KING KONG COMETH

KING KONG COMETH! Edited by Paul A. Woods. Plexus; 2005.

Published to coincide with the release of Peter Jackson's version of King Kong, this trade paperback presents essays, most previously published, about the original 1933 film, Son of Kong, Japanese Kong movies, Kong rip-offs, the silent Lost World (with stop-motion effects by Kong's Willis O'Brien), which prefigured Kong, and so on. It is similar in some ways to Ray Morton's massive King Kong book [Morton nearly ignores The Lost World, however] but because there are many different authors, a lot of material is repeated and some sections are monotonous. There's an interesting section on the restoration of The Lost World. The most forgettable essays offer pretentious Freudian analyses of what is essentially a very entertaining monster movie and nothing more.

Verdict: If you can't get enough about Kong. ***.