286. King Kong (1933)

Starring: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot

Director: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack

Running Time: 100 mins

King Kong is an American film about a movie director who sets out on a daring trip to a remote island in order to find, and film Kong, a giant gorilla, labelled as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’. However, Kong falls in love with the movie’s leading lady, and after he is captured and brought back to New York, he realises that beauty and the beast can never be in harmony.

This was actually a really good film. I’m occasionally sceptical about much older, black-and-white films; I think they’re generally boring, undramatic, and very slow, but this film just blew all of those stereotypes right out of the water.

The story of this film was very interesting, and although it didn’t immediately grab my attention, once Kong turned up about 40 minutes into the film, it all became extremely exciting to watch, and pretty cool too, especially in some of the mammoth fight scenes between the gorilla and the dinosaurs.

Also, I was massively impressed by the special effects in this film. Considering this film was made in 1933, I thought the effects would just be laughable, however they weren’t at all. The stop motion was fantastically done, the settings were realistic, and gave a great sense of scale, so it was very good for a movie made 80 years ago.

Overall, I’ll give this an 8.2, because it had a good story, was very interesting and very cool to watch, and it can easily be viewed as an ultimate cinema classic.