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Jory
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09 Oct 2011, 5:42 pm

Oh hell, am I really starting this up again? Yes, I am.

I ended the first "movie a day" topic due to a physical illness which put things like "watching movies" and "doing anything at all" low on my priority list. Now I feel like starting it up again, for no reason other than the fact that I have no life at all and that I'm stupid enough to waste my free time watching old public domain cinematic bullcrap like D.O.A. and White Zombie. Again, I'm not trying to get anyone to watch these movies along with me, simply posting my progress so I don't fall behind and typing up random thoughts.

I'll use the same loose rules I used last time. I have to watch at least one movie a day. Multiple short films and TV episodes count if I watch at least an hour of content, but like last time, I plan on mostly watching films. If I give up on a movie because it sucks badly enough (which I did a couple of times in the last topic), I'll watch something else to make up for it. I can watch fiction or nonfiction, and I can watch movies I've already seen or movies I've never laid eyes upon. Porn doesn't count. Not that I watch that stuff.

I promise not to focus exclusively on movies involving monsters and Sherlock Holmes like I did last time, and by promise I mean I don't promise that at all. But I've been scouring the web for all sorts of crap to watch and making a big list, so it should be a little more varied this time. I've got a Netflix account, my own DVD collection, YouTube, and the Internet Archive at my disposal. And there's the theatre that's within walking distance of my apartment, but I haven't seen a movie in a theatre since Iron Man 2 over a year ago, so don't count on that. I lasted four and a half weeks last time. Here we go again.

The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935)

Since I watched this yesterday, I'll put it first on the list. I already posted my thoughts on it in the "what movies have you seen recently?" topic, and I won't copy and paste them here. You can click here if you want to see them.

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

"All their knowledge which has been handed down has been stored in their complicated brain cells. So if we eat their brains, that knowledge will help us to adapt." Oh yes, that's actual dialogue. You want more? "Psychologists insist that if you believe everything a child says, it's educationally and psychologically wrong." This is gold.

The plot involves stupid and annoying children who apparently can't tell the difference between planets and stars, evil aliens who want to eat brains, a giant monster who has a Ginsu knife for a face, and Gamera (the "fart-propelled atomic turtle," to use Roger Ebert's description) coming to the rescue. The world would be a much less interesting place without Japan around, that's for sure. Thank Jebus for those insane bastards.

If you think Godzilla movies are cheap and silly, get a load of Gamera. If Jaws is Guinness and Godzilla movies are Bud Light, Gamera movies are the beer that you see at gas stations that just says "BEER" on the label. I wouldn't ask anyone to actually watch this movie, but I hope you'll at least watch this 30-second YouTube clip, because it's hilarious. It looks like it was filmed by a bunch of children in their back yard, doesn't it?

Anyway, I watched the American version, titled Attack of the Monsters, because that's the one that's commonly available. The dubbing is miserable, but I doubt that the original Japanese version is much better. Gamera movies started getting good in 1995, when the excellent Gamera: Guardian of the Universe was released, but the ones that came before were nothing but embarrassing crap, and this one is no different. It's certainly entertaining, though, even if it's for all the wrong reasons.

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10 Oct 2011, 2:35 am

Troll 2 is a bad movie but fun to watch.

If you like a dark and twisted movie with a young cast of actors and actresses I recommend watching the movie Acolytes.

Sweet karma is a good revenge movie.



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10 Oct 2011, 6:15 am

Good show ! ! Glad to see you back at what you do best.


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Jory
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10 Oct 2011, 6:00 pm

Love from a Stranger (1937)

Love from a Stranger is based on a story by Agatha Christie, whose work I've never read. Despite my psychotic obsession with Arthur Conan Doyle, Patricia Highsmith, and Dashiell Hammett, those authors represent nearly my entire familiarity with mystery and crime fiction. I watched this movie for one reason and one reason only: Basil Rathbone, who I know pretty much only from playing Sherlock Holmes. I've never seen The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Mark of Zorro, so this was the first time I'd seen him playing a villain. (His character in Son of Frankenstein wasn't really a bad guy.) I may have to seek out those movies now, because he's brilliant as a deranged killer.

A young woman wins the lottery, buys the expensive pimp hat she's been wanting, sends her annoying hypochondriac aunt to live somewhere else, and rents out the aunt's room to Basil Rathbone. (Because... she needs the money? I don't know.) Her douchebag boyfriend dumps her because he's horrified by the idea of a woman having more money than him (seriously), and she hits it off with Dr. Sherlock Frankenstein, who seems charming enough but turns out to be a psychopath with a sordid past who wants her money.

