The Monster's on the Loose!!! #1: The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)

Why begin this new feature on the Cinema 4 Pylon, intended to spotlight a particular monster -- famous or otherwise -- with a mere (mostly) stop-motion dinosaur? And especially when I normally I steer clear of calling a dinosaur "monster" in the first place.

Dinosaurs -- including the species somewhat represented in The Beast of Hollow Mountain as a member of the Allosaurus genus -- are catalogued scientifically. They are recognized by the immensely overwhelming majority of legitimate scientists as having once possessed life (in the natural sense) and roamed upon our planet in the past (and millions of years before man came along, not at the same time). Monsters, in the vein that I am using them here, are made up of entirely fictional creatures of some mysterious origin either supernatural or unnaturally scientific (such as laboratory or nuclear experimentation gone awry), or they may be part of the group called "cryptids", described by the Oxford Dictionary as creatures "whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated, such as the yeti." (It is my choice on my own website to determine the parameters of the term for my own purposes, and I choose to agree with the Oxford definition.) So, I am somewhat rubbing myself the wrong way intentionally by proclaiming movie dinosaurs to be "monsters" when, in fact, they were merely animals, albeit of enormous size (in many, but not all, cases).

But what else is a dinosaur somehow transplanted to modern times that runs amok among the populace but a monster? There is no way around it this time, because this particular allosaurus  -- the one brought to life via filmed animation and puppetry in The Beast of Hollow Mountain -- was indeed my first true movie monster. I certainly may have had monstrous influence already in my young life at the time that I first saw this film at the age of five (Sesame Street and its assorted Jim Henson Muppet monsters had most likely not yet premiered -- the exact date of my viewing of this film is unknown -- but I did love Puff the Magic Dragon at that age), but this was the film that probably brought to life the earliest stirrings within me of one of the primary obsessions of my life. In piecing together my youth through the films that I saw, I can find no other horror or science fiction film that I saw at such a young age that stuck in my memory like The Beast from Hollow Mountain.

This 1956 film itself is pretty slight (less than 80 minutes) and really doesn't seem to have much dinosaur action in it when measured against the majority of the time that is spent in the film on the usual old west cowboy drama. That's right... The Beast of Hollow Mountain, which promises so much with just its title, starts out as just another western. About six years before I would see a late night viewing of Ray Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi that would blow my mind wide open (more on Gwangi later), I was introduced to the concept of "cowboys vs. dinosaurs" by an unplanned viewing of The Beast of Hollow Mountain on an afternoon matinee show on a local television station. (Unlike most movies over the years to follow, I am unable to pinpoint which station or matinee show. Those details were not important to me yet.)

At five, I was pretty much just happy knowing there was a magical box in our living room that would show me cartoons on Saturday mornings or throw up video of the occasional rocket taking off on the news. But a memory that stays locked in my head from around the same time (1969) was my family's viewing of the footage from the Apollo 11 moon landing on our (now) diminutive television screen. This is mainly because everyone in the world made such a big thing about the moon landing at the time -- it was hard to escape the constant talk -- but I am also certain that I saw it myself because, as a kid of the exact right age to be influenced by such matters, astronauts were my earliest role models (besides Batman, of course).

Someday, I will own this again...

Though I am saddened to recall that I no longer possess it, my first metal lunchbox (one that I would proudly take with me to kindergarten that fall) was The Astronauts one that Aladdin released in that year of 1969, creating an easy money tie-in with the moon landing. I have very few memories of the brief couple of months that I attended kindergarten at Sand Lake Elementary (we moved from "big city" Anchorage to the much more woodsy Eagle River early on in the 1969-70 school year), but another memory from those days that did stick is my jealousy over another student's Lost in Space lunchbox. Of course, he was equally covetous of my Astronauts lunchbox as well, so everything evened out, I guess. (I suppose we could have traded lunchboxes, but it didn't turn out that way.) I also remember we got along pretty well after that, for the short time that I knew him.

But back to that first magic box I mentioned, the one that showed me cartoons and moon landings. Another memory seared into my brain is one of my mother engaged in household chores, including a bunch of ironing, while I killed the afternoon hiding under a chair, with a blanket draped over it so it created a safety fort for me. The fort was necessary, because I needed to hide under one every time things got too scary, and I definitely had need of the improvised fortress while I found myself immersed in the quick bursts of dinosaur rampage scenes in The Beast of Hollow Mountain. It's not hard to see why I would have watched the film, dinosaurs or not. I also liked cowboy shows when I was young, and my parents, not surprisingly, liked to watch a lot of westerns. Television was rife with westerns in those days, and in the eyes of my family, a western was a western was a western. If one was going to spring up on one of the three local channels at that time, it was likely that someone would turn it on at least as background noise.

