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2 February 2012 - 10:49pmAvailable formats:
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What’s really a wonder is how any audience could manage to sit through this painfully-long 2005 remake by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) without the benefit of an iRiff commentary. If you thought the previous 1976 remake by Dino De Laurentiis was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Jack Black and Naomi Watts co-star, along with Adrien Brody’s nose, and more CGI dinosaurs and bugs than you can shake a banana at, plus the King himself (and we don’t mean Elvis).
LAWRENCE WOOLSEY presents this first installment of FANBOY SCI-FI THEATER, while DAN ANGELO and his robot pals—TIM GIZMO and ART T. ROBOT—provide the commentary, making this iRiff more fun than a barrel of (giant) monkeys!
PLEASE NOTE: This iRiff is for the original, theatrical version of KING KONG, not the later extended edition. The theatrical version of this film is long enough, and watching the extended edition may be harmful to your mental health...and to ours. Do not attempt to watch the extended edition of KING KONG. You have been warned.
Is this for the Theatrical version or the Extended version?
"Is this for the Theatrical version or the Extended version?"
Since RiffTrax usually goes with the original theatrical version of films rather than later extended versions, we are doing the same. Also, KING KONG is so long and boring as it is that I don't think we could have made it through an extended version. My God, the horror!
Recorded the movie off of On Demand when it was first made available and only saw it once. Now I remember why. That is one long flick. The opening scenes of New York during the Depression are unintentionally timely. I haven't been watching the news lately since it's pretty bad and don't expect to be reminded of the real world while watching a riffed movie. However the rest of the movie drifted quickly away from reality like a seedy tramp steamer and never found it's way back. Skull Island makes absolutely no sense with its abundant human-built ruins and wide spread monster infestation. If people were able to build so extensively where were the dinosaur then. The native birds suffered an attack of Devolution? T-Rexes swinging on vines? The riffers point out a lot of the strange aspects of the movie. I think I particularly like "Tim Gizmo's" delivery, if I have the names straight. He has a way letting the air of much of the fake awe inspiring scenes, the action scenes, the other scenes that make King Kong a marathon to watch. Pretty good.
When I re-authored this I included as usual the intro in the menu which was a tribute to MST3K and tried to establish a premise for the riffers. It's over 5 minutes long. Since the movie itself is 188 min. I guess it makes sense but it not necessary to enjoy the riff.
Thanks for the feedback! There is a documentary included with the KING KONG DVD that explains some of the history of Skull Island. There was a previous human civilization that built some of the ruins seen on the island in the movie, but they gradually died out as the dinosaurs took over, and they were reduced to the small group of natives living on the rocky coast of the island. There was also a book that explains the history of Skull Island, although one shouldn't have to know all of that to enjoy the movie...which is probably one of many reasons why so many people DIDN'T enjoy it. According to the documentary and book, the dinosaurs on the island continued to evolve over the years, which is why the Brontosauruses were actually Brontosauruses and NOT Apatosauruses, and the T-Rex were now called Vastatosaurus or V-Rex.
Tim Gizmo and Lawrence Woolsey (Does anyone out there recognize that name? Like Clayton Forrester, it was taken from a movie, although one more obscure than WAR OF THE WORLDS) are both played by the same person, who is also a stage actor, which is probably why his delivery is so much better than the rest of us amateurs (Hopefully, the rest of us will improve as we continue to work together). He REALLY hates this movie and refused to watch it more than once, so he skipped rehearsal (Just think how much better he might have sounded if he'd rehearsed!), while I was stuck watching it over a dozen times to come up with the jokes and edit the dialogue. Some of us have all the fun!
I thought this iRiff was really funny.......however, the jokes need to come much faster and have more of them (yeah, I know, it is hard to fill up a 3+ hour movie with jokes). Still, a very fine effort.! Congrats.
Thanks for your review. Personally, I don't believe in loading a movie up with too many jokes. The RiffTrax guidelines for creating an iRiff even recommend spacing out jokes in order to avoid talking over the movie's dialogue and to give the audience time to laugh at each joke before moving on to the next one. Some of the other iRiffs I've checked out seem to have people talking constantly just for the sake of talking, which results in many jokes that seem out of place or just plain aren't funny. As you point out, it's hard to maintain being funny in a 3-hour movie, but I think we managed to do so by pacing ourselves rather than burning out by doing too many jokes. Anyway, I doubt we'll be taking on any more 3-hour movies in the future, as it's a LOT of work. Our next project is a series of GAMERA films that were not released by Sandy Frank and therefore were never spoofed on MST3K, and each movie is only 90-minutes long, which should be a lot easier to work with. We'll see if it's easier to come up with more jokes for a shorter film, although I'm still a firm believer in quality over quantity.