At the start of the film, all potential audience members should leave all sense of logic and intelligence - indeed, ALL sense - at the door.

The film begins in somewhere purporting to be Surabaya, where a ship commandeered by a crooked-mustachioed Charles Grodin (you know a movie is in deep trouble when Grodin is asked to play a ruthless and stupid megalomaniac) is setting sail for an island off the coast. Just as it is about to sail, a long-tressed and heavily bearded Jeff Bridges saunters by and hops on board for reasons as yet unexplained. Shortly after the ship is on the high seas, a tumultuous storm occurs, and the ship receives a muted "Mayday" signal which they never follow up on.

It transpires that Grodin is a low level executive for Petronox, and he's leading an expedition with Rene Auberjonois (hopelessly miscast as a supposedly intelligent scientist) to an off-shore island which is perenially enshrouded by a heavy cloud of fog. The fog, Grodin is convinced, is caused by the emanation of fumes from boiling pools of oil (or something like that), and he sees this expedition as his chance to climb up a few rungs of the corporate ladder. At this point, Bridges appears and questions Grodin's claim. He is of the opinion that the fog is caused by the breathing of a large animal! Bridges plays a paleontologist from Princeton - I wonder if the university sued the production for painting its faculty in such bad light? Incensed that his plan to get rich and famous is being thrown awry by such a preposterous claim, Grodin angrily has Bridges led away below deck (to where the dungeon is located, I assume). On the way, Bridges struggles and screams and excitedly points out to sea - no, Kong doesn't appear. It seems Bridges has spied a teeny weeny tiny life-boat floating about a thousand miles away from the ship.

As the lifeboat approaches the ship (and not vice versa, mind you!), a female form is found lying in it, unconscious. Jessica Lange debuts in a black halter-neck gown made of flimsy material - exploitation immediately enters the viewers minds. When the captain gingerly feels for her pulse, he turns round and jubilantly exclaims "She's alive!", whereupon the ENTIRE CREW cheers! She is taken below deck, and because she remains unconscious, the captain and Grodin summon for Bridges - they figure a paleontologist is as good a doctor as they can get. Are you still reading this? It gets "better". Bridges then does the great doctorly act of breaking open a vial of smelling salts beneath Lange's nose and she awakens - this scene further establishes what idiots the captain and Grodin are.

Once awake, Lange proceeds to act as if there is nothing wrong with her at all. There is not a hint of displacement, fear, loss nor disorientation - in fact, there is no reaction at all. She begins to act like how she has acted in countless other movies since that time: in an affected, coy and exaggerated manner, complete with an overwrought tone of sultriness in her voice. There is a moment of instant bimbo-fication - when Lange opens her mouth. She proceeds to introduce herself as an aspiring starlet, named Dwan. No, that is NOT a typographical error. In yet another really stupid plot development, Lange spends precious minutes explaining that she wanted to be different and so changed her real name Dawn, to her stage name Dwan - duh, that's so intelligent and inventive! Bridges then chimes in to tell her his name is "merely Jack", and Lange utters the priceless: "Mere Jack! How could you be "mere" to me after saving my life?" As if that is not enough, she then begins to share her theory that she's destined to be a star; turns out the ship she was travelling on with a film director had been blown up (hence the earlier "Mayday" call), and she had been out on deck because she had refused an offer to watch Deep Throat, and had been flung from the deck onto a lifeboat that floated her to safety. Of all the implausibilities in the film, this is the second most stupid one. Lange then utters another priceless gem: "I'm probably the only person whose life's been saved by Deep Throat!"

At this point, director John Guillermin then offers us many many irrelevant sequences meant to propel Lange to stardom/notoriety. She is seen accepting clothes from the men, which she cuts and re-fashions into your standard Jane (as in Tarzan) wear. There is even a gratuitous shot of her emerging nude from a shower, clutching a towel to protect her modesty. On and on and on, we are treated to increasingly pointless and exploitative shots of Lange bouncing along, skipping along the deck. By the time the ship reaches shore, it is a relief that there will be no more of these scenes.