I am not sure if it was because of this that The Beast of Hollow Mountain was even on our TV that day. It may have just been blind luck that allowed that movie to show up on our screen. I was definitely too young to read the TV guide in the newspaper (the actual TV Guide was not sold in Alaska in those days) or even care about such listings quite yet (that would change relatively soon). So I certainly didn't read about it or have knowledge enough to know the movie would be on that day. It is also unknown whether, knowing that there was a fearsome beast lurking somewhere within the film, my mother would have turned it on for me to watch. I was certainly not a stranger to televised dramas of any stripe, but I have no way to know how "television cowardly" I was in those days (as opposed to being cowardly in real life, which I probably was at the time).

And if she was worried about it, she needn't have. I believe that the movie permanently dug its way into my head for a reason. I recall being completely transfixed by The Beast of Hollow Mountain, ducking my head underneath the curtains created by my blanket fort to peer through the crack to watch the hero (Guy Madison) do battle with "the beast" that was tormenting a small Mexican border town. I had seen other movies by that age and loved everything that I saw, but in the pre-video era, the number of films that I got to see were far less than kids of today. There was no copy of Frozen to watch 47 times in a week and there were no DVRs to record programs instantly. You either caught whatever was shown on TV when it was aired, or you went to see new movies or re-releases in the movie theatres... or you read books. (And in the phrasing of Dana Carvey as his Grumpy Old Man character, "And we liked it... we liked it fine!")

Also unknown to me is if I watched the film from its start as a child or if I sat down in the middle of it. Since there is little in the way of actual dinosaur action until much later in the film, the promise held at the beginning of the film may have hooked me from the get-go. After some darkly dramatic music over the credits -- far more threatening than the usual western intro -- a narrator tells of a local peak named Hollow Mountain, so called for the legend that it is hollow. We are also told that the mountain's supposedly hollow interior has never been explored because of the thick jungle swamp that surrounds it.

A trio of caballeros ride into view, at the head of which rides Jimmy Ryan (played by Madison), the co-owner of a ranch who has seen a disproportionate amount of his cattle go missing in recent weeks. He thinks rustlers are the primary cause, but his sombrero-wearing ranch hands talk of the mysterious mountain and the ominous swamp surrounding it. To be sure, a cattle skull is seen on its banks, but Ryan thinks that it can't explain all of the cattle. While they search, the camera shows a set of large footprints embedded in the thick mud, but these are unremarked upon by the caballeros.

The film ambles on from this point in decidedly non-monster movie fashion for a good while. We meet Ryan's rival, Felipe Sanchez, who owns another ranch and wants to buy out Ryan to run him out of the territory. We meet Pancho, a well-meaning but generally drunken sort, and his really stubborn son, Panchito. (No, really... his stubborn streak fairly sets up the monster action in the second half of the film.) We also meet the love interest, pretty Sarita (Patricia Medina), engaged to marry Sanchez, but slowly falling in love more and more with Ryan with each meeting. We get a lengthy street fight between Ryan and Sanchez, much talk of cattle buying, more searching for missing cattle, plotting by Sanchez to rid himself of Ryan's presence, and a scene where Ryan has to rescue Pancho after the latter's horse is scared by firecrackers. Western business as usual, and not much difference from a thousand other B-grade oaters of the period.

Just accept your death, Pancho! Why live when your child is so annoying?

But there is always the threat of that swamp and the mysterious creature that lurks around the mountain. Every trip back to the mountain brings us that same ominous, thumping music. And when Pancho gets it into his head that he really must head out to the swamp to find a pathway through it that he just knows must be there, we know something bad is about to happen to him. I say "we know something," but at the age of five and very unused to the beats of horror films, I probably didn't.

At around the 43-minute mark in the film, well past the halfway point, Pancho finds himself mucking around the swamp looking for his path, when there is a huge roar. He looks up and screams in terror at something huge off camera. He pulls his gun and fires several rounds, but to no avail. He screams again and a dark shape advances upon him until we no longer see Pancho at all, just his sombrero laying in the muck.

When Pancho doesn't return as he promised to his son, Panchito totally loses his shit. While a lesser person such as myself would just "take Panchito to the swamp" and then come back without him, Ryan is made of sterner stuff and is able to ignore the kid's incessant whining. Ryan rushes out to the swamp and finds Pancho's sombrero, and pretty much knows the score. (Well, except for the "getting eaten by a dinosaur" part...)

