Review of Congo (1972) by Ashley H — 05 Mar 2012

1993. Jurassic Park is the hottest movie of the year and the film's source material, a novel written by Michael Crichton, also becomes the year's hottest book. So what does Hollywood do? It purchases the rights to many other Crichton novels and for the next six years, audiences get a film adaptation of one of his works almost every twelve months, some high profile examples being Rising Sun, Disclosure, Sphere, The 13th Warrior, and Congo. Now Congo aims to do for apes what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs. Let's just say it fails in every aspect. I'm sure the novel is much better, but this film is as disposable now as it was upon its release.

Let's start with the effects. Clearly Stan Winston was taking a day off, because I haven't seen gorillas this fake looking since the 1976 King Kong. Amy, the sort of talking gorilla looks like a walking carpet with a dollar store mask taped over her head. It's laughably awful. The killer apes look even worse.

Now on to the story. A diamond expedition goes horribly wrong and the psychotic owner of the company sends a doctor/former CIA op/ex-daughter in law to find out what happened. Accompanied by the usual cliche of characters including a mercenary, a greedy merchant, and a scientist who wants to set Amy free in the wild, this new rescue team soon discovers what happened to the team and that the same fate is in store for them. You would think that this premise would lead to a fun-filled B-movie. Nope. The movie is hopelessly boring, and really only contains two big gorilla vs human action sequences. Both of them look cheesy, horribly edited together, and possessing so many unintentionally funny moments that you wonder how any producer could have released this into the theatres expecting people to enjoy it. A flop in its time, I'm sure Congo has broken even by now, but the 4.7 imdb rating reflects that most people still don't think much of it, and frankly, neither do I.