A particularly good scene involves Rathbone, with childlike joy, begging his new wife to read to him from a true crime book about a serial killer he admires who was never caught. He paces around the room, continuously telling her to read louder, getting more and more excited as he hears her recite the details of the killer's crimes. (Of course, he turns out to be that killer.) It's outrageously over the top and quietly subtle at the same time, which is quite a feat. The only problem with the movie is that it's 92 minutes long, which is like four hours by 1937 standards, and it spends a whole lot of time being simply decent before it suddenly gets brilliant right before it ends. But that's fine. I would much rather have decency followed by brilliance than brilliance followed by decency.



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11 Oct 2011, 3:48 pm

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947)

I had a brief obsession with Dick Tracy back when the 1990 movie came out. I was six years old, seven by the time it was on video. I remember seeing it in a theatre, and it may have been the first movie I ever saw that way. (Other possible candidates: Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.) I had the action figures (some of them, at least – we were never a rich family), I had the stupid toy version of the radio watch (which, of course, did not include any actual sort of radio function – it just lit up when you pushed a button), I rented and played the awful video game for the NES, I begged my dad to buy me the comic book adaptation of the movie, and I had him rent the movie and copy it illegally onto a blank VHS tape (again, not rich). I knew that there were comic strips from decades earlier, but I don't think I ever read them, and I certainly never watched any of the older movies.

If I had seen Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome instead of the 1990 movie, there's no way I would have developed such an obsession. This movie has nothing to do with Dick Tracy. You could redub the dialogue to change the names and nobody would ever be able to identify it as a Tracy movie. The only thing making it distinguishable from any other crime drama is its painful sense of humor. There's a physicist named Dr. A. Tomic, and at one point a character says, "If I didn't know any better, I'd say we were doing business with Boris Karloff!" Guess who plays the villain. Of all the cool Tracy villains to choose from, they just hired Karloff to play a generic gangster no different from the one he played in Scarface, and the guy playing Tracy might as well be named "Just Some Dude" in the credits because that's exactly who he is. No movie with Karloff as the villain is ever a total waste of time, but there wouldn't be a reason in the world to watch this one without him.

What I learned from Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome: in 1947, "autopsy" and "homicide" were apparently pronounced "uh-TOP-see" and "HOME-ih-side."



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12 Oct 2011, 5:11 pm

Gaslight (1940)

I've seen plenty of movies that take place in the time of horse-drawn carriages, but this is the first one I've seen that acknowledges the fact that horses poop. Imagine my surprise when I witnessed a man sweeping it off a street. I wish I had something more interesting to write, but it's much easier to write about bad movies than good ones. I'm gonna have to go back to watching crappy old movies from my "50 Horror Classics" DVD set, because Gaslight is so good that I have nothing to complain about. The plot involves a young woman slowly being driven insane by her psychotic husband, who may or may not have killed his first wife and established a new identity. (SPOILER: he did.) This is the British version of Gaslight, which MGM tried to ban so that it wouldn't be able to compete with their 1944 remake.



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13 Oct 2011, 1:20 am

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1968)

I said that I never wanted to see another version of this story, but since I haven't updated my Netflix queue in weeks and I never have any idea what's arriving next, I'm here watching The Hound of the goddamned Baskervilles again. The IMDb lists 19 films with that title, and I've now seen five of them. The first four were the 1939 film with Basil Rathbone, the 1959 film with Peter Cushing, the 1988 TV film with Jeremy Brett, and the 2002 TV film with Richard Roxburgh. This one stars... Peter Cushing? Yes, the story is so over-filmed that two different versions were made nine years apart starring the same actor.

I've seen so many versions now that I don't even really hear the dialogue anymore – it's all white noise. (I wish that one version would at least change the identity of the killer, but none of them have, although one of them changed the motive.) So for me to enjoy yet another version, it has to do something special, and this one doesn't do nearly enough. The one from 1959 was an expensive feature film, but this one is a two-part episode of a TV series from the BBC. The BBC has done Sherlock Holmes justice over the last decade – the 2002 version of Hound, the 2004 film Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking with Rupert Everett, and the series Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch are all excellent – but their 1960s work isn't nearly as impressive.

Cushing is terrific as always (he's one of those actors who could read the phone book and make it entertaining) but aside from another good actor here and there, the only other reason to watch this version is that it includes a few scenes from the book that aren't in the others. The low budget becomes a problem, as scenes from the book that took place in busy London streets instead take place in deserted back alleys, there are very distracting switches between video and film, and night scenes are shot in what looks like broad daylight. It also does nothing to solve the problem of the story that all adaptations of it need to address: the fact that Holmes is missing for the entire middle section. The 2002 version is the only one I know of that handles this well, since Ian Hart makes such a good Watson. If you want to see an adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, choose either that one, the 1939 film, or the 1959 film. This one wouldn't make a Holmes fan out of a newcomer.



