Perhaps the most painful thing about King Kong Lives is that it's not a cheap show. The effects are very good for pre-CGI work, excellent in fact, with great miniature settings, vehicles, tanks and buildings, while Carlo Rambaldi's twin ape suits are even better than Rick Baker's a decade before. This is not a budget movie, and it's almost traumatic that all this craft and talent was expended in the service of a film that you'd think no studio fool would ever spend a nickel on.

De Laurentiis' King Kong was an artless lump that trashed the giant ape's reputation and that of the Academy as well; a lot of reforms in how Special Effects Oscars are nominated and awarded were initiated after Dino more or less promoted awards for his film. King Kong Lives starts off with a weird kick, reprising the previous finale atop the World Trade Center.

The story and screenplay are beneath ridicule. The scientists dispense far too sober exposition that's rushed to get to the good stuff. Hamilton and Kerwin are each allotted about twenty seconds for character development, and spend the rest of the time dishing out sub-Indiana Jones smart talk. There are plenty of 'humorous' lines, but nothing remotely funny. The nadir of 'new-woman' screenwriting comes when all of Mitchell's pickup lines fail, until he praises her surgical skill. She perks up with a, "Do you really think so?" look. That's the dramatic high point.

The Kongs are just a peace-loving couple, anthropomorphosed about two degrees shy of being characters in a Chuck Jones cartoon. He's still fascinated by the moon; they exchange little gifts and act like housebroken, civilized newlyweds. Rambaldi's excellent animatronic masks come up with weird, very non-ape smiles, grimaces and growls. It's all technically adept and insultingly silly.

There's no subtext whatsoever here. The Army general makes his tanks charge with tough-guy orders and alternates between capture efforts and maximum firepower attacks without rhyme or reason. Kong was already riddled with machine gun bullets in the traumatic end of the first film. He fell from the tower as well but apparently has healed all 902 broken bones in his body. An hour after open heart surgery, he's a stompin' and a fightin' like new, although the loss of his cardio-monitor dooms him when Amy can no longer regulate his artificial heart. It was all an excuse anyway, to motivate the couple to chase Kong through the forest.

Another nadir of taste occurs when the two monsters bed down for the night, while Amy invites Hank into her sleeping bag for the evening. It's pretty awful in every respect.

The movie has a bittersweet, inane ending that gives Kong a chance for a grab at our heartstrings. Lady Kong bears him a son (boy that was fast, and she didn't even look pregnant) who is also behaving like a teenager minutes after his birth. The entire enterprise winds up as if nobody gave a damn except Dino, who must have been busy paying the bills.

There's a lot of good old-fashioned effects work here, but the cumulative result is a film that's no better than the Japanese War of the Gargantuas with its brown and green monkey men on an endless wrestling match amid cardboard landscapes. King Kong Lives cost probably 50 times more and surely made half as much money back.

Fox's DVD of King Kong Lives looks splendid - why do all the loser movies have perfect elements and excellent transfers? - and has a robust soundtrack that may entertain you for minutes at a time, until you remember you can do something more fun, like balance your checkbook. There's a Dolby digital track. The packaging doesn't list the aspect ratio, but it's a full-width 2:35 to one.

Why is Fox putting this out, while The Innocents languishes somewhere?

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, King Kong Lives rates:
Movie: Poor but excellent production values
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: none
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: September 15, 2004