't cheap at first either. I think it leveled out around $19.95 eventually, but our initial retail price was around $39.95. At least, that is the price I recall from when we first carried it. And the price I paid... before my employee discount that is.

The important thing, though, is that I finally had a copy of Kong of my own that wasn't recorded at an atrociously fast speed, and that was supposedly duplicated from the finest archival print that could be found at the time. And I cherished that copy of King Kong for about...oh...a year.

[To be continued in Part 6 here...]

Yes, Jack! A Prehistoric Beast... Let's Kill It! [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 4]

[Before stomping on any further, read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, and Pt. 3 here...]

Getting back to the real Kong, once I managed, with great difficulty it seems, to sneak around the readily apparent charms of Fay Wray, there was still the matter of the dinosaurs, my raison d'être for wishing to view the original 1933 version of King Kong again in the first place. Besides seeing the original Kong three years earlier, I had filled the dinosaur void in my soul with other films featuring the prehistoric creatures. 

My first experience with dinosaurs on film was like to have been The Beast of Hollow Mountain, which I saw at the age of five and which served to solidify my dinosaur love. In the previous summer of 1976, I had discovered Ray Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi for the first time and found myself unable to function at all for a few weeks. At that time, I never really knew the connection between both of those films and Kong until much later (both Beast and Gwangi, which feature battles between cowboys in the Old West and dinosaurs, were derived from an unrealized story treatment by Willis O'Brien, the man who brought King Kong's creatures to glorious stop-motion life). I had also fallen in deep love with Godzilla by that point, mainly because of John Belushi, who introduced an NBC showing of Godzilla vs. Megalon in prime time by wearing the same Big G costume he had also used in a famous sketch on Saturday Night Live that season. Sure, Megalon is one of the lower entries in the entire Godzilla series, but we loved it all the same. (And still do...)

I poured my youthful energy and attention on practically every book on dinosaurs and paleontology that I could get my hands on, in a way that I really wished, in retrospect, I had reserved for school work. I had also spent every Saturday morning the previous couple of years devouring every single episode of Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost, which not only gave me plenty of stop motion dinosaur action, but also supplied me with the still frightening concept of humanoid reptilian hybrid Sleestaks.

I was, to put it mildly, dinosaur mad. It's true that I was also baseball mad, but once you pushed aside the piles of Baseball Digest magazine and the boxes of trading cards that I had collected, you would run into my array of Snap-Tite dinosaur models, with which I would recreate repeatedly a horrible battle between my Tyrannosaurus Rex and my Triceratops, flipping a coin to determine the outcome. Eventually, I would devise a dice system, much like my self-rigged baseball game, which would become the deciding factor in moves and attacks. I was sure that once I published my game, I was going to make a mint and the world would be mine. I also had a more advanced motorized model that I built of my all-time favorite dinosaur, the Ankylosaurus; more than one, in fact, because I built a second model to use in a diorama that I had built for school, using artwork based on Charles R. Knight.

On that summer afternoon in 1977 staring at the cathode tube, I found myself ashore on Skull Island, fresh with the flush of shipboard puppy love, ready to take on all comers in defense of the lovely Ann Darrow. At some ill-fated hour of the night, she was kidnapped from the Venture by the way-too-sneaky natives of the island, and I was the only crew member to have noticed it, but my cries of alarm from my deckchair are to no avail! Deaf to my pleas, my fellow shipmates don't notice the transgression until the sacrificial fires are already lit and the drums are rolling out their steady thrum-thrum-thrum as a call to the Mighty Kong. Our response is to hit the boats and rush to the village, but upon our arrival at the gate of the supposedly Kong-proof ancient and giant wall, it is too late to save Ann. She is whisked into the dense jungle with a fiercely roaring and enormous rush of fur and sinew, lost to the wilds of Skull Island. Frightened, we pursue nonetheless...

At this point in the film, despite my advance knowledge of what would be encountered on this trek, I had no idea how this return trip through the jungles of Skull Island would affect me for the remainder of my days. Kong seems to be a simple adventure: a ship, a girl, an unknown island, an awesome monster, a tragic end. But just like the 1939 The Wizard of Oz, the trip is backloaded with trick after trick after trick, image after image after image. The layman remembers these films as mere fantasies, but they are thick with entertainment, and made by craftsmen who knew exactly how to deliver that entertainment at a high level. And it is only natural for subjectivism to take over for the eager viewer and make them believe that maybe there is something else in this as well besides simple melodrama and heroics. For me, Skull Island, built on studio sets with creatures brought to life with magic-like puppetry, was alive like no place I had ever seen in a film. I sensed it the first time that I saw the film, I felt it even more on that second viewing three years later, and I still feel that way to this very day. To turn Gertrude Stein on her ear, that simple jungle rescue trek has so, so much "there there". There was so much subtext lurking for me in King Kong, beyond the obvious Freudianism of the title character and the racism inherent in jungle pictures that rely on encounters between native cultures and pearly white, trigger happy Americans.