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13 Oct 2011, 9:26 pm

A DVD set called Sherlock Holmes: The Archive Collection was recently released. A more appropriate title would have been Sherlock Holmes: A Bunch of Miscellaneous BS That Only Hardcore Fans Will Care About. Since $24.95 is a pretty ludicrous price for a bunch of stuff that's in the public domain, I decided to just download the content and watch it online instead. I had already seen some of it, like the 1912 short film The Copper Beeches and the 1931 film The Sleeping Cardinal. Instead of watching a single movie today, I watched some of the other short films from this collection.

The Man with the Twisted Lip (1921)

This movie sucks. The first half is a bunch of talking, which is really boring in a silent film since you're reading instead of watching, and the second half is just going through the motions of adapting the story. I'm not convinced that Sherlock Holmes can really work in a silent film. Dracula works (see Nosferatu) because his appeal is all in his looks and motions, but Holmes is all about the way the actor reads the dialogue. It's a good thing this was only half an hour long, because anything longer would be painful. I'll give it one thing: at least it doesn't make the mistake of revealing the details of the crime before Holmes even begins his investigation, which so many early Holmes films do, to my utter frustration.

The Dying Detective (1921)

Another silent short starring the same actor, Ellie Norwood. It's no more impressive than The Man with the Twisted Lip, but it was doomed for me before I even watched it, because I had already seen the terrific Jeremy Brett version from 1994, and there was no way it was going to be displaced. Not terrible but nothing special.

The Limejuice Mystery, or Who Spat in Grandfather's Porridge? (1930)

It's a parody with puppets. Team America with Sherlock Holmes, 1930 style. It's nine minutes long. I made it two and a half before giving up.

The Man Who Disappeared (1951)

It's a half-hour pilot episode of a TV show that was never picked up. It's another adaptation of "The Man with the Twisted Lip," but it makes some significant changes to the story, which is nice. I get tired of seeing the same Holmes stories adapted again and again with no variation, which is why I prefer watching movies that are original stories rather than adaptations. John Longden makes a decent Holmes. I like the way he asks a police inspector what the penalty is for burglary right before breaking into someone's apartment.

The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1949)

Another half-hour TV episode. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be the start of a series that was never continued or if it was intended as a one-time thing. This one starts off with an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, with a shot of a tobacco field, and there's a host who introduces the story and shows up periodically to light a cigarette. Lucky Strikes make it "fun to be alive!" Until they give you cancer, but until then, you'll be feeling great. Anyway. Holmes is played by Alan Napier, who's best known as Alfred from the Adam West Batman. I would never have recognized him. This is the third adaptation of this story that I've seen. It's not quite as good as the 1984 version with Jeremy Brett, but it's much better than the 1931 version with Raymond Massey. It's a shame that Napier never played Holmes again, because he's very good. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I need a cigarette.



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14 Oct 2011, 5:17 pm

Laser Mission (1989)

If I ever kill myself, I'm blaming this movie in the suicide note. I gave up 15 minutes into it. Trying to watch Laser Mission is like trying to watch Manos: The Hands of Fate without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary. This is bad, bad, bad. The movie looks and sounds like it was recorded on a camcorder, and the worst Godzilla movie I've seen had better acting. Whatever limited acting ability Brandon Lee showed in The Crow isn't here at all. I'll have to find something else to watch today.



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15 Oct 2011, 12:47 am

The Fatal Hour (1940)

This movie was included in the Mill Creek "50 Horror Classics" DVD set, but it's not a horror movie. It's about a Chinese detective named Mr. Wong. He's played by a white British man, because real Asians were just too scary for audiences in 1940. Boris Karloff squints his eyes a lot, because that's all it takes to make you Asian. Fortunately, he doesn't attempt an accent. Unfortunately, he doesn't do anything interesting, and neither does anyone else. I didn't even attempt to follow the plot, because the movie is so bland that you could have unplugged the TV set halfway through and I wouldn't even have noticed. There's murder and blackmail and everyone yells at each other because nobody involved in the making of the movie knew how to create genuine drama, but that's all I remember.

What I learned from The Fatal Hour: in 1940, police captains allowed obnoxious newspaper reporters to barge into their offices to demand a story and be present at crime scenes.

