CONGO. (1995) BASED ON THE BOOK BY MICHAEL CRICHTON. DIRECTED BY FRANK MARSHALL. MUSIC BY JERRY GOLDSMITH.
STARRING LAURA LINNEY, DYLAN WALSH, ERNIE HUDSON, GRANT HESLOV, JOE DON BAKER, TIM CURRY, JOE PANTOLIANO, DELROY LINDO AND BRUCE CAMPBELL.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
Now, this would be a good choice of family viewing over Christmas for you guys and the older kids. It's one of those brilliant adventure films that have nothing to do with Christmas whatsoever, but they stick 'em on the telly every festive season nonetheless.
You know, films like JURASSIC PARK, writer Michael Crichton's biggest book-to-film success, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, the INDIANA JONES movies and the Stephen Sommers THE MUMMY trilogy. Great films to watch with the kids over Christmas, the lot of 'em.
Anyway, CONGO is a jungle adventure story with an easily-recognisable cast, some marvellous African scenery, a great pay-off and a talking gorilla. That's right, folks, a talking gorilla. Her name is Amy and she's the hairy, banana-munching genius protegé of a curly-headed professor of science-slash-primatologist called Dr. Peter Elliot.
He's taking a desperately homesick Amy back to the jungle in the Virunga region of the Congo. Along the way, they pick up a motley crew of familiar faces, including Laura Linney as Dr. Karen Ross, an electronics expert and former CIA operative who's searching for her ex-fiancé who went missing on a previous expedition to the jungle.
The ex-fiancé is none other than Bruce Campbell from Sam Raimi's THE EVIL DEAD movies. That's the utterly brilliant thing about the film, that it has such a legend in one of the minor roles. Bruce's determined chin may not jut outwards for long in CONGO but at least we get to see him, which is the main thing, and his revulsion when he catches that eyeball is pretty priceless.
My favourite character in the film is Ernie Hudson as Monroe Kelly, the big handsome black man with the dazzling grin who's leading the hapless white folk on their perilous trip through the jungles of the Congo.
He talks kind of like a black Rhett Butler from GONE WITH THE WIND and he certainly has the charm, quick wit and swift decisive turn of mind to match. Monroe has Rhett's ability to extricate himself from a jam as well, which is handy when you're taking a party of novices through a country torn apart by civil unrest.
Grant Heslov, an actor whose name you mightn't know but whose face you'd recognise if you saw it, does a grand job as Peter's nervous little research assistant. He has good reason to be nervous too. Killer mutant gorillas are nothing to be sneezed at. Oh yeah, I must've forgotten to mention those, haha. They're actually kind of integral to the plot.
These evil- and hideously fierce and ugly- primates jealously guard the diamond-studded lost city of Zing, which Amy the Talking Gorilla has often seen in her dreams and sketched for the benefit of her mentor Peter. Yes, she's something of a wee Rembrandt in her spare time, this marvellous prodigy of a hairy monkey...!
The city of Zinj (and, more importantly, its miraculous treasure) is the only reason Herkermer Homolka, a dodgy Romanian 'philanthropist,' ('philanthropist,' my butt!) is coming on the trip. He's played by that simply fabulous transexual from Transylvania otherwise known as Tim Curry.
Will his greed blind him to common sense and be his undoing? It usually happens like that in this kind of film (Remember Benny in THE MUMMY back in 1999?), but they'd be pretty f***ing cheeky to kill off the one and only Frank N. Furter, wouldn't they...?
Ralphie Cifaretto from hit HBO Mafia drama THE SOPRANOS, aka Joe Pantoliano, turns up too as a foul-mouthed, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing sort of fix-it guy.
Joe Don Baker, a fantastic American character actor who was brutally garrotted in CAPE FEAR (1990) by the world's hairiest and most heavily tattooed maid, is brilliant as the megalomaniac boss of a satellite technology company who cares more about diamonds than he does about his son Bruce Campbell. The selfish swine...!
And just to add that Delroy Lindo, a cute black actor, has a few funny lines in the film involving a rather dry-looking sesame cake. Cake is cake though, I always think, however dry or tasteless it may be, and its inclusion in a film is always worth a mention. The same goes for biscuits, chocolate, wine and, of course, crisps...! (Pringles, of course, being the very holiest of all grails.)
The ending is, as you might know if you've seen the film, the best part, with everything leading up to the showdown between man and primate in the eerily beautiful lost city of Zinj. Laura Linney somewhat ridiculously turns into a gun-toting Rambo-type during this bit, but it's all good clean fun, honestly.
CONGO is a genuinely good jungle adventure story with only a couple of swears thrown in, which the older kids should be well able to handle. Well, if the language out of my own kids is anything to go by, anyway...!
Happy Christmas and a safe and Happy New Year to all my readers. I'm almost certain they exist...
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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