By Chad Plambeck

“No one cry when Jaws die. But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. Intellectuals gonna love Kong - even film buffs who love the first Kong gonna love ours. Why? Because I give them no crap. I no spend two, three million to do quick business. I spend 24 million on my Kong. I give them quality. I got here a great love story, a great adventure. And she rated PG. For everybody.”

That infamous quote by producer Dino de Laurentis is taken from the October 25, 1976 issue of Time Magazine and it refers to his much-ballyhooed remake of “King Kong.” If the movie had turned out half as good as artist John Berkey’s conceptual paintings, instead of the big steaming pile of crap it was, I probably wouldn’t have been as outraged when another remake of Kong was suggested by Universal Studios in the mid-’90s.

Sure, Peter Jackson’s name was attached to it – who doesn’t love Dead Alive? – and I personally thought The Frighteners was great, but this is a franchise that has been very dear to me. I wasn’t sure if I trusted Jackson with the project. Well, not necessarily Jackson himself, but you have to remember there was a period of time, for about five years, after the first Men in Black, that I can’t name one big special effects movie that didn’t reek. These were dark days indeed for the sci-fi and fantasy film fan and I wanted Kong to have no part in these plotless special-effect orgies.

In fact Universal put the Kong project on hiatus due to Tristar’s updated version of Godzilla. Apparently, neither company wanted two giant monster movies competing against each other. “Tristarzilla” was a dud and it looked like Kong’s remake was dead in the water so Jackson moved on to another pet project written by some guy named Tolkien.

Will the rest be history?

To read the rest of this article, please order B-Movies Quarterly #3.