December 8, 2005
King Kong battles the dinosaur in 1933 original film.
With the opening of the new King Kong movie directed by Peter Jackson just a week away, the giant ape seems to be everywhere. Kiss of the Beast, a show featuring more than 15 Kong movies, runs through December 18 at the Federation Square’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.
The exhibition Kiss of the Beast – Gorillas, Wild Beasts and Monsters in Art and Film features some 100 works, including film and the moving image, posters, sculptures, paintings, prints and rare books, and a film program opened in Brisbane at the Queensland Art Gallery on November 16. The exhibit minus the film program will remain on display at the museum until January 22.
Kathryn Weir, head of cinema at the Queensland Art Gallery, says: “It’s been a wild ride researching and preparing the exhibition and arranging the film program. Dr Ted Gott (her co-curator, senior curator of international art at the National Gallery of Victoria) and I put the proposal together late last year, and it was accepted by the gallery early this year. This scale of exhibition usually involves three years of preparation.”
“King Kong’s most enduring leitmotif is the fair maiden, helpless in the clutches of the monstrous, aggressive gorilla,” the exhibition catalogue notes. “It goes without saying the confrontation between Kong and Fay Wray is what makes the movie.
“It was beauty killed the beast,” says Weir, quoting the famous last line of the classic.
“While Kiss of the Beast arrives from Brisbane without the attendant exhibition curated by the National Gallery of Victoria’s Ted Gott (ACMI is hosting the Stanley Kubrick exhibition until January 29), it remains a diverse assembly of titles that puts King Kong in a thematic framework, placing the Beauty and the Beast myth alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution.”
Myself, being a Godzilla fan from way back, I prefer King Kong vs Godzilla from 1962. That may change next week though…Anyone else planning to see the new one?
A 1977 Hong Kong reworking, Mighty Peking Man.
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Filed under Bigfoot Report, Cryptozoology, Living Dinosaurs, Movie Monsters, Pop Culture