Giant Beasts

King Kong (Two-Disc Special Edition)

"Now you see it. You're amazed. You can't believe it. Your eyes open wider. It's horrible, but you can't look away. There's no chance for you. No escape. You're helpless, helpless. There's just one chance, if you can scream. Throw your arms across your eyes and scream, scream for your life!" And scream Fay Wray does most famously in this monster classic, one of the greatest adventure films of all time, which even in an era of computer-generated wizardry remains a marvel of stop-motion animation. Robert Armstrong stars as famed adventurer Carl Denham, who is leading a "crazy voyage" to a mysterious, uncharted island to photograph "something monstrous ... neither beast nor man." Also aboard is waif Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) and Bruce Cabot as big lug John Driscoll, the ship's first mate. King Kong's first half-hour is steady going, with engagingly corny dialogue ("Some big, hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and bang, he cracks up and goes sappy") and ominous portent that sets the stage for the horror to come. Once our heroes reach Skull Island, the movie comes to roaring, chest-thumping, T. rex-slamming, snake-throttling, pterodactyl-tearing, native-stomping life. King Kong was ranked by the American Film Institute as among the 50 best films of the 20th century. Kong making his last stand atop the Empire State Building is one of the movies' most indelible and iconic images. --Donald Liebenson

DVD features
Not surprisingly, the eighth wonder of the world's DVD treatment is nothing short of spectacular. The newly restored, digitally mastered print of the 1933 version of King Kong is sharp, well balanced, and given that this film is seventy years old, has very few scratches or blemishes. The restoration is nothing short of amazing. What may frustrate some is the audio. Though crystal clear, it is still in 2.0 Mono. The soundtrack on Kong is such an integral part of the film you really wished they could have pulled it out to at least 2.0 Surround; but this is a minor criticism. The bulk of the commentary track is by visual effects veterans Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston joyfully discussing the special effects of the film and discussing why King Kong is such a favorite and important film to the community of visual effects artists. Spliced between their commentaries are colorful and humorous anecdotes from director from Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray. The two documentaries on disc two run over three and half hours long. I Am Kong! The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper is an engaging documentary on the renegade, Hemingway-like director. It is fascinating to learn that Cooper was every bit the adventurer that the fictional director Carl Denham in King Kong was in the film. RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World is a two and a half hour documentary broken into 7 parts: "The Origins of King Kong," "Willis O'Brien and Creation," "Cameras Roll on Kong," "The Eighth Wonder," "A Milestone in Visual Effects," "Passion, Sound and Fury," "The Mystery of the Lost Spider Pit Sequence," and "King Kong's Legacy." Also included is complete footage of the legendary "The Lost Spider Pit Sequence." Presenting the segments are various film historians and filmmakers including Rudy Behlmer, Cooper biographer Mark Cotta Vaz, the Chiodo Brothers (of Team America: World Police special effects fame), and directors John Landis and Peter Jackson. Here you will learn everything you would ever want to know about the making and importance of King Kong, including that the producer/director team of Cooper and Schoedsack played the pilots who shoot Kong off the Empire State Building. The highly anticipated, long-awaited release of King Kong will meet most viewers' expectations, and exceed everyone's else. --Rob Bracco

DVD Features:
Audio Commentary
Documentaries
Other
Theatrical Trailer

Monster from Green Hell

A test rocket containing scientific experiments, including a wasps' nest, crashes in the jungles of Africa. Radiation from outer space infects the wasps, creating a hive of titanic atomic mutations as big as a house. These hideous creatures have an appetite for human flesh and proceed to munch their way across the dark continent. An expedition of scientists are sent to investigate the strange happenings and native disappearances. Volcanic thrills come rocketing to the screen as science once again creates mutations born out of the radioactive world of the Atomic Age.

The Screaming Skull/Attack of the Giant Leeches - Drive-In Discs Vol.1

In an effort to re-create a genuine drive-in experience in the comfort of your own living room, Elite Entertainment has paired up two horror films with nothing in common, tossed in a couple of cartoons, and dredged up a night's worth of intermission fillers. Alex Nicol's The Screaming Skull is an eerily effective little psycho-thriller about a newlywed (Peggy Webber) who moves into her husband's secluded mansion and becomes haunted by the ghost of his first wife. Borrowing liberally from Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (in particular the titular skull that follows our traumatized heroine around ), Nicol gives it a Southern Gothic twist with a decaying old mansion, a "slow," childlike handyman, and a strangling, overgrown setting. The Giant Leeches is another story, a swamp trash take on Creature from the Black Lagoon with floppy rubber creatures trawling the everglades for victims. They're as scary as a garbage bag and about as distinct too, but the real fun is the film's hothouse melodrama of hick poachers and hot-to-trot hillbilly adulterers. The giant bloodsuckers are explained away in classic fashion: "Maybe our proximity to Cape Canaveral has something to do with it."

Elite's transfers are better than one would expect, a little soft perhaps but clear, clean, and intact, and they've both been effectively letterboxed. They've also gone the extra mile to complete the drive-in experience with the alternate "Distort-O" audio option. Select the track and listen to the glorious low-fi reproduction of the tinny, buzzy drive-in speaker sound. --Sean Axmaker

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Beginning of the End

Leapin' locusts! It's giant-insect time again, only this time the radiation from an agricultural experiment has turned Chicago into a breeding ground for gargantuan grasshoppers. It's all courtesy of '50s sci-fi schlockmeister Bert I. Gordon of The Amazing Colossal Man fame, and with Peter Graves as the nominal bug-busting hero, it's no wonder the guys at MST3K decided to roast this 1957 turkey on their popular TV show. But which is funnier, the movie itself or the skewering it gets from the snickering silhouettes of Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo? No matter, because you can have it both ways on this dubious DVD--plain or nutty! Some of the MST3K gags are cleverly twisted for trivia buffs (as when a cop approaches a wrecked car and Tom Servo says, "Uh... Miss Mansfield?" or when the sight of falling grasshoppers yields the ad-lib "Carry on our businesssssss..."). There are more hits than misses, and the movie's every bit as awful... er, great... as it sounds! --Jeff Shannon

A mad scientist attempts to drive his captive, Mike Nelson, insane by forcing him to watch B-Movies. This episode's feature is "The Beginning of the End" (1957, 76 min.) - An enterprising journalist investigates the story of giant grasshoppers accidentally created at the Illinois State experimental farm. She struggles to save the city of Chicago, despite military resistance in their efforts to cover-up.

Roger Corman Retrospective, Vol. 1 DVD

The Giant Gila Monster / The Killer Shrews