News Dune: Part Three Dune: Part Three Trailer Takes Us 20 Years Forward, With Paul Atreides Now a Tyrant We also see the return of Duncan Idaho, Chani, Alia, and more… By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on July 8, 2026 Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three, the final installment in his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novels, Dune and Dune Messiah, is set to hit theaters later this year. Today, we got our first full trailer for the film, and in it we see that Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is now the emperor of the galaxy and destroyer of thousands of worlds. We also see that his former love Chani (Zendaya) is now seeking to bring him down, and that somehow, Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) returned (though don’t worry; Herbert’s book gives an explanation for this, and I assume the movie will as well). We also get glimpses of Robert Pattinson as the blond villain Scytale, Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, Anya Taylor-Joy as a (bloody!) Alia, and Javier Bardem as Stilgar. Other cast members include Rebecca Ferguson, Isaach de Bankolé, and Charlotte Rampling. Here’s the official synopsis for the film, which Warner Bros. also confirms is the conclusion to Villenueve’s oeuvre: Dune: Part Three is set nearly two decades after Paul Atreides seized control of the Imperium. Now a ruthless Emperor, Paul must face the consequences of his reign as old allies return, terrifying new threats emerge, and betrayal lurks in every shadow. Haunted by visions of Imperial collapse and the reappearance of his long-lost love, Paul is drawn into a sweeping conspiracy, with Chani at the heart of its unfolding mystery. As rebellion brews and enemies close in, Paul must confront the true cost of power and the fate of those he loves the most. The screenplay from Dune: Part Three comes from Villeneuve and Brian K. Vaughan (Paper Girls). It will premiere in theaters on December 18, 2026. While we wait, check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>Dune: Part Three</i> Trailer Takes Us 20 Years Forward, With Paul Atreides Now a Tyrant appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Romantasy Read an Excerpt From The Lion & the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent Some blood tastes like vengeance. Some blood tastes like grief. Some blood tastes like nothing at all. By Carissa Broadbent | Published on July 8, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Lion & the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent, a brand new novel in the Crowns of Nyaxia series and the first book in the Bloodborn Duet, pubishing with Bramble on August 4th. Under an eternal night, the world has been ravaged by ten years of war between humans and vampires. Kyrene scrapes by as a bounty hunter, bearing a blessed sword from the goddess of justice. But in the wake of a devastating loss, Kyrene commits a crime that makes her a target for mortals and gods alike—and she is still desperate for vengeance.Her only chance at survival—and revenge—is making a deal with her enemy, the silver-tongue vampire prince, Septimus, who offers her one final job: to slay the gods themselves.Together, Kyrene and Septimus must hunt the ultimate marks, all while navigating a web of prophecies and curses. Septimus is calculating and mysterious, masking secrets bloodthirsty enough to consume them both. Yet, most dangerous of all, Kyrene finds an unexpected kinship in him.But their growing attraction is deadly in a world where the only currency is blood. And Kyrene will stop at nothing to fulfill her ultimate goal: to kill the goddess of vampires, even if it means sacrificing love for revenge. Buy the Book The Lion & the Deathless Dark Carissa Broadbent Buy Book The Lion & the Deathless Dark Carissa Broadbent Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Prologue The night that she became a divine hero, the girl was covered in blood. Some of it was hers. Most of it was not. The goddess had already left. Her world had already changed. Now, she kneeled on the ground, holding a blessed sword. It was magnificent—the Blade of Retribution, once held by the Goddess of Justice herself, and the weapon lived up to her name in every way. She was crafted of pure gold, the strength of her light so bright it almost hurt against a world that was now so ceaselessly dark. And yet, the girl could not tear her eyes away, no matter how much it ached to witness. The girl was just seventeen years old. The world was freshly dark. It had been only weeks since the sun had fallen and the vampires invaded. She did not yet know how much darker it could get. {We must leave, and quickly,} the blade told her. Her voice was soothing, sliding into the girl’s mind like a caress over skin. It was less disorienting than the girl might have expected. {The fallen ones will come soon. They will smell you.