I already know that this is probably one of the most reviled, most hated movies centering on Merian C. Cooper's 1933 creation known to modern man. Why is that? Simply put, because it is a story that really doesn't need, doesn't depend on and doesn't even care about the ape of the title - a King named Kong.
Like so many told and twice-told and thrice-told tales, versions get so diluted and re-imagined we don't even get a sense of who is the main headliner of the piece. Kinda like the King James version of the Bible.
In fact, between 1933 and 2005, we've had no less than seven variations on a theme about-a dees beeg monkey. Of course when it comes to Japan, once they get wind of an idea, they will retell the ever-lovin' heck out of it. Not only have they done this with giant monster stories, but also with war stories, cop stories, crime stories, Star Wars stories, invading alien stories, and any other movie that involves large-scale miniature sets and at least one out-of-place-looking American.
When it comes to King Kong Escapes, the problems are many, the solutions few and for as much as Toho Studios wants to pretend otherwise, this is one beeg monkey that is just a beeg prop.
A prop in a story that involves Bond-like villains, nefarious dames, explosions, deadly gadgets and wide-eyed Americans.
And did I mention this is also based on a cartoon show?
Oh yeah; Toei Company created a short-lived cartoon series in 1966 for Rankin-Bass that utilized the beeg money into a beeg playmate for Bobby Bond and his family. Of course, when this live-action movie tie-in came to be, the Bonds were totally excised from the story and a whole new storyline was substituted, featuring nothing that involved cartoons, save for the acting level.
Forget about it, Jake; it's TohoTown.
Story time: the evil Doctor Who...no, not Tom Baker; this is a white-haired, leering evil guy (Hideyo Amamoto) in a black suit left over from Blofeld's last garage sale. He is hot to mine a radioactive element called - oddly enough - Element X. For what? It's not important; it's for evil world-taking-over purposes. In order to mine it from the frozen lands of the North Pole (presumably without Santa's permission), he constructs a gigantic mechanical King Kong to do so...because he can, is the best answer. However, Klang Kong (as I call him) is unable to dig very well (cheap Japanese crap) and Doc W's little helper Madame X (Mie Hama) kidnaps the real Kong from Mondo Island (not Kong Island, don't be silly...). So, a real ape to replace a mechanical one who didn't even work in freezing temps in irradiated conditions. Good job, X.
As an insurance policy, W and X kidnap Lt. Susan Watson (Linda Miller), Lt. Commander Jiro Nomura (Akira Takarada) and Commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason). Seems Big 'N' Hairy developed a crush on Susan when she and the boys went native on Mondo Island, and he does what she tells him to. After much ne'er-do-well plotting, scheming, threatening and other stuff, Real Kong escapes and hightails his banana-lovin' keister for Tokyo (as if there were a doubt he would). Susan and company also break out of North Pole oppression, but W and his minions follow with Klang Kong, Susan is grabbed up by the faux-bot promptly and taken high atop Tokyo Tower (since it would have cost too much to get The Empire State Building overseas) and a battle ensues between Kong and his robotic replica.
Ishirô Honda rears his directorial head yet again! The man responsible for lensing epics such as Gojira (that's Godzilla if yer nasty), Rodan, Mothra, Gorath, Varan The Unbelievable, Atragon, Dagora The Space Monster, Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster and War Of The Gargantuas yet again brings us another clash of rubbery titans. Give you this much: Honda knew to stick with what he did best. Not one location looks real - from islands, to arctic wastelands to downtown Tokyo. In fact, I was disappointed they didn't leave a tube of model glue lying at the corner of the screen.
With our beeg a-boy, though, they had to do more skimping than they did on their sets. Lazy, glazed-over eyes and a face that combines Joe Don Baker and Ernest Borgnine with a crew cut are the least of our ape's problems, though. Eiji Tsuburaya and company made it look like Kong (both metal and non-metal versions) had a lot wrong in the moving-and-realistic-interpretation department. Even if this isn't a stop-motion version like we grew up with, I still have a lot of trouble believing they're giving us The Eighth Wonder Of The World here. More like something you'd see on a platform in that amusement park KISS performed at that one time.
