King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

King Kong is a deeply weird and transcendent work of imagination that exists outside of age and time, a permanent thumbprint-on-the-subsconcious film-dream, and a vulgar spectacle/frozen time capsule piece that shows off the full derangement of the white male American brain (I have one of those, and I've been nuts since birth). It's also a lot of damn fun and must have been mindblowing to audiences walking in cold in 1933.

I can't remember a part of my life where I wasn't aware of King Kong. Both the 1933 and 1976 film versions were on television constantly when I was growing up (though the '33 version was mostly relegated to early Sunday mornings, where the '30s and '40s films were often dumped in the early '80s), and one of the first comic books I repeatedly devoured after learning to read was an oversized, full-color adaptation of Kong that my mother or grandmother bought for me at a garage sale when I was in preschool. Like Sesame Street, King Kong was just something that always existed, a foundational piece of my childhood mind.

By now, after multiple film, television, and comic book adaptations, sequels, and rip-offs, the story is familiar to most of you, so I'll forego the plot synopsis. What I'll attempt to describe instead is the odd sensation of childhood memory and adult experience crashing into each other while watching Kong in the present.

As a child, the film's opening scenes were just something one had to endure until the ship makes it to Skull Island, the conversation of adults sounding to my young ears the way the grownups sound in the Peanuts cartoons. Quit making with the yakety-yak and get to Skull Island, you jabronis. As an adult, these scenes are hilarious, skillfully paced, and great at building atmosphere, mood, and character. Cooper and Schoedsack poke fun at themselves, masculinity, show business, and the stereotype of the rugged action/adventure director who would do anything to get his pictures made, especially put the lives of his cast and crew in danger.

The sexism is so ridiculously over-the-top that it's obviously, at least in part, meant as self-parody. Director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) laments having to include a woman in one of his films for the first time because of the beauty and the beast angle he envisions for his latest story. A crew member on the ship replies, "You've never had a dame in any of your other pictures. Why put a dame in this one?"

Sailor John Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) initially resents the presence of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray, who worked with co-director Schoedsack and actor Armstrong on another weird island movie, The Most Dangerous Game, the previous year) on his usually all-male sea voyages and gives her the business every time he sees her. Until, of course, he falls in love with her. When he gets the nerve to profess his love, Ann says, "But you hate women!" to which Driscoll shyly replies, "Aw, you ain't women." Wray is famous for her full-throated screaming in Kong, but she's a likable, funny, and natural actor in the early scenes with a luminous beauty and charisma that the camera loves.     

The early scenes on Skull Island filled me with awe when I was a kid, but the racism bums me out as an adult. So much entertainment I consumed as a kid depicted black people from Africa and island nations as superstitious, easily frightened, barbaric primitives who could not be trusted around white women. They were simultaneously novelties, threats, and expendable pieces of a story. I internalized so much of this without noticing, and King Kong is unfortunately a part of that, even as the powerful images and the scale of the sets and extras in these scenes still visually leave a great impression. These scenes don't read as malicious, just ignorant, and a few of these characters get human moments, but it's the part of Kong that has aged the worst.

The remainder of the film is a whirlwind of action and incredible images from Skull Island's giant monsters, lush wildlife, and rugged terrain and Kong's tragic adventures in the streets and on the skyscrapers of New York City. The New York scenes, especially, continue to astonish. The scenes of Kong in chains on a Broadway stage, his giant face peeping in the windows of apartments, the attack on the high line train car, and his ascent up the Empire State Building and the plane's-eye-view zooms toward him as he stands atop it are almost frightening in their visual power and presence and have lost none of their strange beauty. I felt a fusion of my childhood and adult selves while watching the film's second half, and I'm still amazed at how much emotion the special effects team managed to create in the face of a stop-motion animated ape-gorilla hybrid. 

The 1933 King Kong is still the greatest of the Kong film adaptations, a complex, weird stew of sexuality, comedy, horror, adventure, fantasy, male and racial anxiety taken to artistically absurd lengths, show business spectacle, and the vicarious thrill of a giant creature smashing things to bits, with some of the most expressive dream images of Manhattan ever committed to celluloid (yes, I know it's mostly studio sets). So familiar, so eternally strange.

Beyond the Darkness aka Buried Alive (Joe D'Amato, 1979)

Another weird, wild Italian horror film from the seemingly endless supply of weird, wild Italian horror films released between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, Beyond the Darkness is a sick, twisted, unpredictable, and deeply strange Psycho-inspired shocker with a few truly disgusting scenes, lots of dark humor, some genuinely creepy scares, and plenty of atmosphere and detail. When I wasn't looking away in disgust, I really enjoyed this one.