} The girl dimly recognized this as fact. There was so much blood, and blood had become so very dangerous. She had been in such terrible pain only minutes ago, but now, it had ebbed, nearly disappeared. As if the blade in her hands had washed it away like an incoming tide. Still, the girl did not rise. Her vision was blurry. She blinked, and two tears fell like dying blossoms onto the sword’s engraved blade, pooling in ancient scripture. {There is no need to cry, child,} the blade said. Her voice was so tender. It was how the girl imagined a mother might sound. “What do we do next?” the girl asked. The question was hoarse and small. She had never felt more mortal. {You shall wield me. And together, we shall enforce justice, as our goddess commands us.} The girl looked at the scene around her, the silent aftermath of grotesque violence. None of it seemed like justice. She wrapped her arms around herself, cradling her stomach. “I’m nobody,” she said. “I don’t even know how to wield a sword.” {I shall teach you.} A note of wry, warm amusement. {But it seems to me, Kyrene, that you already did wield me, and wield me well.} The girl looked at all the blood—on her, surrounding her. Perhaps this was true. “I can’t walk,” she said. “I’m—I—” Words failed her. The girl did not know how to describe the nature of her injuries. {I know,} the blade said softly. {But you can walk. You shall be healed. That is, you understand, the nature of my vow to you.} The girl watched the golden light shuddering up the blade’s beautiful form. “Vow?” she repeated. {You are now my bearer, Kyrene. And thus, I vow that I shall provide you my divine strength; that you may use me to enforce what is Just in this world. Death shall not touch you while you are my wielder, until the day I offer it to you by my blade.} The girl was silent. Then she began to laugh. The sound was unpracticed and pained, spurting up from inside her like blood from a freshly torn wound. Another tear plunked into the sword’s carvings. {What is so funny?} the sword asked. The girl gestured to the macabre scene that surrounded them. “This is justice?” And the blade was utterly serious as she replied, {Yes, child. It is.} The girl did not believe her, but she did not argue. {Now come,} the blade said. {This night will be behind us soon, and there will never be a need to return to it. Wipe your tears.} But the girl could not stop them. They just came and came, rolling down her cheeks with every blink. “I’m not sad,” she said, suddenly self-conscious. “I’m angry.” The blade glowed gently. The girl felt it in her heart. Light, in freshly eternal darkness. Warmth, in an endless cold night. {I know,} the blade said. {Leave the tears. Bring the anger. Only one is useful to you now.} The girl nodded. She rubbed her tears with a dirty sleeve, leaving more smears of red on her cheeks. She did not know if the blood belonged to her or not, but in this moment, she realized it didn’t matter. The blood would always spill, and perhaps it was irrelevant to whom it belonged. She staggered to her feet. The blade had been right; she was stronger, now. The pain drained away. The weapon had to have weighed nearly as much as she did, but she hardly struggled to pick it up. She heeded the blade’s words. She began walking and did not look back, not even once, as she left that night behind her. Her tears remained there in the bloody dirt, but she would carry the rage with her for the rest of her life. She was no longer a faceless child. She was a divine warrior. It would be more than ten years before she would at last allow herself to think deeply about this night. She would think of it and tell herself: I should have died that night. And she would be right. But of course, fate is never so simple. Excerpted from The Lion & the Deathless Dark, copyright © 2026 by Carissa Broadbent. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Lion & the Deathless Dark</i> by Carissa Broadbent appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird Cleaning After Confession: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 11) The Cat-Man returns as Good Stab’s confession draws to a close… By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on July 8, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 21-22 of Stephen Graham Jones’s Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel, May 5 1912. Good Stab flees the Fat Melters Camp after the murders of Yellow Kidney and his sister. All Pikuni will now be at war with him, though in this case he isn’t responsible. Good Stab wakes to meet Cat Man, who is responsible. He wants Good Stab to suffer, a “disease” to his people. Good Stab goes to his buffalo herd and finds all dead, and the semi-flayed Weasel Plume dying. He euthanizes the bull by crushing his heart. As he weeps blood, a voice behind him says, “Well, that was melodramatic.” That the Cat Man’s been subsisting on long-legs is obvious from his elongated limbs, antlers and yellow eyes. That he speaks Pikuni means he’s spent time in Pikuni camps. He shrugs off questions about his origins. He’s 450 years old, and knows things Good Stab can’t even imagine. To demonstrate his superior strength, he tears off Weasel Plume’s massive head. If Good Stab were worth his time, not just an accident, he could educate him, show him “the world in all its misery and grandeur.” But if all Good Stab wants is to die, why should Cat Man deny him? Good Stab accepts Cat Man’s challenge. Each takes a goring from Weasel Plume’s horns. Good Stab drinks Cat Man’s blood, hoping it will strengthen him. But Cat Men can’t drink each other, and instead it sends him into a coma. He wakes in a glacial cave, hands and knees frozen into the icy floor. He breaks an arm struggling to free it and uses his exposed bone to dig out his good arm and legs. He wanders a maze of tunnels studded with human and animal remains. Cat Man must have lived here for years. Good Stab starts encountering living Pikuni, sustenance provided by his captor. The third winter, Cat Man supplies only napikwans. One says that outside, Pikuni are starving, buffalo are decimated, and Indian territory shrinks. Good Stab finds a flint arrowhead buried in the man’s flesh, and makes a torch of scavenged clothing to melt his way out. He carries Weasel Plume’s skull to the top of Chief Mountain, a worthy shrine. Then he searches for his people. Eventually he finds the Small Robes’ camp. He now looks napikwan, and they bring him to their new chief. Walks Twice looks Pikuni, but is in fact Cat Man. He hides his true nature by claiming that for his “medicine” to stay strong he must avoid sunlight. Cat Man defers final judgment on Good Stab until he and his hunters return. Good Stab will remain, bound to a post. Children gather to observe him. One girl, Kills-in-the-Water, communicates through hand signs. Seeing sunlight bothers him, the children tie cloth over his eyes. The hunting party returns with only two bulls, and one hunter missing. Cat Man arranges an untimely Sun Dance. Though this upsets the whole camp, no one opposes him. Good Stab is forced to dance in place of a proper Pikuni initiate to manhood, with Kills-in-the-Water the medicine woman who pushes the impelling pegs into his chest. She’s crying “about the wrongness of this.” The dance done, Cat Man carries Good Stab off to the Backbone. There he breaks Good Stab’s legs, spine and one arm, and leaves him to an agonizingly slow recovery. The last of his revitalizing meals are Blue Mud People fleeing soldiers; these leave him Indian again. He finds that the Small Robes have fled Cat Man’s voracity. He meets Kills-in-the-Water and her brother, who fear him, but he builds them a lean-to and brings them food. The last part of Good Stab’s confession he tells with reluctance. He’s returned to the Small Robes’ corpse-littered winter camp. He sets Walks Twice’s lodge on fire and waits. Cat Man comes. He killed these people because they kept hiding Kills-in-the-Water, even daubing themselves with her blood and scattering. Once in a century, someone’s born with blood their kind will do anything for. Kills-in-the-Water will be only the third Cat Man’s ever drunk. Good Stab proposes a bargain: He’ll bring Cat Man Kills-in-the-Water if he’ll then leave, and spare the surviving Pikuni. But first, he returns with the three hundred remaining buffalo. They trample Cat Man flat, but he still throws Good Stab aside and starts to stand. Good Stab rushes back to Kills-in-the-Water. Her brother’s died of the cold; alone, she clings to Good Stab as his daughter used to, all the way to an island below Face Mountain. Her embrace makes what follows his worst sin: He holds her for Cat Man. He then bites blood from his own tongue, mixes it with blood he took from the girl’s shoulder, and injects the mixture back into her. That full mouthful