And that does it for Week 1 of my second attempt to watch a movie every day. I have no idea how long I'll last this time. If I quit again, I won't be starting up "A Movie a Day 3: Jory Takes Manhattan" a few days later, I can tell you that much. Here's the recap: The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), Gamera vs. Guiron (1969), Love from a Stranger (1937), Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), Gaslight (1940), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1968), The Man with the Twisted Lip (1921), The Dying Detective (1921), The Limejuice Mystery, or Who Spat in Grandfather's Porridge? (1930, gave up), The Man Who Disappeared (1951), The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1949), Laser Mission (1989, gave up), The Fatal Hour (1940)



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15 Oct 2011, 7:29 pm

The Thing from Another World (1951)

"I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."

That's a quote from Roger Ebert's review of North, but it accurately sums up how I felt the first time I watched The Thing from Another World. I had been told by many people that it was terrific, one of the best horror films ever made. Some of them even said it was better than the 1982 version of The Thing, which is my second favorite movie (after Blade Runner). When it ended, I sat in stunned silence. How could such an incredibly boring movie have possibly gained the glowing reputation that it had?

In anticipation of the 2011 version of The Thing, I decided to revisit each of the previous versions, and that included giving the object of my hatred another chance. Thanks to DailyMotion.com, I could watch it online without having to waste a Netflix rental on it. I've just finished watching it, and I'm sure that its fans will be glad to hear that I've warmed to it a bit. I still consider it hideously overrated and by far the worst version of the story, but I no longer want to travel back in time to punch Howard Hawks in the throat.

The reason that I'm still not ready to fully jump on the bandwagon is that I still consider it a failure as a horror film. In the original 1938 short novel (John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?) and the 1982 John Carpenter film, the monster is a shapeshifter which can replicate itself and take the form of any human or animal. In this film, it's just a rip-off of Frankenstein's monster, so there's never any tension in wondering who is and who isn't a Thing. That would have been perfectly fine if the film had been able to present the monster as a real threat, but none of the characters ever seem too worried about it. They get nervous when it's nearby, but otherwise, they seem more interested in drinking coffee and catching up with old girlfriends. There's only one gripping moment in the film: the characters douse the monster with kerosene, light it on fire, and since they don't know how else to attack it, they keep throwing buckets of kerosene on it until it jumps through a window.

So why do I no longer hate the film? Because now that I've totally given up on any chance of it scaring me, I was able to better appreciate the scenes that weren't trying (and failing) to be scary. I liked the characters looking at the monster's spaceship under the ice and forming a circle around it to determine its size. I liked the lead male and lead female characters talking about the time she drank him under the table. I liked the lead scientist taking bits and pieces from the monster's severed arm and "growing" new little monsters like plants. And despite the hilariously stupid "military good! science bad!" attitude that the film has, I was able to enjoy the battle of wits between the military men who wanted to kill the monster and the scientists who wanted to study it.

So I'm calling a truce with The Thing from Another World. No longer will anyone have to suffer through hearing me call the movie an embarrassment and wonder what the hell my problem is. Still, I'm in no hurry to watch it a third time. The next time I'm in the mood for some 1950s sci-fi or horror, I'll watch the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds.



Last edited by Jory on 15 Oct 2011, 10:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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15 Oct 2011, 10:30 pm

Forget the Nostalgia Critic and his Guy With the Glasses gang. Jory, you are my favorite movie reviewer. I really hope that you continue this thread, because you have a gift for it. :) I myself have always wanted to write reviews for movies, so you are an inspiration.



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16 Oct 2011, 3:51 pm

The Third Man (1949)

I had already seen this, but I'm sick of watching crappy movies and wanted to see something I knew I liked.

It's a shame that Patricia Highsmith didn't write The Talented Mr. Ripley a decade sooner than she did, because Orson Welles would have made the best Tom Ripley ever. He plays a very similar character in The Third Man, although Tom was never quite evil enough to sell diluted penicillin on the black market.

Welles is so f**king good in this movie that it's impossible not to be a little disappointed in his lack of screen time, but it works because even when he's not around, he's all the other characters ever talk about, so he remains a constant presence. The Thing from Another World could have learned something from this movie. Just because your villain is off-screen doesn't mean you should forget about him.

I don't always nod my head in agreement when it comes to movies that are considered classics, but this one deserves all the praise it gets. I could watch the scene on the ferris wheel, when Welles confronts Joseph Cotten, all day long, and the final chase through the sewer tunnels of Vienna should be studied by every director who wants to know how to film a good chase scene. The Third Man is one of the first movies I would recommend to someone who thinks that old black and white movies are boring.

You can watch the full film online at Dailymotion.com here, or just the five-minute ferris wheel scene on YouTube here.