Well, the film goes back to the western stuff: Ryan's cattle are set to be sold and shipped away, Sanchez wants to buy Ryan out but not after the cattle are sold, Sarita and Sanchez's big wedding day arrives, and Sanchez sends his men out to stampede Ryan's cattle before they can make it to the train station. Fireworks are shot off in celebration of the wedding and the whole town is partying. It seems like a big disaster is brewing, but it is not the one that the town expects. That's right... there is more stubborn screeching on the part of little Panchito, who is obsessed with finding his papa in the swamp and wants to set out on his own to do so. This makes Sarita take to her own horse to find him. If ever there was a time for the monster to make his big entrance, this is the opportunity...

...and does he ever! Back at the swamps, where a pair of Ryan's caballeros are playing dice instead of watching over the numerous head of cattle surrounding them, we see the first non-shadowy glimpse of the creature. While this film mainly employs stop-motion animation for its creature effects, other puppetry methods are used, including the first shot of the monster's feat. The effect is not removed at all from the Godzilla style of "suit-mation" and looks rather comical when matched against the stop-motion action to come. There is much tooting of dramatic fanfare as the beast's feet march across the ground and then come to a stop in front of the caballeros, who have to this point not noticed the monster's advance. That is, until the beast lets loose with a snarl and a roar. The caballeros look up and are stunned with terror.

I just knew he was on the Paleo Diet...

We get a close-up of the beast and see that the main character trait of this particular creature is a tendency to not only curl its lip into a sneer, but also has a very long, almost snakelike tongue that whips out several inches from its mouth. The caballeros make a break for it, but the monster's appearance has already frightened the cattle, and the men are crushed to death beneath their hooves. The allosaurus decides that a snack is in order, and we get a neat shot of the beast tracking one of the cattle across the landscape and picking it up in its mouth. So, at about the 59-minute mark, we finally get some major dinosaur action. And we will get exactly that for the remaining eighteen minutes of film.

The stampeding cattle start running in the direction of the town. Other caballeros hear the noise and do what they can to stop the stampede. The townsfolk dance in the streets, unaware of the impending doom. Panchito is caught in between, and veers off the road to head towards the swamp. The cattle sweep through the town sending the citizens scurrying for safety. Ryan is told that Sarita has gone after the annoying Panchito, and then Sanchez is told that Ryan has headed after Sarita who has headed after Panchito.

Khaaaaaaaannnnnnnn!!!

As for that insufferable little snot, Panchito is making his way along the swamp's edge, when just like his father before him, he hears the snarling entrance of the Beast of Hollow Mountain. Sure, he's not going to get eaten, which is a sad thing for anyone with ears and/or a modicum of taste, but kids were usually safe in monster movies at the time.

But we can delight in his torture, and when the creature does a full roar and lunges at him, Panchito loses his shit a second time, like a kid who has finally been told the truth about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and exactly how he was conceived -- all at the same time. (Of course, what he would find out was that he was the result of a totally unplanned and drunken haystack ravaging.)

Pop its top!! Pop its top!

Unfortunately for the audience and the allosaurus, the lovely and brave Sarita arrives in the nick of time to lead Panchito to a ramshackle cabin. The monster chases the pair around the building briefly, but when they finally go inside, the beast attempts to get at them through the roof, which already has a sizable hole in it. While he thrusts his arms inside trying to grab them, Sarita grabs a pole to try to ward him off. Panchito? He's got no game. Practically crying in the corner, that kid.

Finally, Ryan arrives and fires a couple of shots at the monster's face. One connects and causes a lot of damage, painful enough to make the beast swing his smallish arms at his snout. Ryan's tactic works well enough that the dinosaur forgets about the cabin and runs after Ryan. But Felipe Sanchez is arrives as well, meaning to do Ryan in for good. He takes aim at the American, but a sudden appearance of the beast frightens his horse. Sanchez takes a rough tumble into the dirt, and it is up to Ryan to rescue him.

He should really get some hydrogen peroxide on that wound...

Riding off with Sanchez hanging on behind him on the horse, Ryan cuts across the plain, and we get the first shot of the dinosaur running, a nice composite with both the horse and the dinosaur in full flight.

The next couple of minutes are of the monster in pursuit of Ryan and Sanchez. The beast goes up the mountain, and then down the mountain, and eventually up again. Finally, Ryan's rides his horse sideways down a steep incline, thinking that there is no way that the dinosaur could possibly pursue them. But when they hit the bottom, Ryan's horse takes a spill (the stunt looks very unplanned), and the two cattlemen are sent sprawling on the ground. At the top of the incline, the dinosaur roars wildly and waves his arms. With his carrying on, the mountainside gives way underneath his massive weight, and the allosaurus slides down the mountainside, also taking a small tumble himself. In what is perhaps my favorite shot of the entire film, we see the allosaurus pick himself up from his fall, and then sprint across the field in the direction of Ryan, who is continuing to fire bullets at the creature.