of Good Stab’s blood leaves Cat Man puppy-weak. Good Stab spends four winters feeding Cat Man sturgeons. Then he releases his enemy into the lake, a fish trapped forever in the water. Good Stab searches for Pikuni camps, but finds none. It’s Starvation Winter, with corpses frozen into the snow-crust and Pikuni wasting away at Old Agency where rations never come. His confession’s done. He leaves Three-Persons now, in the church, with his own dead. The Absolution of Three-Person, May 26, 1912. Two weeks after Good Stab’s last confession, Arthur finally returns to his journal. The mice have returned to his church, but Cordelia has not, nor does Arthur dare to steal her again. The mice probably smell the lingering rot of the pews’ dead occupants, now removed by deputies sworn to secrecy. Of course, news of the macabre spectacle has leaked out anyway. Arthur has scrubbed and scrubbed. If only he could scrub clean his memory. He has sunk to so low that he can’t even comfort himself on the stream of victuals delivered by parishioners. The mice were having daily banquets in the pantry until Arthur started feeding stray dogs. He does keep eggs on hand, not to eat but to detect “the proximity of servants of the Pit.” Every Sunday he demonstrates to parishioners the sanctity of their chapel by cracking an egg into a chalice. So far the yolks have been yellow. Arthur did get one shock when an Indian wearing dark spectacles appeared, but it was only Amos Short Ribs. He has told Mose to supply Amos with bottles on Arthur’s tab. The Blackfeet are “a cursed people, and the quicker they become tillers of the soil and tenders of cattle, the better” both for Montana and Arthur’s own “sanity and sanctity.” It remains for him to bear the torture of waiting for Good Stab to select the day of his execution. The Degenerate Dutch: Cat Man has destroyed whole peoples, “lost to history,” and promises that the Pikuni will go the same way. Libronomicon: Of Good Stab, Arthur says “look upon his works and despair!” Which makes him Shelley’s Ozymandias, two vast and trunkless legs of stone plus boasting. New deep lore: the rest of Ozymandias got torn apart by a vampire and scattered to slow his healing. Weirdbuilding: Cat Man mocks Good Stab by promising to force him into a different kind of story—the villain in a tale of a hero who defeats monster after monster. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Appetite spoiled by Good Stab’s confession, Arthur blames the feral dogs for their “gluttony” with his parishioners’ donations. Ruthanna’s Commentary The thing is that (a) I love horror and (b) I am easily squicked out. It’s not that blood and guts scare me, it’s that I’m very good at imagining corporeal damage and it’s an unpleasant experience. Give me unnamable experiences with extradimensional incursions any day. Or give me chewy thematic ideas that I can focus on while I try not to think too hard about the body horror. And if there have to be bloody guts, better that they be weird. Snyder’s metamorphoses were a lot easier to deal with than the open brain slurping, which is easier again than a near-mundane infected wound. Jones is very good, and his themes are very chewy. But the climax of Good Stab’s confession has a lot of ick. A lot of visceral, easy-to-visualize ick. So I am having trouble thinking about the themes because I’m too distracted by having to tear off your hand that’s been frozen into a glacier. Which reminds me way too much of Aron Lee Ralston’s story (CW for much like Good Stab’s story but in real life). It’s hard to type when I’m thinking about this stuff, because I become way too self-conscious about my wrists. I had enough trouble handling a 2-centimeter cut in my thumb a couple of weeks ago. I would not enjoy being a Jonesian vampire. But then, no one else seems to enjoy it either. Leaving aside the grievous bodily harm, or trying to, we learn this week that it’s possible to survive even what happened to Cat Man during Good Stab’s “rebirth.” It just takes a while to recover. And it makes you—or at least, Cat Man—really mad. One of the thematic throughlines that I’m following, under the amputations, is what remains for a nachzehrer of their original life and self. Cat Man is cut off from his own origins, but seems to have come originally from Europe. (Did someone stick him on a ship while he was injured, trying to get rid of him? Did he board to feed, and accidentally go on a transatlantic voyage?) He’s 450 years old, which means he was barely 20 at the time of re-contact. He doesn’t care about his people, doesn’t think of mortals