The View From The Mountain

When I was a kid, the original King Kong was a Thanksgiving Day staple in New York City. I visited my grandmother, who still lived in the City then, for turkey day. One of the local NYC channels would run King Kong , often with Mighty Joe Young , on the holiday. When the remake of King Kong , starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange, was released in 1976, I was taken to see it in the movie theater by my mother’s then-boyfriend. The three of us had plans to go Christmas shopping, but my mother had to work a night shift at her job in the city. It was her idea for us guys to see a movie to pass the time until she could meet up with us after work. It's hard to believe all of this took place almost fifty years ago now. I don’t remember the name of the NYC theater where I saw the ‘76 Kong , but it was very large and ornate, a real temple of the cinema. It was just too bad the movie didn’t match the majestic setting that I saw it in. I was eleven at the time, and was something o...

You want a piece of me?! King Kong has been remade several times since the original film’s release back in 1933. The Japanese movie firm Toho, which produced the Godzilla movies, did the first remake of Kong with 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla , which was a fun romp. Toho followed this with an even better romp in 1967 called King Kong Escapes , an enjoyable lark that had Kong battling a mechanized version of himself. The first American remake of King Kong followed in 1976, and wound up being an unimaginative and dreary mess. 1986 saw Linda Hamilton ( The Terminator and T2 ) starring in a really bad fiasco called King Kong Lives , and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson directed another remake of King Kong that saw release in 2005. Although Jackson’s Kong is considered by many to be the first “proper” remake, it’s a movie that’s not without its flaws--especially seeing how they tried to make King Kong more realistic, which resulted in him looking like a giant silverback ...