Ryan and Sanchez make it to a cavern opening that Freud could have written volumes about, and hide inside hoping that the dinosaur will pass them by. They are not so lucky, and after sizing up the entrance for a moment, the monster tries to use his right arm to grab one of them. His first attempt is in vain, but he readjusts and tries again. This time, Ryan uses his knife to stab the creature in the hand, and the beast recoils briefly in pain. The third time, the allosaurus gets his hand around the neck of the villainous Sanchez, who collects his just deserts by being strangled and then thrown roughly against the wall of the mountain. A posse from the town arrives just as it seems that Ryan will be caught next, and then they distract the allosaurus just enough to allow Ryan to escape.

Ryan tells the group that bullets do no harm to the beast, which is an outright lie, because we have already seen one nearly take out his eye. There have been other moments where he acts annoyed by the bullets, so they can clearly harm him. You just have to concentrate enough firepower on it at once to have real effectiveness. However, Ryan has a plan, and it is one so crazy it just might work. He decides to lead the dinosaur to the deadly swamp and trap the creature in the muck.

Ryan grabs a rope and runs into the waters of the swamp and wades across to a large tree a short distance from the short. Forming a lasso, he throws the rope upward to a high branch on the tree. Believe it or not, he actually manages to get it around the branch on the first throw (he really does it too), and then he creates a loop in the other end so that he can swing on it. With his foot in the loop, he starts to do the Tarzan routine, swinging back and forth, slowing taunting the allosaurus forward to the edge of the swamp. The dinosaur snaps menacingly at Ryan, but the cowboy manages to stay just out of the grasp of the beast. In a surprising moment, the dinosaur lashes at Ryan with his claws on one swing and tears off a piece of Ryan's shirt. At last, the dino steps ahead just a little too much and slides off the bank into the swamp. His ponderous weight does not allow him to escape, and the beast of Hollow Mountain slowly sinks in the quicksand until he disappears from view. The hero embraces Sarita, and all is well in the town again. The End.

While it does take just under an hour for the dinosaur action to really begin, the last twenty minutes seem to be non-stop action, broken up only by quick town scenes. The beast seems to be a constant menace for the remainder of the picture, and this may be exactly why it lodged itself in my memory from age five onward.

One key note about this film. The plot is based on a story written by the great Willis O'Brien, the genius animator who not only brought King Kong to life, but really jump-started stop-motion dinosaur action in cinema with several short silent films that eventually culminated in the creation of the original version of The Lost World in 1925. In 1949, O'Brien teamed up with his apprentice, Ray Harryhausen, to make Mighty Joe Young. Ray became the king of stop-motion once The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms caught fire a couple of years later, but while "Obie" (as he was known to friends) continued to work sporadically throughout the '50s during the resurgence of giant monster movies (The Giant Behemoth, The Black Scorpion), he never got the financing he needed to do another project on the level of King Kong.

The same story by O'Brien was reworked by Harryhausen in the late '60s into one of my personal obsessions, the aforementioned The Valley of Gwangi, directed by James O'Connolly. In this film, the dinosaurs vs. cowboys theme is taken to greater heights of imagination, and naturally, given Harryhausen's involvement, the animation is far more inspired and intricate.

This is not to say that I don't enjoy the animation in The Beast of Hollow Mountain. Produced by William and Edward Nassour, the latter of whom served as co-director with Ismael Rodriguez and also oversaw the visual effects work, Beast is filmed in the Nassours' patented "Regiscope" animation process. Sure, the seams show a little more than in a bigger budget film, but there is some excellent imagery in TBoHM. My favorite detail is getting to see the dinosaur run after the cowboys following the cabin attack scene, and then seeing him run once again after he picks himself up after his spill down the mountainside. Yes, the titular dinosaur is a tail-dragger -- just like many other carnivores dinosaurs of the film variety -- and thus seemingly slow through much of the picture, but then the moments where he picks up his speed really adds an extra, and quite surprising -- thrill to the action.

And for the five-year-old who watched this way back when, it was believable enough to never leave my mind. I didn't see the film until many years later, and had in fact, never really known the title when I was five. (It didn't matter then.) But those swamp sequences and the fight between the cowboy and the allosaurus (including his eventual sinking into the muck) triggered enough memories for me to be able to locate the film eventually. I had a VHS copy off of cable (I think Cinemax) for many, many years, but it never got a proper release until recently, when it was put out on Blu-ray as a double feature with a far lesser film, The Neanderthal Man. Myself, I have not purchased a copy as of yet (being out of work does that to you), but it is definitely on my wish list.

It seems only right that "my first monster" should live on in my movie collection next to all of my other influences.

RTJ

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.

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...]