as people at all, the supernatural equivalent of whiteness erasing culture. His list of “ship” cognates starts with “nava,” which might be a Latin variant, and goes on into French, Spanish, a Slavic tongue, Czech, and Russian. He’s not thinking about what he would’ve called it in childhood, nor about what languages are meaningful to Good Stab, just running a cursory finger through his memory file. (Except, then, there’s that ring. A past to be swallowed over and over so that it isn’t—quite—lost.) What he does have, still, is cruelty and an instinct for vengeance. That matches Good Stab, who’s been trying to hold onto his cultural identity and remnant purpose, but who mostly ends up killing and punishing, messily. After another couple of centuries, where would he be? Especially if fellow nachzehrers kept taking the opportunity to destroy the things he cares about whenever he crosses them. All that can’t be taken is hunger, and, um, hanger. And the urge to destroy whatever makes you hangry. Which makes it especially interesting that he doesn’t fully destroy Arthur—though there are still two chapters remaining, and Arthur still expects to die. Instead he forces Arthur to grapple with his own past, and with Good Stab’s. While hung from a cross, in a church full of corpses, admittedly. Not exactly traditional. Still, it turns out that the confession isn’t entirely a farce. One death, out of all those Good Stab is responsible for, has stuck in his conscience. But why confess to an enemy? To a Christian? Why beg for approval? The whole urge seems un-Pikuni. There’s something missing, still, from this picture. And now, what’s missing is Good Stab. Arthur reports the corpses, gets help cleaning them out, returns to serving his flock. He’s lost his once-voracious appetite and his denial, but he’s alive and has his community. Still, he thinks of Good Stab as a representative “savage,” rather than a monster by both napikwan and Pikuni standards. Still, he wishes the surrounding nations “civilized” as quickly as possible, made into tame farmers who don’t know the beavers or the crows or the Backbone. Wishes a world divided into humans and resources to be exploited, with no space left for monsters. Anne’s Non-Commentary: Anne will return from her mysterious island next week, in whatever form the water shapes her. Next week, Marjorie Bowen’s “The Bishop of Hell” offers an older story-confession. In addition to Project Gutenberg, you can find it in Mike Ashley’s Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories From the Women of the Weird.[end-mark] The post Cleaning After Confession: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.

News Emmy Awards Widow’s Bay and Pluribus Rightly Earned a Pile of Emmy Nominations Cast Dale Dickey in everything, you cowards By Molly Templeton | Published on July 8, 2026 Image: Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Apple TV While the powerhouse HBO series The Pitt and Hacks received the most Emmy nominations this year (25 and 24, respectively), two brand-new genre shows are hot on their heels. Widow’s Bay earned 19 nominations, and Pluribus got 18. A few other SFF series also crop up here in the major nominations: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for Best Drama Series; Wonder Man’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for Lead Actor in a Comedy Series; The Testaments’ Chase Infiniti for Lead Actress in a Drama Series; and three nominations for Paradise, including Lead Actor (Sterling K. Brown), Drama Series, and Outstanding Supporting Actress (Julianne Nicholson). But Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus and Katie Dippold’s Widow’s Bay are way ahead of the pack. Widow’s Bay is nominated for Best Comedy Series, and four of its stars are up for the related acting awards: Matthew Rhys (also nominated for his work in The Beast in Me), Stephen Root, Kate O’Flynn, and Dale Dickey. Guest stars Hamish Linklater and Betty Gilpin are also nominated for Best Guest Actor, which is as it should be. Pluribus has a quartet of similar nominations on the drama side of things: Best Drama Series and acting nominations for star Rhea Seehorn and supporting cast Carlos-Manuel Vesga and Karolina Wydra. It also has two Guest Actor nominees in Jeff Hiller and Miriam Shor. Once you get into the Creative Arts Emmys, SFF is all over the place, from Steven Yeun’s Best Character Voice-Over Performance nomination for Invincible to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ lone nomination for Best Special Visual Effects in a Season or a Movie. Alien: Earth has a nomination for Best Cinematography for a Series (One Hour), and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Fallout has two different makeup nominations. Our beloved Murderbot is also now an Emmy-nominated television program, with nominations for Title Design, Main Title Theme Music, and Sound Editing. Star Wars: Visions turns up in Best Animated Program, and Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord in Best Sound Editing. The (massive) full list of nominees is available via the Emmys website. Mariska Hargitay hosts when the Emmys air at 5 p.m. PDT/8 p.m. EDT Monday, September 14, on NBC and Peacock.