Konga (1961)

In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought the many riffs on King Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.

Swamp Thing (1982)

1982 turned out to be one of the most influential years in genre filmmaking, hosting movies that reverberated whether they were an initial box office success or not. In a time when ET, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and Poltergeist all premiered within weeks of each other, there was also John Carpenter’s The Thing, a critical and financial failure at the time that nonetheless ushered in a new wave of revisionist monster movies, taking the ideas from the classic creature features of the fifties and revitalizing them with dark humour and special effects that realized or exceeded people’s imaginations. Later that same year you also saw Q -The Winged Serpent, another movie in that vein, but the real kick-off for this trend was Wes Craven’s adaptation of Swamp Thing—and while just as indebted to the classic tropes of the old monster movies as The Thing (and was also a financial disappointment at release, leaving Craven in career doldrums until he started working on something called A Nightmare on Elm Street), it represents a very different sort of revisionist take. While The Thing took the paranoia and unknowable monstrosity of its fifties predecessor (and the short story it’s based on) to its utmost extreme, Swamp Thing is a movie about a tragic accident of science, as many of the classic monsters were, who then becomes a hero, playing into the sympathies of a whole generation who questioned why the Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein had to die before the movie ended.