Klang Kong at least has a better time of it in terms of looks. If you're gonna make a mechanical robot version of Kong, then this is the version you'd want. Those glowing eyes sold me, as well as his stiff movements every time he attacks. I guess it makes sense that you should expect Klang Kong to move like that. The real deal, though? Not so much.
dubbedly possible. A shout-out goes out to Amamoto as Doc Who. What? WHO! White hair, Casey Kasem good looks, arched eyebrows and a face that goes from zero to Snidely Whiplash in point-six seconds, he takes evil to a whole new level with a mean voice that lends itself to a sneer. Everyone else is just a bit playa and even Mie Hama as X to his Who can't best him.
A word about Hama - you probably know her best as Kissy Suzuki from You Only Live Twice and/or Fumiko Sakurai in her 1962 go-around with Fuzzy Boy, King Kong Vs. Godzilla. You may even know her from her pictorial layout in Playboy - the first one to feature a pretty Asian lady such as herself. She certainly has a special something, that's for sure. But even playing up her evil villainess role to the hilt as she does, she just doesn't make anyone forget who the main villain is...or who the kids are here to see.
The Americans cast here...well, to be honest, I'd never heard of them before this and I don't remember seeing them anywhere else. Of course, I'd never seen Rhodes Reason's many TV Western appearances nor Linda Miller's sole other movie appearance in If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? - of course after being in a movie with a bovine-eyed ape, anything else is bound to be a letdown.
What about the writing, though? Scripter Takeshi Kimura gave the world such well-loved entertainments as The H-Man, The Mysterians, The Human Vapor and even Godzilla versus The Smog Monster, versus Gigan, versus Megalon and versus All Monsters, too. It's not like he doesn't know his stuff, but the choice to play everything like it was a spy movie is one of those things that makes you wonder why, indeed, they bothered. Seeing how popular spy flicks with dark cackling villains and sinister tools of destruction were at the time, I guess it made sense to put everything in gigantic hairy ape terms WITHOUT Sean Connery. And I'll bet you a golden gun that Mie Hama's involvement was just one of those cinematic co-inky-dinks that happened to happen. You know how The Biz can be.
Still, with all of this and all of the large-scale-small-scale action, King Kong Escapes comes up a disappointment. Why? Because of one simple factor - it wants to be two different types of movies and never mixes into a whole. Espionage capers and giant monster rampages never seem to do very well when mixed - even with Doctor Who cackling and arching his brow at every provocation, he is not enough of an anchor to give the viewer a reason to think everything is coming together just fine and dandy. It's like getting the film reels mixed together when you're not sure if they should even be in the same multiplex, much less on the same screen.
And with all of the other intrigue and stuff going on, something happens that should never happen in a King Kong movie - Kong is sometimes forgotten about for moments at a time! HOW CAN YOU FORGET ABOUT A GIGANTIC MONKEY? This is the movie that answers that question.
Kong purists usually rank Escapes on the far low end of their scale when it comes to what they will accept their King in. Badness is all but guaranteed for your monster movie, though, when its premiere in North America is on a double-billing with that classic Don Knotts comedy The Shakiest Gun in the West. Gotta wonder which one played first.
As far as I'm concerned, if you have movies like King Kong Vs. Godzilla, Godzillas' Revenge, Destroy All Monsters and so forth in your collection and love them like your own children, Escapes is just another addition to the family...even if it is the red-headed stepchild of the group. It's still one of the gang, so you let things slide.
Not that the rest of humanity is as forgiving; after the critical drubbing it got in its initial release, Escapes didn't exactly make the most of its pedigree; director, writer, FX and everything right down to the cinematography may have been the same if not similar, but it just didn't have the one thing that every other Kong movie had: a sense of fun.
And no, pointing and laughing isn't the same as "fun".
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