It was Carl Denham and the crew of the Venture that proved it for me. Yes, the greatly oversized stegosaurus charges them early on in their search, and its attack and their reply could be construed as a case of kill or be killed, so I don't entirely fault them for their response. The thing that must be remembered when watching King Kong is that, while the film has themes that will play to the Ages, its dialogue and plotlines are fully indicative of its time: 1933. However groundbreaking the film may be in the area of action storytelling and special effects, it is rooted firmly in the cliché and attitudes that pervaded the movies (and culture in general) in 1933. The world was a much larger place then, and there were still many mysterious, unexplored regions to dream of at that time. Rambunctious adventurers and fearless explorers, then as now, were the heroes of the day, and sadly, big game hunters were much admired, too. And while Carl Denham is clearly cut from the "Bring 'Em Back Alive" mold, the "Shoot First, Ask Questions Later" attitude is the more apparent logic at work here.

Denham hasn't even seen his first dinosaur for more even ten seconds before he asks for a "gas bomb" to be handed to him. One of the crew has a box strapped to his back (marked "Gas Bombs," just so you are sure of where they are) that holds, judging from the size of the box, at least eight of the spherical grenades. When the stegosaurus charges, there is a hail of bullets from the crew, and then Denham hurls the bomb. The stegosaurus goes down from the combination of weaponry, but instead of continuing on a separate path or merely steering the party widely clear of the beast, Denham marches the crew directly towards it. And instead of leaving it alone, Denham fires another shot at the still-gasping creature. This riles it even further, but as it stands and twirls to make another charge, it is brought down again with another hail of bullets. Carl and the crew advance even closer, and when the dinosaur dares to make one more roar of defiance, Denham puts a final bullet into its brain. Only after Denham has proclaimed "That got 'im", does the "bold" adventurer ponder his position. "If I could only bring back one of these alive," he wishes all "aw, shucks" and dreamily. Yes, if only... I wonder when you will get a chance.

The fact is that he could have brought that stegosaurus back alive. If you are going to go after something the size of Kong, and you have boldly announced the "fact," without any proof whatsoever, that your "gas bombs" can bring him to his knees, why not test their effectiveness on something of a similar size? Maybe the first dinosaur that you run into, let alone the first prehistoric creature that you or any other man has ever witnessed in real life? You throw one gas bomb, Denham, but not a second? You had at least eight in the box, and you have used one and it did not knock the stegosaurus out, even with that unnecessarily added dosage of bullets. If gas bombs two, three, and four don't work, then you had better rethink your Kong capture plan at that point, because you would only have four left, the stegosaurus is still kicking, and that Kong is one baaadaasss mutha'! If you use less than four on the stegosaurus, then you might have plenty to work with on the ape, and perhaps you will have some extra for any other dinosaurs you are likely are going to run across. But Denham never throws a second bomb, instead relying on his trusty ol' shotgun. He never considers whether they are actually going to work on the giant gorilla that they are trying to capture, and basically treats the death of the dinosaur practically as if it were just another minor animal on yet another big game hunt. His immediate reaction to an unknown species is to kill it. How very... American of him.

You can say "You were only twelve. Surely, you were simply watching a monster movie?" and you would be mostly right. I myself was not there to ruminate on the cruelty of man and his supposed right to ransack the Earth, American or entrepreneurial imperialism, the suppression and infiltration of native cultures, and the "Big Gun = Happy American" equation. I was there to watch giant apes and dinosaurs. Period.

And I got giant apes and dinosaurs. What I also got was a lifelong crush on a movie star almost sixty years my senior, a savage dislike of guns and the people who insist that they are the only way to live a proper life (I have no dispute with people who use them genuinely as tools, not even hunters, as long as they are hunting for sustenance), and several more floors in my skyscraper of steadily growing misanthropy. None of these side effects distracted me very long from the swell monster battles and adventure that were set to take place in the next hour, but they combined with other forces at work in my life at that time. I do remember my reactions very clearly on my second opportunity to see King Kong, so moved was I by the experience, and I have found myself thinking about them quite a lot any time that I watched the film from that day onward.