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17 Oct 2011, 8:53 pm

The Thing (1982)

Kurt Russell battles a shapeshifting alien using only his beard and cowboy hat.

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And flamethrowers. Lots and lots of flamethrowers.

I can't think of much to say about this movie that hasn't already been said thousands of times. The only thing keeping me from calling it the best science fiction film ever made is Blade Runner, and the only thing keeping me from calling it the best horror film ever made is The Shining. And even then, it's a tie.

Have you ever been in love? Quick, tell me why you loved that person. Not so easy to describe, is it? Now think of a person you hate. I bet that it would be far easier for you to tell me exactly why you hate this person, right? That explains why I can easily type up half a dozen paragraphs about The Thing from Another World, a movie that I feel lukewarm about on a good day and despise on a bad one, and yet I can barely think of anything at all to say about The Thing.

If you haven't seen it, you're a bad person. Stop being a bad person.



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18 Oct 2011, 7:36 pm

The Thing (2011)

I'm at a loss here, staring at my computer screen, wondering what the hell to type. And that's a good thing, because it's much harder for me to describe why I like a movie than to describe why I dislike one. The Thing is not as good as the 1982 version, but it's kind of amazing how successful it is at capturing what made it so good: the combination of paranoia and social decay with grisly, Lovecraftian creature design. (Flamethrowers, too. They make everything better.) You rarely see horror movies like this anymore, and it's a f***ing miracle that we occasionally get something like this and The Mist. This movie is so much better than any Saw or Hostel or Paranormal Activity movie, and better than the overrated Dawn of the Dead remake that all I can do is laugh at the 33% rating it has on Rotten Tomatoes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7ZUFs04C6I[/youtube]

It's not perfect. Some of the victims are redshirts you know nothing about, and there was a wasted opportunity to include elements from the 1938 short novel and 1951 film that weren't used in the 1982 film. (For example, characters arguing about the safety of introducing alien germs to humans, or the characters forming a circle around the spaceship to determine its size.) It suffers from Die Hard 2 syndrome, meaning that it's almost as good as its predecessor, but not quite, and it's so similar it sometimes feels redundant. It's not supposed to be a remake, but some of the scenes come straight from the 1982 film. Also, the final Thing creature doesn't look all that great. It's not that the effects are bad, it just looks a bit silly.

But this is nitpicking. The film works as a good companion piece to the 1982 film. Despite having too many similarities, it's got enough good new stuff to make it feel worthwhile, so many scenes that nobody ever thought to try in 1982. (Especially in the third act, when it departs from the 1982 film and turns into a Thing hunt.) The creature design is fantastic, and the effects, blending puppetry with CGI, work well for the most part. As for the characters, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is so awesome that I would be fine if the Die Hard series continued with her taking over from Bruce Willis, and they get everything they can out of the xenophobia and language barrier between the Americans and Norwegians.

I was prepared to throw up my hands and say, "Damnit, the critics are right. It sucks." But I can't. The critics are going to be reassessing this movie again in the years to come, just like they hated the 1982 film when it was released but saw what was so good about it later. Don't get your hopes up and think it's as good as the 1982 film, because it's not. Just walk into it expecting a good horror movie and you'll like it. I'll certainly be seeing it again, and it'll be fun to watch it back to back with the movie that I'm getting sick and tired of calling "the 1982 film."



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19 Oct 2011, 7:18 pm

The Lost World (1925)

Let's play Six Degrees of Sherlock Holmes. I can connect Holmes with Godzilla. Here:

Godzilla (1954) was a rip-off of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which was a rip-off of King Kong (1933), which was a rip-off of The Lost World (1925), which was based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Holmes stories.

What I just did was more entertaining than pretty much anything in The Lost World.

Say! Do you like King Kong? Of course you do. You'd have to be some kind of as*hole not to like that movie. Well, imagine if King Kong had been made seven years earlier as a silent film with worse acting and much, much worse stop-motion animation. That's The Lost World. I'm sure that people in 1925 had to wear diapers to avoid pooping themselves in amazement, but today, Willis O'Brien's effects look embarrassing compared to what he did later. Aside from the Brontosaurus (which actually looks pretty good, almost as good as Kong), the animation looks more like a series of still pictures than actual motion.

The version I watched is 68 minutes long. The original version was 108. From what I've read, the deleted footage was just filler that was cut for a re-release. Thank Jebus. As bad as the effects are, the footage of people just sitting around talking didn't need to be any longer than it already is. King Kong was practically a remake of this movie (right down to individual scenes), and it's a much better film overall, and not just in the effects department. Watch that instead.

Did I mention that this movie is hilariously racist?

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