[end-mark] The post <i>Widow’s Bay</i> and <i>Pluribus</i> Rightly Earned a Pile of Emmy Nominations appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays King Kong Does the First King Kong Remake Deserve a Fresh Look? The Peter Jackson remake perhaps owes a debt to the much-maligned 1976 version By Don Kaye | Published on July 8, 2026 Image: Paramount Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Paramount Pictures It seems like King Kong, one of the acknowledged landmarks of fantasy cinema, would not necessarily have been a ripe candidate for a remake. The original 1933 movie, despite being dated in many ways, was still a groundbreaking effort in visual effects and such an iconic film that even an update with the latest advances in technology might have felt like something no studio or filmmaker would dare attempt. And yet it happened twice—in 1976 and again in 2005. The latter, of course, was co-written and directed by Peter Jackson, who used the leverage from his Lord of the Rings trilogy to make his own version of one of his all-time favorite films. While flawed and bloated, Jackson’s take on the classic story was nevertheless a hit with audiences and critics, grossing more than $557 million worldwide and earning an 84% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The 1976 version, on the other hand, remains the outlier of the three versions: while profitable, it scored only mixed reviews from critics and is perceived as the weakest of the three—and a mediocre film in general. Image: Paramount Pictures But is it really? Fifty years after its release, King Kong ’76—directed by John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno) and produced by legendary Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis (whose resume ranged from early Fellini classics like La Strada to campy ‘60s fare like Barbarella to David Lynch’s Dune)—perhaps deserves some reappraisal. De Laurentiis’ version certainly pivots away from key aspects of the original, yet arguably provides a more sympathetic, even pro-nature take on the giant ape and his clash with the civilized world that makes us feel for Kong and his plight and paints him as more than just a rampaging beast. The story remains essentially the same, although some details are different: an expedition to an unexplored island reveals the existence of Kong, a gigantic ape who is a mythic, almost god-like figure to the primitive tribe that worships him. A beautiful, aspiring actress with the expedition is offered to Kong by the tribe as a sacrifice, but he is instead strangely drawn to her. This leads to him being captured and brought to New York, where he is ruthlessly exploited by modern civilization and goes on a rampage that ends with his lonely death as he plummets from a New York skyscraper (the Empire State Building in the original, the Twin Towers in the ’76 film). De Laurentiis landed the rights to King Kong after an ABC-TV executive, Michael Eisner (who later became CEO of Disney), pitched the idea of a remake to both Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures. The latter brought De Laurentiis on board as producer, and he quickly secured the rights from RKO-General, a holding company that retained the remnants of RKO Pictures, which produced the original 1933 version of Kong. Since Universal apparently claimed to have the rights as well, due to the novelization of the original film being in the public domain, De Laurentiis rushed his version into production before Universal could strike first (it was Universal that eventually produced the Peter Jackson version). Following that, De Laurentiis hired Lorenzo Semple Jr.