These feelings are not necessarily implied or even meant by the film (Creator and producer Merian C. Cooper was, after all, a big game hunter, and Denham is basically a stand-in for Cooper.) But that is what I read into it then, and that is what I read into it now. Such feelings made a movie like King Kong come alive even more for me, even as a kid. And they are probably why it made such an impression on me. It adds to the tragedy of the film's ending, where Denham places the blame for Kong's death on a Manhattan street as being due to "beauty" (meaning Ann Darrow), when in fact, he is the progenitor of Kong's demise. The Big White Hunter has been tamed by tragedy, and he can't bear the load.

It's only a monster movie, you know...

[To be continued in Part 5 here...]

Some Gigantic, Turned-On Ape... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 3]

[Before traipsing deeper into the jungle, read Pt. 1 and Pt. 2...]

A side-trip to another Kong: As I hinted at briefly before, something else happened in the summer of '77 that didn't start out as having anything to do with King Kong, but ended up furthering my giant ape obsession regardless. Star Wars fever had slammed into the earth like a meteor, and my brothers and I were no exceptions to the rest of humanity that year. I had already read the paperback novelization (with the original, purplish Ralph McQuarrie-painted cover released the winter before, not the gold-colored movie poster-draped cover that was in circulation that summer) five times, I had the first couple issues of the comics, and was already buying the trading cards. I was a primed and raring-to-go convert to the Lucas cult before I had even stepped into the theatre.

Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for our parent's pocketbooks, we lived in a town without a movie theatre. In fact, we lived a good fifteen or so miles from the nearest movie theatre, and thus our sojourns into the big city were far and few between; we only saw new movies maybe four or five times a year, if we were lucky. So, when we went, we made sure that we were seeing something we really wanted to see. Usually, it would be, due to our tender ages, the newest Disney flick (like the Witch Mountain movies) or the latest in the Pink Panther or James Bond series (thankfully, my mother was a fan of both). I had started to push things a little more as I reached my teen years, and was able to convince them to see new science-fiction or fantasy movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. So, it was not even a light certainty that we would get the opportunity to see this movie that well-timed mass merchandising had already brainwashed us into believing that we had some sort of moral imperative to go see.

This story would have no purpose if we hadn't gone to see it, and yes, after a small amount of pleading and begging, my brother Mark and I eventually wore down my mother's resolve. Meanwhile, my best friend Rusty and his little brother Rodney worked a similar magic on their mom, and thus, we found ourselves crammed into one vehicle one Saturday afternoon, heading into the "big city" of Anchorage, Alaska to make our acquaintance with R2-D2 and the rest of that motley crew of rebel heroes. It would have been a sad situation if the movie had sucked, but even if it did, we did not possess the critical faculties to say so, inexperienced in the ways of movies as we were at that time, and really, we were kids. If someone in the media had convinced us watching paint dry was the hottest and greatest new fad, we would have adopted the consumer lock-step and marched to the nearest house, staring at freshly-brushed walls all summer. So, whether Star Wars was actually any good was beside the point. It's just a happy coincidence that it actually was good.

So, where do you take five sugared-up, buzzing kids who have just spent the late afternoon and early evening watching droids, aliens, lightsaber fights, spaceships, and laser blaster battles? To the local ice cream parlor to get them even more sugared up and buzzing! The parlor, in this instance, was a local establishment (and failed attempt at franchising) called Soapy Smith's, named after the ever so-popular Gold Rush gangster and conman Jefferson "Soapy" Smith. (Because, if there is anything that goes perfect with a banana split, it is extortion and murder. "Would you like a cold case of murder with your strawberry parfait?") But, sugared-up and buzzing Star Wars fanatic kids aren't worried about such ironies; we just wanted more candy and ice cream. As I recall, the plan was actually to get us to eat some actual food, and I do remember having a hot dog, followed by the previously mentioned and murderously intentioned banana split. But I also had five dollars to spend on candy, and because I was deep in the early throes of a both a burgeoning card collecting habit and movie fandom, I bought a couple packets of Topps King Kong trading cards from the candy counter.

