'KONG: SKULL ISLAND'.....THEY DID THE MASH...THEY DID THE MONSTER MASH.....

Kong: Skull Island (2017)   In the classic 'Twilight Zone' episode "It's A Good Life", little Anthony (Billy Mumy), a capricious tyke with godlike powers, rules and terrorizes his family and neighbors.......with the sheer force of his will, he creates his own TV programs, compelling the adults to join him in watching endless footage of dinosaur battles. The grown ups subserviently gush with compliments, not daring to offend Anthony. lest he......'wish them away to the cornfield'......

                To the BQ, it's starting to feel like the people who run Hollywood studios have all become little Anthonys........force feeding us monster battles and superheroes.....

               And since Warner Brothers, Universal, Sony, Fox and Disney can't wish us away to the cornfield...(not yet anyway)......we can feel free to honestly assess their various, computer-generated franchise entries.....

                This one, we understand, is part of the Warner Brothers Monster-verse......a calculated mashup of King Kong, the entire stable (circus? zoo?) of Toho monsters from Japan, with a little bit of Lovecraftian mythos thrown in. The Warners monster corral should not be confused with Universal's Monster-verse, a threatened exhumation of their 1930's classic, creepy coterie, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, yada yada.....(they've already badly stumbled out of the gate with their woeful, reviled Tom Cruise-ified "The Mummy")
 
                 We'll say this much for "Kong: Skull Island"....we were never bored. It moves like an express train and unlike the studio's 2014 "Godzilla", which played peek-a-boo with its monsters, 'Kong' serves up a full course meal of what its target audience came for.......big-ass creatures bashing each other's little brains out.

                  A few quick observations.....

                  Homages   The movie is so steeped in references to "Apocalypse Now", "Heart Of Darkness" countless other movies and video games that it never truly finds its own identity. Not so much a movie......more a collection of references in search of a movie.....

                  Samuel L. Jackson  Tiresomely employed as a one man homage to himself and all his previous films, even to the point of repeating his lines from "Jurassic Park".......it's a wonder they didn't have him scream, "I want all the mother$&%^#% monsters off this mother*#&$^$ island!"  Even worse, the script senselessly turns him into a third act villain.....

                  Kong  No longer the slightly over-sized gorilla.....now he's a stand-up guy, literally and enlarged to the size of an upended aircraft carrier.........vitally necessary, since Warners, functioning like Don King, has Kong lined up for more pay-per-view smackdowns with the big 'n tall Toho bunch.....next up, Godzilla.....(well, neither of them exactly floats like a butterfly or stings like a bee, but we'll watch anyway...)

                  Brie Larson....trying to lift a crashed helicopter off a giant water buffalo. We couldn't decide what's crazier or funnier......Brie attempting to go all Wonder Woman on the copter or the idea of a giant water buffalo.....

                   John C.Reilly  The MVP of this movie and boy, does he know it.......given the role of  'Mr. Heart and Soul Amid All the Carnage', he works overtime at it and invaluably adds to the film's watchability........

                   The Island Monsters  We kind of admire the nonsensical randomness of them......unlike the 1933 Skull Island's strictly prehistoric eco-system, this 2017 island supports mainly video game monsters........nightmarish creations improbably designed to inflict maximum damage and look awesome doing it. We've no idea why a giant octopus would choose to hang out in a shallow lake, but it makes for a great shot of Kong snacking on its tentacles like a calamari appetizer.....

                   The Post-Credits Teaser......promising us a future stampede of  those Tokyo behemoths Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah......Ghidorah's no doubt relieved that CGI will allow its bobbing three heads to movie freely instead of pulled on wires......and we hope and pray that Warners can convince Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to return to movies and play the peanut twins who sing to Mothra.......

                  Mercifully, the movie runs a tad under two hours.........and we forever thank director Jordan Vogt-Roberts for not deluding himself into thinking he's David Lean making "Lawrence Of Arabia" with monsters. So we'll roar out 2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2) for "Kong: Skull Island".....a passable time waster for us fantasy/sci-fi/action fans.........and unlike the grovelling adults in the 'Twilight Zone' episode, at least we didn't have to falsely whimper to Warner Brothers how much we loved it.......