Sunday Munch!

I'm marking this as a first time watch, but there's no way I didn't watch this at least once when I was dead young. My favourite bit would probably have been when he drops that woman to her death out of her bedroom window.

I can see why King Kong had a load of stuff cut out of it after it was released and the Hays Code came along and made filmmakers miserable for a bunch of years. It really is a splendidly brutal film at times as Kong dumps people to their doom, shakes people off a log so they plummet down a chasm, eats people, bats planes out of the air, fucks up dinosaurs and generally shows himself to be a bad motherfucker.

That's why I enjoyed King Kong so much though. The fact that it's prepared to be so brutal and uncompromising with its violence, right down to the genuinely sad way he's peppered with gunfire and plunges to his iconic death. Watching those people fall down that chasm is awesome because it's not satisfied with just showing us one and presuming that we got the point is great. Here, watch the next few as well!

Its unsubtlety definitely works in its favour and it's something that every good monster movie remembers - just let the monster create absolute mayhem with no compromises at all. It's just a shame that we don't get to see Kong yomping through the Big Apple some more to see what other chaos he can create. That said, its unsubtlety does create some issues elsewhere.

Of course, it's not just Kong who flings people around, the dinosaurs get in on the act during some more fabulous violence. Possibly my favourite part here is the scene where they gun down a dinosaur (I don't know what it is, Ross Geller) and they do a great job of showing how massive this thing is by having the party of interlopers walk slowly from one end of its body to another. Simple things like that are often forgotten in films like this by way of showing how gargantuan these things can be.

It takes a while to get going, admittedly. But who cares. It's King Kong.