These cards were not for the 1933 version that had somewhat recently begun not just my Kong obsession, but also my jonesing for Fay Wray, a woman 57 years my senior. No, these were for the 1976 Dino de Laurentiis version, a film which I had not been given the chance to see (though in a couple years I would get a chance to see it and regret it highly). But standards of quality were not a factor that evening, instead it was the simple fact that I had the opportunity to purchase an item that had a snarling, roaring Kong on the wrapper, and the hope that inside of that wrapper, I would see numerous cards featuring dinosaurs galore. This hope reared its head only because I was unaware that Mr. De Laurentiis did not see fit to loading his Skull Island up with prehistoric beasts, but rather merely with a giant python. (And the man's name is Dino? Talk about not living up to your billing. Tsk tsk...)

So, I bought the cards, but did not open them until we were in the darkness of the car ride home, where Rusty and I began flipping through the cards, the only illumination provided by our pocket flashlights and intermittently glowing streetlights that our vehicle passed. What we discovered, to the complete opposite reaction of horror, was that we had in our hands little cardboard pieces of what to our parents' eyes would have been damn near pornography: a progression of images of a young and scantily clad Jessica Lange being drenched with a waterfall and in various other states of undress that seem like nothing now, but were certainly provocative enough for a couple of young boys at the time. Especially of interest to me was the "waterfall" card, where Kong douses Dwan to wash the mud off of her. Dwan sits with her legs under her on the palm of the giant gorilla's hand and takes her shower. On the card, while it is clear that she is wearing garments, it was easy enough to trick one's mind just enough to convince oneself that she was completely nude. While I have never been that into the Jessica Lange type, at the time, she worked for me just fine.

I said that our parents (or at least one of mine; my mom would have been fine with it) "would have" considered those cards nearly porn, but they never hard the opportunity. We never let our parents see the more intriguing cards, and we managed to keep our cards to the same level of secrecy that our little neighborhood gang eventually managed to keep our fairly well-stocked Playboy collection, which we obtained through means of having sharp little eyes always on the lookout for displays of female pulchritude. Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Gallery, Genesis, Nugget, High Society, Hustler... we had them all. Never to be discovered by the elders of the village, our "comic book" collection was revered by the neighborhood boys. If you heard us say to one another, "Hey, you want to read some comics?," three out of five times we were heading off to look at titty mags.

But that was in the very near future; that collection would come about in the next year or so. For this moment, all that we had were these, for all purposes, completely innocent trading cards in our pervy little hands. I managed to keep my set of those cards -- completely innocuous by even the standards of that day, but that didn't matter to me then -- hidden from my parents. And I still have each of those cards today. [The images on this page are from my collection.]

It is always astounding to me the moments that stick with you as you shuffle through life. Embarrassing moments, squandered opportunities, and early small perversions all seem to exist in the same file cabinet in my head, while what most people would consider the larger, more important events in a life, like weddings and such, seem to have filtered out of my brain almost as soon as they happened. Somehow, this whole Kong card thing, along with most other movie-related "trivia," has convinced my gray matter that it is of far more revelatory importance to me than those other mislaid events. Somehow, this reveals more of my eventual character than I would realize at the time. And it is probably right.

[To be continued in Pt. 4 here...]

Say... I Guess I Love You... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 2]

[Before plodding forward, read Part 1 of this article here.]

So... you finally end up taking that long ocean voyage back to the legendary Skull Island, whose mysteries have built up in your youthful imagination in the three years since you last saw it, and you know that from the tales that you have heard and from the pictures that you have seen that the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and plesiosaurs that you will encounter will be bigger and grander than you remember them. But before you can finally make landfall on the beach of that much vaunted island, there is the not-so-small matter of making that voyage through thousands of miles of dangerous, barely charted waters. Such voyages take a lot of time -- at the beginning of the 1933 King Kong, it takes somewhere in the vicinity of twenty minutes or so -- and you don't know if you can stand the wait any longer.

But then the strangest thing happens during that seemingly endless twenty minutes while you wait to finally see the monsters and dinosaurs of Skull Island again... you fall in love with Fay Wray.

You don't forget about the island or the dinosaurs or the pterodactyls or the plesiosaur or the giant prehistoric gorilla that you know are waiting to be rediscovered on that mysterious place... no, they are the reason you came and you will make damn sure to get your money's worth (even if it's free). But there's this girl on the ship, you see, and she's beautiful and blonde and sad and lonely, and one look into her dewy, longing eyes and you are lost. Hell, you were lost before anyone even made it onto the ship and took to the sea. Her presence on the ship merely added extra paper to the package as she wrapped you up forever. What's that? Land Ho? Oh... are we there already?

