Congo ** (1995, Laura Linney, Tim Curry, Dylan Walsh, Ernie Hudson, Grant Heslov, Joe Don Baker) – So Bad It’s Good Movie Review 11

What did the female gorilla say to the handsome primatologist? Nothing. Gorillas can’t speak, except in director Frank Marshall’s 1995 summer blockbuster Congo. It’s an unabashed old-style adventure movie, riding high on the back of Jurassic Park, since it is based on another novel by Michael Crichton, on a roll with his books and movies like Disclosure and Rising Sun.

True to Crichton’s form, Congo is an eye-catching high-concept movie, with clever, even provocative, future-gazing ideas half buried in a traditional backward-looking entertainment format. The concept here is a technological advance that’s apparently allowed a gorilla to speak. OK, I know and you know gorillas don’t have liguistically usable vocal chords, but this film’s gorilla-suited star, Amy, is equipped with a data glove with sensors and a computer on her back pack that can read and translate her gestures into mechanically speaking a vocabulary of 620 words.

The lovely Amy, with her realistic electronically controlled facial features, is in good hands because she’s designed by four-time Oscar-winner Stan Winston, responsible for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the queen alien in Aliens and the prosthetics in Terminator 2.  Unfortunately Crichton’s King Solomon’s Mines-style quest story, straight out of one of those silly 50s adventure tales with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr, is as feeble as it is derivative.

A nice young American primatologist (Dylan Walsh) decides to return Amy to her jungle home in volcano-troubled darkest Africa. He teams up with dodgy Romanian philanthropist Herkermer Homolka (our very own Tim Curry, giving a performance as ripe as a row of Fyffe’s bananas), a spunky American communications company operative (Laura Linney, the likeable young star of TV’s Tales of the City) and a wisecracking African guide (Ernie Hudson).

Naturally when the intrepid trekkers get to Africa, they meet every peril known to scriptwriters, including the old poisonous snake attack, the deadly encounter with hippos scene, and guerrilla warfare with batting political factions, before they finally in the very last reel get to the gorilla warfare with monster monkeys and the erupting volcano.

Given the high-budget production and the classy location filming (in Costa Rica at the base of a real live volcano), far too much of the movie is studio bound with vast but tatty-looking sets. The Lost City of Zinj looks like something out of a 60s Hammer horror film and turns out to be a Guinness Book statistic – the largest styrofoam set ever built – recyclable, of course, at least for other movies.

The killer gorillas that guard the city, though suitably gruesome, are not huge or threatening enough to make the film’s climax terrifying though the studio-staged volcano eruption is truly exciting. Nevertheless, as a brain-in-neutral popcorn movie, Congo is undeniably a daft fun night out or night in, especially for those who enjoy laughing at actor-defying lines (‘There’s no point in acting stupid now’) and tongue-in-cheek performances.

Tim Curry deserves a special Oscar, perhaps a gold-plated banana, for monkeying about so valiantly.

© Derek Winnert 2014 So Bad It’s Good Movie Review 11

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