Guillermo Del Toro: At Home with Monsters at LACMA 2016, Pt. 1

The inside entrance to At Home with Monsters, guarded by the
Angel of Death from Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

It was a long enough wait, and October 29th finally rolled around today. My brother Mark, his wife Marci, and my teenage nephew (and burgeoning rock star) Aerin were in town from the north part of the state to join Jen and I at the Guillermo del Toro exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (aka LACMA). We had planned this excursion a few months earlier in July and I, like many horror and fantasy fans in the area, was just beyond waiting any longer to go see it.

Titled At Home with Monsters, the exhibition, curated by Mr. del Toro himself, was meant to do multiple things. First was to celebrate the art and films of the man himself; second, to pay tribute to the influences – from art to literature to cinematic or otherwise – that have influenced del Toro since his childhood days and straight through his remarkable career in film; and third, to give us a glimpse into what his inner sanctum is like, in this case, his home base (though it is not his actual home) in Los Angeles that he has named Bleak House after a favorite Dickens novel. (He has so much crammed into Bleak House, that he has a sequel house already called Bleak House 2.) Most of the contents of this exhibit, from paintings to sketches to models and even the life-sized statues of figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Frankenstein's Monster, and Johnny Eck (from Freaks) take up space in this place that also houses his working office, art studio, and research libraries.

I have decided to split this photo essay in two. This first part will feature photos of costumes, figures, and props related to Del Toro's own films; the second part will be exclusively devoted to objects in the exhibit portraying the wide range of influences on his talent and career.

The Faun from Pan's Labyrinth.

The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth.

In addition to the full-sized figures such as the characters above and below, many of the rooms had video screens on the walls that played montages (in loops) based around common themes in his work, such as Death and Resurrection, Monsters, or Beauty and Brutality. There were also several stations spread throughout the vast exhibit that allowed you to push buttons to select different pages that had been scanned from his working notebooks, to get a sense of how devoted he is to his craft at seemingly every moment of his life.

The Ghost of Edith's Mother from Crimson Peak.

An illuminated book created for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Insect paintings, sketches, and models in a section
mainly devoted to Mimic.

Costumes from Crimson Peak.

Weaponry and artifacts from the Hellboy films.

The Cronos Device (right) from Cronos.

Costume, weapon, and other pieces from the Hellboy films.

A wall-sized poster of a shot inside Del Toro's actual Bleak House.

Costumes from Pacific Rim.

An illuminated book from Pan's Labyrinth.

Pt. II, featuring some of Del Toro's major influences, will be posted tomorrow...

RTJ

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

Disapproval Would Be Folly...

Several times over the last couple weeks, people have asked me this question: What is your favorite Christmas movie? Of course, they sometimes ask this when I am decked out in my sweet Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas Jack Skellington silk shirt with the Jack-faced buttons running down the front. Or often they will ask this when I am standing in front of them in my Jack scarf, striped and with Jack's smiling, beguiling face on either end. I am often surprised, though, how many people don't identify Nightmare as a Christmas flick, when it most certainly is one. I am equally surprised at the number of people who have yet to see it.

But Nightmare, while it would seem it is a given, is not my choice. Even though it is one of my very favorite movies, on my list of Christmas movies (this does not include TV specials, mind you) there can really only be one choice: the original 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street (in black and white, thank you very much!) While I am not normally given to the accepted ideas of family in our society, this one gets to me, and while I watch it, nothing becomes more important to me than whether sweet little Natalie Wood (so smart, so unmoved by the fantasy trappings of Christmas) gets the home she has always wanted, and whether her mother will hook up with "Uncle Bob", the lawyer neighbor who has won their hearts, and finally give her a complete family unit again. Oh yeah, and whether she will finally believe that the twinkly-eyed old gentleman named Kris Kringle (played by Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Edmund Gwenn, the most charming Santa ever) who has entered her world is really the Kris Kringle, the Santa Claus that her mother has taught her is nothing but stuff and nonsense. And also whether we, the viewers, believe he is...

I'm telling you, this one gets to me. To use Kevin Smith's term for the manner in which men weep during movies, the room got "dusty" about three times during Miracle on 34th Street for me, and I can't friggin' help it. Jen mocked me just a little for this (though she didn't watch it with me, but did see some of it later in the evening when it ran on TCM), but I can't help it. It's been this way with this movie since I was a kid. Especially when little Susan Walker (Wood) asks her mother (a gorgeous Maureen O'Hara) whether Kris is sad because of all the trouble he is having in the film. She answers, "Yes, I suppose he is..." ---

Oh! Hey! Did a wind whip up or something? Is there a tornado coming this way? Is there something in the air content? Because something is making my eyes water... what the hell? Ah, it got to me again just writing about it. Merry Christmas everyone!

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.

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...]