I'm no Jack Driscoll, but I'm a damn sight closer to Jack Driscoll than I am to Kong. Despite the differences between the two male corners in this tragic love triangle, they both shared a passion for Miss Ann Darrow, and I came to understand very quickly everything that those two big lugs go through for that love in the course of this adventure. Because, after the destitute and shivering Ann looks up helplessly into Carl Denham's eyes on that fateful encounter on that New York street; after viewing the hope and excitement that fills every feature of her face in that coffee shop as Denham takes her into his company; after she stands on the deck of the "Venture," defending herself against Jack's bluff-filled tirade against women on ships; and especially after her on-camera full-dress rehearsal, glamour-dolled up and gorgeous, as she screams to shocked alertness (and erectness?) Driscoll and the rest of the crew, I found myself fully caught in the grip of deeply amorous feelings for this beautiful blonde innocent played by the eternally underrated Ms. Wray.

To sell the basic conceit of the story, that a big ape is going to go even more ape over the heroine of the picture, and to not sell it as a basic jungle picture, with a mere gorilla-girl-hero storyline, but as an epic adventure spanning half the globe, with her honor and safety constantly being fought for against giant dinosaurs and monsters, and with Kong meeting his doom at the top (and then the bottom) of the Empire State Building, all due to this girl... well, that girl had better be pretty incredible. And in the short time, of which I thought would be an unwanted eternity as it was the first time that I saw it, I was given a re-introduction to that girl, and it was like I had never seen her before. It may be the difference between my concerns when I was ten and how I felt as I nearing thirteen, but Ms. Wray sold that girl to me so solidly that I was ready to follow her for the rest of my life, and not just across that imaginary island. Even today, in my head, I am married forever to a girl with that face: Ann Darrow's face; Fay Wray's face.

But, there wasn't just innocence in that face. I picked up on this even as a youth: Ann and Jack are finally pitching woo to each other but then Jack is called away for shipboard duties, and just seconds before she is captured by the scheming Skull Island natives, the look on her face, flushed with her excited breathlessness and contorted ever so slightly with her lip curling in anticipation -- Woof! What that shot still does to me even thirty years later! Down, boy! I know that such scenes were a common trope of romantic films in earlier eras, with even the toughest female becoming all weak-kneed and swooning the instant the hero touches her, (and I personally prefer my movie heroines to be a lot less damsel-in-distress and far more tough on their own terms), but in this film, Wray nails down the lid on that traditional scene forever,. Those deep, lustful, post-buss gasps emanating from her breast meant that, from that point on, I was severely hooked. Everything that either of the males vying for her affection do in the film was completely understandable to me, and sold the film to me outright... before I had even seen monster or dinosaur one!

There are far more legendarily risqué scenes in the picture: the filmmakers' unprecedented nerve on display in Kong's gentle but forceful disrobing of Ann's garments, which leads to his tickling of her (which, sadly for the big boy, only results in her screaming even louder); Ann, clothes torn and writhing almost orgasmically, as she is bound to the top of the sacrificial altar to meet her would-be groom; and in a scene for which I would have killed for VCR remote control to have been in my twelve-year old hands, Ann's fall off of the cliff and into the river, where she emerges from the water in her now-shredded garments, only... let's just say that the clinginess doesn't really allow you to notice her garments. Despite all of this, it is still that shipboard scene that gets to me the most, and the one that will keep me returning to this film year after year, just for another taste of that introduction to that delightful woman.

So, go ahead, critics who wish to reevaluate this picture with today's critical standards and "modern" sensibilities. Mock the hammy acting, when it was played exactly the way it was meant to be played; rip on the racism inherent in the film, as in nearly Hollywood picture of that era, because while it is indefensible, it was part of the times and can't be avoided without avoiding the film altogether (and shouldn't be avoided if we are ever to learn anything from that unenlightened time); and go on and take a hot, steaming squat on the "primitive" special effects, when in fact they were "state-of-the-art" for their time and for many years hence, and will continue to shock and thrill for many more generations to come, even after many of today's more "advanced" pictures will be forgotten, along with your reviews.

And go ahead and rag on the fainting and screaming Fay Wray, because despite all of the post-feminist critiquing of the character (and, as stated earlier, I, too, wish she were a little more quiet and proactive in her behavior towards the big guy, a situation I am sure will be amended in the remake), Ann Darrow is actually the one in charge in this picture. Even with all of Kong's killing, rampaging, roaring, rending, and his great and terrible gnashing of teeth, Ann is the one ultimately in control.

After all, according to that Denham guy, she is the one who kills the Beast...

[To be continued in Part 3...]