King Kong Lives

Lethargic and prone to comedic, bug-eyed reaction shots whenever Lamborghinis or similar are being crushed underfoot, King Kong Lives does at least take some massive conceptual swings in its early passages. A decade has passed since Jessica Lange's hirsute suitor was blasted full of holes, by hovering Bell helicopters, before falling off a skyscraper onto the concrete pavement below. Rather than turn the giant ape's bones to powder, this plunge instead landed the Eighth Wonder of the World in a long-term but apparently stable coma. Tended by Linda Hamilton's Dr. Amy Franklin in a mid-80s present day, the sleeping Kong is suddenly found to be in desperate need of both a blood transfusion and a brand new, mechanical heart. Luckily for Kong, Brian Kerwin's earthy adventurer stumbles across another enlarged primate in Borneo. This gorilla, dubbed Lady Kong, is rather shy and retiring, especially when compared to her male namesake. The female of this species, apparently, preferring to brood and sulk rather than thrash about in an impassioned rage. Although farcical in terms of how John Guillermin's sequel accounts for its time skip, there's a certain kind of fun in how the film portrays the scaled-up, day-to-day processes of looking after a pair of enormous apes. Heavy trucks, driven by weekend warriors, bus around rotting fruit while fleets of bulldozers are employed to corral the more placid Ninth Wonder. The real highlight though is an open heart surgery sequence in which Hamilton's doc cracks Kong's ribs with a gleaming, sterilised circular saw before plunging a pacemaker the size of a small van into the titan's chest. It's a shame that the rest of the film has, comparatively, flatlined.