—whose credits included the 1960s Batman TV series as well as classic ‘70s conspiracy thrillers The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor—to pen the screenplay. From the start, De Laurentiis wanted to jettison Kong’s many battles with dinosaurs (he only fights a giant snake in this one) and update the story to a modern-day setting. Semple told Starlog magazine in 1983, “We made a very deliberate attempt not to be anything like the original movie in tone or mood. Dino wanted it to be light and amusing, rather than portentous. I don’t think the original was meant to be mythic.” Image: Paramount Pictures Semple’s script isn’t excessively campy, like his work on Batman, but there is a lot more self-aware humor in the film. “I had my horoscope done before I flew out to Hong Kong,” says Dwan, the female lead (and Kong’s “love interest”), played by Jessica Lange. “And it said that I was going to cross over water and meet the biggest person in my life.” Lines like that permeate the script but don’t necessarily weigh it down, and in many ways Semple’s screenplay succeeds at updating the story while retaining many of the signature sequences from the 1933 film. One of the cleverest things he does is turn the original’s Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), a documentary filmmaker, into Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin), an executive with the Petrox Oil Company who charters a ship to look for untapped oil reserves on what he believes to be a previously unmapped island hidden behind a permanent fog bank (the atoll is never explicitly called Skull Island in the film). When the island’s oil turns out to be unusable, making the whole trip a potential waste and putting Wilson’s job on the line, the emergence of Kong provides him with an opportunity to capture the giant ape and exploit him for promotional purposes. Whether Semple wanted to intentionally poke fun at the people writing his own paycheck—Paramount was owned by Gulf and Western at the time—it’s all too clear that Petrox and the smarmy, manipulative Wilson are quick to exploit natural resources and leave behind a trail of destruction no matter what the cost. “Even an environmental rapist like you—even you—wouldn’t be asshole enough to wipe out a unique new species of animal,” sneers Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), the primate paleontologist who initially stows away on Wilson’s ship yet grudgingly joins the expedition. Maybe Wilson wouldn’t kill Kong outright (although he initially considers it), but his removal of the giant ape from his habitat not only traumatizes Kong but, as Prescott suggests, is more than likely to upset the natural order on the island. Image: Paramount Pictures Prescott is a reimagining of the character of Jack Driscoll from the 1933 film, the ship’s first mate played by Bruce Cabot. The Driscoll character is a tough, no-nonsense “man’s man” who resents the presence of actress Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) on the voyage (he’s got a thing about women on boats) until he eventually falls in love with her and bravely risks his own life to rescue her from Kong. Driscoll is more or less a square-jawed stuntman with little on his mind, while Prescott is a scientist and activist who is forced to become an action hero while struggling to protect not just Dwan but Kong himself from Petrox’s predations. Bridges is terrific in the role, and he and the excellent Grodin square off magnificently throughout the movie, while Bridges proves himself to be a formidable physical actor as well. And then there’s Dwan (as she notes, her name is Dawn but she switches the middle letters to make it more memorable). In her film debut, future two-time Oscar winner Jessica Lange is almost preternaturally gorgeous, and this being 1976, De Laurentiis and director John Guillermin drape her in the skimpiest outfits possible. But while Lange’s performance was heavily criticized at the time as unconvincing and inexperienced, film historian Ray Morton states in his book, King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon, that this was intentional on Lange’s part—she purposely plays Dwan out of the gate as naïve and somewhat dizzy, giving the character room to grow, while her work earned accolades from Jeff Bridges. Over the course of the film, the relationship between Dwan and Kong does indeed become more touching. The original film portrayed its title character as little more than a monster, and Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow pretty much screams her way through the movie and wants nothing to do with the big ape. The 1976 version takes a different approach (which Peter Jackson also adapted to some extent for his 2009 iteration), having the empathetic Dwan launch a running monologue with Kong that the gorilla finds unendingly amusing. Although there has always been a