Oh, King Kong Escapes is absolutely horrible. It features gratingly bad American
actors in critical roles, ugly monster design and story that feels like it was
designed to put its audience to bed as quickly as possible.
Here’s the story: a “research submarine” commanded by a
hunky American guy and crewed with a capable Japanese dude and a comely
American woman with indeterminate responsibilities, goes to an island in the
South Pacific. Of course, it’s that
island, and some pretty standard Kong-type stuff happens, including a fun
little Kong-on-dino battle for the ship’s bimbo. Kong gets captured, eventually, and there’s a battle with a
Mecha-Kong that exists for no other reason than to give its inventor the rather
amusing name of Doctor Hu. The
film winds up on the Empire State Building, for reasons I don’t entirely
recall, the ship’s bimbo screams a lot.
But I didn’t care about Kong, or the bimbo, or He-Captain,
or much of anything here. King Kong Escapes conjures no sense of wonder, danger, or delight. It gives us no characters of interest
and does nothing to compel us to watch it all the way through. It’s just bad. Bad bad bad. I wouldn’t even see it to mock it. Neither should you.
