yes, we have no bananas
Yield to the 'kiss of the beast' with a whoop of classic King Kong movies, presented as part of the new cinema season Focus on Monsters at ACMI.
Timed to coincide with the highly anticipated Peter Jackson remake of King Kong, the Focus on Monsters season begins Friday 9 December and will rampage until Sunday 18 December.
King Kong (1933) is often considered to be the grandfather of all monster movies, with Fay Wray clutched in the eponymous gorilla's giant hand and the tragic last stand atop the Empire State Building enduring as iconic images in popular culture.
Focus on Monsters, originating as a cinema season to accompany the exhibition Kiss of the Beast at the Queensland Art Gallery, takes the first Kong movie as a starting point for the exploration of the many versions it spawned, as well as other chest-thumping classics, such as Tarzan, King of the Apes.
Some of the program highlights include:
Curt Siodmak's 50s B-classic Bride of the Gorilla
Ishiro Honda double King Kong vs Godzilla and King Kong Escapes
Hong Kong 70s action extravaganza The Mighty Peking Man
W. S. Van Dyke's Tarzan the Ape Man and Tarzan and His Mate, starring the legendary Johnny Weissmuller
Robert Florey's gothic adapation of the Edgar Allan Poe tale Murders in the Rue Morgue, starring Bela Lugosi
A program of silent rarities that include D.W. Griffith's 1912 work Man's Genesis: A Psychological Comedy Founded on Darwin's Theory of the Genesis of Man, and early special-effects pioneer Willis O'Brien's Creation and The Dinosaur and the Missing Link.
View the complete program here
Kiss of the Beast cinema program was curated for the launch of the Australian Cinémathèque at the Queensland Art Gallery, in association with an exhibition co-curated with Dr Ted Gott.
For those who cant' get enough King Kong, here's some trivia about the 1933 original:
Box office success
King Kong (1933) broke all box office records on its opening, which is particularly amazing when you consider that it was released during the Great Depression. The movie was so successful it was released four times between 1933 and 1952. Then in 1971 it was released again, this time without the cuts originally made to please censorship boards.
Creating a giant ape
King Kong was actually a model only 18 inches tall, brought to life through the painstaking process of stop motion animation. Kong and the other animal models had to be photographed separately every time their position changed 1/16th of an inch. The fight between Kong and the Pterodactyl reportedly took 7 weeks to film.
King Kong's roar
For other monster sounds, Murray Spivak of RKO's sound department had recorded the growls of cougars, leopards and lions, and then reversed them. As a 50 foot tall ape, Kong's roar was more problematic. Spivak ended up recording gorillas' cries backwards at a slow speed and constructed a special sound-box 25 square feet in size to enhance the effect. It also came in handy for creating the hollow thumps when the great ape beat his chest.
At last count
While Focus on Monsters: Kiss of the Beast features six films directly related to the Kong legend, there are at least another twelve films with a take on the giant ape, including The Mighty Gorga (1969) - described as having the worst ape suit ever seen in a motion picture!
Published Tuesday, 29 November 2005
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