I knew I was in for something quite a bit different than a routine slasher film when the first two post-credits scenes involved cult movie actress Franca Stoppi showing pictures of a happy couple to another woman, who then begins to violently stab a voodoo doll with pins while Stoppi grins malevolently, and a young man unloading the carcass of a baboon onto a medical table inside a sprawling Italian villa. "Hell yeah," I thought to myself. "Weird times are about to be had."

Those weird times soon begin to make some narrative sense (though I don't require narrative sense to enjoy a movie). Iris (Stoppi) is the housekeeper/caretaker of the villa, and the guardian/twisted mother figure of the young man who owns it (you guessed it, the guy with the baboon). That young man, Frank (Kieran Canter), inherited the villa from his parents, who died in a car accident when Frank was a tween. Now Frank is a young adult who enjoys taxidermy (the baboon finally makes sense), blank stares from his piercing blue eyes, and his fiancee Anna (Cinzia Monreale), the victim of the voodoo doll mischief. The voodoo soon works its magic, and Anna falls deathly ill. Frank pays a visit to her in the hospital, they make out, she dies. He watches her final moments with more arousal than grief, digs up her body after the funeral, removes her guts, replaces her real eyes with fakes, dresses her, and puts her in his double bed. Real normal shit.

Meanwhile, the jealous Iris manipulates and controls Frank, playing both the authoritarian mother figure and a weird sort of wife role, making him suck her breast and giving him hand jobs while he stares at his dead fiancee. You know, real normal shit. They strike up a deal where Frank will marry her on the condition that he keep his dead fiancee in the house. Frank also has a habit of luring attractive young women to the villa, and he and Iris murder them and dispose of their corpses in a variety of gruesome ways. Iris becomes more and more jealous of Anna's corpse, detectives come around looking for a missing jogger, and a suspicious funeral home employee secretly snoops around the premises on multiple occasions. Things come to a boiling point when Anna's twin sister Elena stops by the villa to say goodbye before leaving the country, leading to a pretty sweet shock ending.

Beyond the Darkness is a wild ride, with more humor than you would expect from the above plot synopsis (shout-out to the disco dancing scene and the hilarious boogie moves of actress Simonetta Allodi, credited as Disco Girl) and, as my wife pointed out after we watched it, lots of real-time detail, like a scene where Frank changes a flat tire and another scene where Iris tries on different dresses until she finds one she likes for the evening. The characters are interesting and unusual, and Stoppi is so weird and so great as Iris.

Beyond the Darkness also contains some supremo gross-out moments, which has led to much censorship of the film. I had to look away when Frank rips the fingernails off of one victim (finally found something that makes me as squeamish as hypodermic needles going into arm veins), but the film also includes gut and eyeball removal, sawing off of limbs, and the dissolving of bodies in acid. Maybe the grossest scene of all, though, contains no violence at all, and is merely a closeup of Iris enthusiastically and vigorously chowing down on a gruel-like stew after one of the murders. Get some table manners, Iris. This scene also grosses Frank out, and the guy loves gross shit. If you have the stomach for it, Beyond the Darkness is an unusual, character-filled, detail-packed horror movie.

Director Joe D'Amato had a long, prolific career in Italian cinema until his death from a heart attack in 1999 at the age of 62. He made a steady living as a cinematographer under his real name, Aristide Massaccesi, and his credits in this role add up to a whopping 169 films. He worked as a camera operator on 71 films, a screenwriter on 47, a producer on 27, an actor on 15, an editor on six, an assistant director on six, a crew member on another handful, and a director on a mind-boggling 197 films. No wonder the guy died of a heart attack.

In order to keep his various projects separate and keep working at the prolific pace he loved, D'Amato used a staggering number of pseudonyms for the staggering variety of genres he directed. He made horror films, spaghetti westerns, action movies, fantasy movies, softcore sex movies, and hardcore pornos under dozens of names, including Hugo Clevers, Raf de Palma, Dario Donati, Dirk Frey, Arizona Massachusett (lol), Igor Horwess, Zak Roberts, Chana Lee Sun, Robert Yip, and my favorite, only used once, Dick Spitfire. D'Amato was his horror name, and the one most often connected to his films today. His directing credits include such titles as More Sexy Canterbury Tales, Stay Away from Trinity ... When He Comes to Eldorado, God Is My Colt .45, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, Porno Holocaust, Ator the Fighting Eagle, 2020 Texas Gladiators, Paprika: The Last Italian Whore, Sex Penitentiary, Lunch Party, Flamenco Ecstasy, Cop Sucker, House of Anal Perversions, and multiple entries in the Emanuelle series. It's Joe D'Amato's aka Arizona Massachusett's world, we only live in it.