Monthly Archives: May 2020

Jaws (1975) | Steven Spielberg

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Roy Scheider stars as police chief Martin Brody of Amity, a Long Island resort community just about to enjoy its most popular season of the year, in the sun and fun of the 4th of July.  All is not idyllic on this day, however.  A teenage girl has been found washed up on the beach, apparently the victim of a shark attack.  Brody’s instinct is to close the beach, but he pulls back when the mayor of Amity reminds him how important it is to keep the tourists coming, warning that news of a shark in the water could cost the community dearly.  Meanwhile, the attacks continue. Try as they might to keep a lid on things, they are soon forced with a decision to close the beach or catch the shark themselves.  Enlisting the help of a wealthy oceanographer (Richard Dreyfuss) and charismatic shark hunter (Shaw), Brody sets to the ocean in order to lure the large Great White shark near to go for the kill.

Steven Spielberg directs this shocker on the sea from the novel by Peter Benchley.

King Kong Lives (1986) | John Guillermin

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In this sequel to the 1976 remake of Kong Kong, none of the original cast returns, except in archival footage shown in the intro depicting Kong after getting shot down from the top of the World Trade Center and falling to the streets below. We come to learn that Kong (Peter Elliott) improbably survived, existing in a coma for ten years on life support in a giant lab facility in Atlanta awaiting a giant artificial heart to replace the organic one that can no longer support him without medical assistance. Kong also needs lots of ape plasma for the surgery but there aren’t apes like him to give blood. The lead heart surgeon, Dr. Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton), laments that only a miracle can save Kong.

That miracle arrives when the soldier-of-fortune Hank Mitchell (Brian Kerwin) discovers another giant ape while scouting for diamonds in the jungles of Borneo. He finds a way to bring the female ape back to the United States for fortune and glory. The lab needs her plasma but the two apes sense the presence of each other, which makes it particularly dangerous for any humans trying to keep the apes from doing what apes want to do naturally.  The apes escape their confinement and run away as fugitives, but the scientists can’t have these two roaming the Great Smoky Mountains wreaking havoc, so the military, led by the tenacious Colonel Nevitt (John Ashton), is called in to take whatever measures and necessary. It’s up to Dr. Franklin and Hank Mitchell to lead them to safety somehow. John Guillermin directs.

King Kong (1976) | John Guillermin

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In this remake of the 1933 classic of the same name, Petrox, a gasoline corporation, sends an expedition to an uncharted island near Micronesia obscured by perpetual fog to find out if there’s oil there. Stowing away is Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), a paleontologist from Princeton University curious if the reports of a giant primate residing on there are true. they pick up another unexpected passenger in Dwan (Jessica Lange), an aspiring American actress adrift in a lifeboat.

What they find instead of useable oil is a gorilla six times the size of a normal ape, who is the god to which the native villagers sacrifice women, of which Dwan becomes the next in line. Kong takes a liking to Dwan but gets captured by the Petrox people who take him back to the United States to gain publicity. Problems arise when the ape escapes and begins destroying the city searching for Dwan. Charles Grodin Costars. John Guillerman directs this Dino De Laurentiis production fro a Lorenzo Semple Jr. Script.

Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981) | John Derek

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Set in 1910, virginal Jane Parker (Bo Derek), a feminist who thinks women should be able to explore the world the same as men. She travels to Africa to find the father she never knew, renowned explorer James Parker (Richard Harris). James, who abandoned her when she was an infant, thinks Jane is the spitting image of his late wife, which brings up all manner of incestuous feelings. James continues his safari to find the fabled elephant graveyard where precious ivory exists. Jane insists on coming along despite her father’s protests. Tarzan’s primal yelling makes their native entourage nervous, forbidden to travel into the land occupied by the famous “white ape-man” who stands, according to myth, ten feet tall.

Proceeding cautiously, Jane bathes in the ocean, attracting a ferocious lion, saved by the mysterious ape-man of myth. James determines Tarzan (Miles O’Keeffe) will be their next kill, especially after he kidnaps Jane, though she seems more than willing to get caught.

John Derek directs.

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) | Hugh Hudson

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Based on elements within Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 novel, “Tarzan of the Apes,” Greystoke begins in the late 19th century, where a young couple born into Scottish nobility, Jack Clayton and his pregnant wife Alice, find themselves shipwrecked off the coast of Western Africa. Months later, they give birth to a boy who quickly becomes an orphan when his mother dies of malaria, and his father is killed in an altercation with nearby apes. One of the apes adopts the human baby as her own. When the boy grows into a man, he takes on the alpha male to become the leader of the tribe.

Meanwhile, an expedition arrives nearby for specimens for the British Musem. The expedition gets viciously attacked by a native village. Surviving the slaughter is a Belgian named Phillippe d’Arnot, whose life is saved and wounds tended by the mysterious ape-man. Phillippe realizes his savior is the son of the married couple, the Claytons, who built the abandoned cabin in the vicinity. Dubbing the jungle man “John Clayton’, d’Arnot teaches him to speak, move, and behave like an aristocrat from civilized society before taking him to his ancestral estate in Scotland to reunite with his grandfather, the Earl of Greystoke. There, John develops feelings for grandfather’s ward, an American-raised woman named Jane Parker.

Christopher Lambert, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm, Andie MacDowell, James Fox star. Hugh Hudson directs.