Rent King Kong (1933)

Monster Classic. - King Kong review by Steve

Merian C. Cooper started from an image of a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building, with fighter planes swirling over its head. Edgar Wallace wrote most of the rest of the plot, though it clearly leans on Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Willis O'Brien worked on the landmark modelling for that film's adaptation in 1925 and returned to lead the incredible monster animations of Kong on Skull Island.

Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is a megalomaniacal film producer who takes a crew off the known map to research and exploit a legend about a land of giant creatures. He keeps his real mission a secret, especially from Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), a starving ingenue he finds fainting in a queue for a soup kitchen in New York who he proposes should star in his film.  

King Kong feels like an extreme experience  not just because of O'Brien's inspirational all time great effects, but also the sheer amount of death. Its body count is off the chart. And because of the crazily entitled behaviour of Denham, who takes Kong back to wreck New York.

This is a prime example of how much sound was now able to contribute to thirties horror. Fay Wray's screaming is legendary. The cries of the beasts are fearsome. And Max Steiner's thrilling score is all over the climax of the film in a way not yet typical. King Kong is a triumph of technical achievement, but it is also a tale of exotic exploration, anthropological hokum, crazy entrepreneurship, two fisted action and Fay Wray in her underwear.