Director Jordan Peele’s much anticipated third outing of big-budget, spectacle horror filmmaking, Nope, has a lot of big ideas swirling around inside it. The comedian-turned-horror-maestro explored the horrors of racism in his debut, Get Out, and the horrors suffered by an American underclass who exist in order to make life easier for everyone above it in Us. With Nope, Peele’s ideas never quite gel into a cohesive whole. The story is ambitious, the storytelling is thrilling, but Nope ultimately feels like a blockbuster-budgeted episode of The Twilight Zone.
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I’m attracted to the kinds of transgressive, subversive movies that Joe Bob Briggs curates in his TV and live shows because they’re like a pressure release valve. They let us laugh and be shocked and be grossed-out in a safe environment. They, like virtually all movies, allow me to experience the world in a way that is radically different from how I experience it. They overturn the acceptable behavior – or, more often, show it for the hypocrisy it often is – of square society. (And, yes, I realize that I’m about the squarest person you could ever meet, which adds to the appeal of these movies for me.)
I can’t think of a better overseer for these dubious masterpieces than the man, the myth, the legend, Joe Bob Briggs. In his immortal words, “The drive-in will never die!”
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And so, in Godzilla vs. Kong, we come to a natural culmination of Legendary Entertainment’s stab at a Marvelesque shared cinematic universe. I phrase it that way not because we actually have come to an end to the MonsterVerse, but because a movie centered around the two biggest draws of that universe, squaring off like Ali and Frazier, seems like a logical end point. Fans can take heart. The pocketbooks behind the franchise have assured us that if enough money rolls in, we’ll be getting more stories featuring MUTOs – Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms. A brief bit of research reveals that a Skull Island series is in development over at Netflix, and Guillermo Del Toro has expressed interest in the MonsterVerse crossing over with his Pacific Rim franchise.
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This is the next entry in my ongoing 100 Essential Films series. If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here. Film number four is 1933’s King Kong. This is the first talkie of the series, as well as the first straight genre picture. The stop-motion animation in King Kong forever changed the industry. It was a watershed film for special effects. Just like the first two films in the series, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intralibrary loan. It’s a lovingly produced transfer from 2010 by Warner Bros. which features a two+ hour documentary. Director Peter Jackson, who made his own mega-budget remake of King Kong in 2005, played a role in the making of the documentary.
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