King Kong – 1976 (WINNER)
I can see exactly why this movie won for best special effects. But let me tell you, the effects didn’t hold up well over time. By today’s standards, some of the effects in this movie were laughably terrible. But it was the mid-70s and King Kong did some innovative things that really wowed audiences of the day. I liked the giant mechanical hand that held the beautiful Jessica Lang. It looked pretty good and moved pretty smoothly, if slowly. But it is difficult to focus on what they did well because it pales in comparison to what they got wrong.
Where to start? Well, let’s start with Kong, himself. The ape suit looked good enough, except that the actor in the suit, Rick Baker, moved not like a gorilla, but like a human. In fact, King Kong was shaped like a man and not an ape. Many of the green screening effects were done very well, while others had a clear black line around the subject. Or the worst offender was a scene in which Jeff Bridges is hiding from Kong inside an alcove in the side of a cliff as the beast tries to grab him. In the wide shots we can clearly see the angular cut-out around Jeff Bridges, and when he moved outside the edge of the cut-out, he disappeared. Then we go to a close-up shot in which Kong’s giant hand is suddenly slow and undexterous.
Another bad effect showed up three times in the movie, once when the men fell from the log bridge, another time when Jessica Lang fell into Kong’s cell on the boat, and again when Kong fell from the top of the World Trade Center. Oh my goodness, these looked awful! The plummeting actors looked really fake against a backdrop that obviously didn’t belong behind them. The motion of their falling looked slow and strangely clunky. It is hard to describe.
And then there was the giant snake which appeared ridiculously plastic and mechanical, not just in the way it looked, but in how it moved. However, I will say that when Kong ripped its jaws apart, it looked pretty cool. But then there was the forty-foot-tall robotic travesty. They actually built a life-sized mechanical Kong, but it looked absolutely laughable. It wasn’t shaped right at all, and it moved like a piece of heavy machinery, especially its arms. The legs on which it stood were impossibly straight and immobile. It was a very unconvincing illusion.
The climax could have been cool, except that when Kong was being shot to shreds by powerful machineguns mounted on helicopters. For one thing, they couldn’t seem to figure out how big the helicopters were supposed to be, as they seemed to change sizes in separate shots. And the way they moved through the sky whenever they shared the screen with Kong looked as if they were being filmed from another flying craft. They didn’t move quite right behind the gorilla. And once again, those pesky black lines around Kong gave away the green-screen effect. I mean, they should have been able to hide them against the black sky, but they were clearly visible. I remember really liking the effects in this film when I was a kid. But now, I have to say, they look pretty shoddy.