T w e n t y S i d e d
In my previous post about the King Kong movie, Jaquandor warned me that some upcoming scenes were not for the squemish. He wasn’t kidding. Eeew. One of the worst moments for me was the part where Ann hides in a rotted log, and encounters a couple of huge centipedes.
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| I know it’s really frightening, but close your mouth, idiot. With instincts like this, it’s a wonder she survived the movie. |
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| I’ve lightened these shots up quite a bit so we can see the bugs better. |
Now, this is nowhere near the worst encounter with bugs in the movie. Other characters meet ones a lot bigger and some of them die very badly. But these two centipedes (which never hurt anyone) made me squirm in my seat, because I know they are not that far from reality. Some of the other creepies in the movie (like leeches the size of a bear) didn’t make a lot of sense to me, foodchain-wise. My mind filed them into the same slot as dragons and H. R. Gieger’s Alien: dangerous stuff I’ll never have to worry about. But there really are centipedes that are nearly this big and they give me the willies. If I’d been in Ann’s place here, I would not have sat there with my mouth open, I would have run away, waving my hands over my head and screaming like a woman.
You have to see the real thing to believe it, although I don’t really suggest it. It isn’t for the faint of heart, but here is a YouTube video of a gigantic centipede catching and eating a mouse. If that’s not enough gross for you, then try watching a centipede eat a tarantula.
But getting back to King Kong: The movie was one horrifying death after another. After a while I went numb. I fast-forwarded a lot, and the movie still took ages. If you plan to have a go at this movie, make sure you have lots of free time and a strong stomach.
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The main problem I found with the spiders-and-slugs scene was that it stopped the movie dead. The movie was already lumbering along, it really needed to speed up a bit instead.
Incidentally, David Attenborough has a documentary out, “Life in the Undergrowth” I think. There’s a scene in that of a centipede catching a bat. While the bat is flying. It really makes the idea of living in a hermetically sealed box appealing, I tell you.
Don’t forget the giant centipede eating a bat. Oh just took the time to read the above comment. I guess we were on the same page.
So there were interesting scenes in this one?I never reached them because it was so damn boring.And when those words come from a guy that watched the babel from start to end,its a lot.
I made the mistake of buying a ticket to that movie and spent most of it extremely pissed off. It was the most pointless waste of too much time ever! (Did you notice how many sweeping shots of people’s eyes there were??)
King Kong is a great movie, thrilling and rewatchable despite the sad tone. The centipede scene was one of my favorites – they seemed friendly and curious, rather than mindless or evil like the bugs in the gorge.
Thanks for the video links – I’ll have to get one of those as a pet someday. :) Life in the Undergrowth was good, I preferred the earlier “Alien Empire” though.
“We serve the One in whose presence creatures of the night need no longer fear the day.”
It is fantastic and didn’t feel like three hours to me at all. The bug sequence worked for me because it had a completely different pace and tone to the V-Rex attack. There wasn’t that uniformity of time and staging to each of the attacks that the first film had.