vaguely unpleasant sexual subtext to every version of this tale, the 1976 Kong treats Dwan with genuine affection and care, as when he washes mud off her in a waterfall then blow-dries her with his breath. There’s something child-like about him, as well as her efforts to calm him, that adds far more pathos to their relationship than the original movie mustered up. Image: Paramount Pictures Dwan yearns for fame and success, but ends up devastated by what that fame wreaks on the innocent Kong. Her grief over Kong’s death at the end of the film is sincere, while Kong’s demise itself is far more heartbreaking. “No one cry when Jaws die,” Dino De Laurentiis told Time magazine. “But when the monkey die, people gonna cry.” If the 1976 King Kong has one major advantage over the 1933 version, it’s that Kong in this film is a much more sympathetic and tragic figure. The moment in the film’s finale when he gently deposits Dwan on the roof of one of the Twin Towers—almost as if he knows that this will sentence him to death in a hail of bullets from a squadron of helicopters—is genuinely moving. As for how Kong himself was brought to life, De Laurentiis was adamant from the start that he did not wish to use the same stop-motion techniques pioneered by Willis O’Brien in the 1933 film. Yet his plan to build a walking, moving, fully animatronic 40-foot version of Kong which could interact with the sets and cast proved to be a disastrous one. Despite the best efforts of special effects legend Carlo Rambaldi, the much-hyped full-sized Kong is only seen for less than 30 seconds in the scene where Kong is unveiled at Shea Stadium. The huge robot merely stands in its cage, barely moving at all, and is never seen again. Much better are the jumbo Kong arms and hands that are used to pick Dwan up or put her down in a number of sequences. Most of what we see in the film of Kong is a collaboration between Rambaldi and makeup wizard Rick Baker on both a detailed, man-sized ape suit and a series of hydraulically-controlled masks meant to give Kong a wide range of expressions. Baker wore both the suit and the masks, and while the full costume never quite conquers the “man in suit” effect that hampered many a Japanese monster movie before this, the masks go a long way in conveying Kong’s emotional state and making the gorilla seem like a living being. It’s not the digital magic that has given us characters like Gollum, Thanos, and the Na’vi in the past 25 years, but—with the help of some skillful editing, John Barry’s resonant, haunting score, and the flexibility of the masks—it’s enough to counteract the often-crude compositing of the full suit into scenes with the actors. Image: Paramount Pictures In the end, Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong is a film with a lot of issues, but is nowhere near as bad as some critics have suggested over the years. It benefits from some solid performances, great cinematography, fantastic location shooting in and around the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and that underrated score. Semple’s script is both cynical and humane, if still falling into tired tropes (the characterization of the tribe on Kong’s island is hopelessly racist, a problem that all three versions of the story failed to solve), while managing to be entertaining and even a credible improvement in some ways on the original. Even with the efforts of Baker and Rambaldi, the visual effects are perhaps the film’s biggest letdown, missing the surreal quality of the original’s stop-motion animation and falling far short of the motion capture wizardry that gave full reign to Andy Serkis’ uncanny acting abilities in the Peter Jackson version. Yet I would argue that this Kong is lighter on its feet than the Jackson film, which takes a good hour to get to Skull Island and retains the Great Depression backdrop. And while Naomi Watts is perfect in that film as Ann, Jack Black and Adrien Brody are miscast as, respectively, Denham and Driscoll (the latter of whom is turned into a playwright). The 1976 King Kong is probably the first one that audiences of a certain age and generation saw, and like the Star Wars prequels, the one that defined their vision of this timeless tale. It may not be as iconic and historic as the 1933 original—which remains the definitive version, even with its own shortcomings—and it may not be as visually overwhelming as the 2009 edition, but this version of Kong can stand tall next to its cinematic brethren.[end-mark] The post Does the First <i>King Kong</i> Remake Deserve a Fresh Look? appeared first on Reactor.