Up to this point, the film has been a lethargically paced and stupid mess. We're almost 45 minutes into the film and nothing has happened. Once on the island, the film becomes a fast-paced and stupid mess. The expedition discovers a high walled village, inside of which live a native tribe who are in the process of offering a nubile village girl as a bride to a mysterious beast. Catching sight of Lange, the villagers decide that she would make a better sacrifice and offer to exchange the village women for her. The expedition leaves in a huff, and we next see Bridges hauling sacks of supply onto a lifeboat, about to make an escape from the ship, when Lange happens to come by to say: "You're an aries, aren't you? I can tell by the shape of your ears." Chalk up another point for the school of stupid screenwriting. Needless to say, the villages paddle a raft to the ship and kidnap Lange. She is then trussed up in a revealing gown and left to await Kong, her destined groom.

An hour after the movie began, Kong finally appears. The filmmakers won a special Oscar for special effects, but I honestly cannot see why. Even measured by 1976 standards, the SFX here are rudimentary, crude and not at all deserving of the award. After many stupid scenes involving the expedition team's attempts to rescue Dwan, Kong and Dwan finally share a tender moment: he uses his finger to tickle her, conveniently pushing off her dress in the process. One wonders why - the size disparity between Kong and Dwan makes it highly unlikely that a creature that size would even bother with Dwan. Bridges finally appears to rescue her, but not before movie goers are treated to a giant snake that keeps Kong occupied long enough for the heroic duo to escape. We are left to guess exactly how many other giant animals there are residing on this island off the coast of Surabaya (incidentally, did the government sue for gross misrepresentation of their country?).

By the time Bridges and Lange make it back to where the expedition team is, Grodin has discovered that there is no commercially viable oil on the island, and has come up with a brilliant plan to use Kong in an advertising campaign! He muses that Exxon "put a tiger in your tank", so just imagine what Petronox can do with Kong! The audience reaction would be: !

Somehow they get the creature onboard the ship and sail back to USA - this is the most stupid implausibility in the script. Bridges has become a fierce animal rights activist, and Lange is convinced that the beast is her protector and her hero (nevermind he tried a little hanky panky with the tickling incident). The plot plods along to the conclusion, a media blitz unveiling Kong as Petronox's new mascot where all chaos breaks loose as the beast escapes and rampages through the streets of New York City, finally expiring as he falls from the top of the World Trade Centre. As the film ends, Bridges and Lange are left to stand ambiguously apart, a pair of lovers thwarted by a giant ape. But by then, we no longer care.

What can one say about a movie as bad as this? The script is purposefully low-brow and high camp, but director John Guillermin approaches the material as if he were directing the next Citizen Kane. There are many heavy handed touches, and everything about the film is treated with an earnest sense of serious film-making ill-suited to a trashy script. The performances are wildly incongruous. Grodin, still looking like a stressed out loser, except this time with a fake lop-sided mustache, is ill cast as the expedition leader. Singularly unconvincing and unintentionally funny, he is the weakest link in the main cast. Jeff Bridges, in an unfathomable career choice, turns in a very disinterested performance as the hero. He's got comparatively few dumb things to say, and even gets to make an impassioned speech about protecting animal rights, but on the whole, his performance is well below his usual standards. Still the most watchable member of the cast, but this is not a film worth fighting to get a look at. Jessica Lange, in a disastrous movie debut, at times shines slightly brighter than Bridges (even though he's got longer hair and is prettier) only because she has allowed the director to exploit her so brazenly and audaciously. Mostly, she seems to be playing a character from a 1930s movie. Her performance is woefully out-of-sync with the material and the direction, and even if this were an attempt to parody Fay Wray from the 1933 original, it is done with so little skill and to so little effect that she is reduced into a walking, talking mannequin. It is amazing that her career survived this risible debut.

On the whole, this campy remake has been roundly trounced by critics everywhere. Some people consider it a camp classic, but really, the term "classic" should not be bestowed upon films as poorly made as this one is. Inexplicably, Guillermin made a sequel ten years later in 1986, entitled King Kong Lives, starring one Linda Hamilton. Sigh.

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