King Kong

MOVIE #1,387 •🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿• 02.21.24 While this is spectacular — as close to a 10/10 on sheer principle as a film can get — I do think it's a little bit hard to completely and/or authentically enjoy it as a movie. It's like I'm an anthropologist or something, and an unqualified one at that. After not seeing Kong or any of the dino stop-motion, the final hour is nearly all non-stop action. But I'm still watching it from an arm's length thinking about and marveling at how it all got made while picturing the audiences in 1933 just completely losing their shit. Typically the stop-motion animation is what's praised here but the back its matte paintings, rear projection work, miniatures, and the close-to-scale giant puppetry are equally as good. It’s simply astonishing the technical ground they covered in the eight years since The Lost World. Many times these elements are blended together…

(You could make a 100 gifs from this.)

I jokingly subtracted two points to my score of The Lost World for “unexpected blackface” and, similarly, the racist undertones can’t be ignored here. This seems racist in any century…


I don't think she's talking about the Central Park Zoo.

So I don’t want to sweep that stuff under the rug. It sucks. Still, the FX achievements and, more importantly, that they still hold up more than 90 years later, make this an essential watch: a landmark movie in the history of cinema.

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King Kong is a 1933 American pre-Code adventure horror monster film directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, with special effects by Willis H. O'Brien. Produced and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, it is the first film in the King Kong franchise. The film stars Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot. In the film, a giant ape dubbed Kong captured from Skull Island attempts to possess a beautiful young woman. It was released on March 2, 1933.