KING KONG (1976) Blu-ray Review

King Kong (1976) d. John Guillerman (USA) (134 min)

After Airport kicked off the all-star disaster-film craze, director Guillermin was tapped to helm Skyjacked, a fairly transparent riff on the Irwin Allen blockbuster, with Charlton Heston’s take-no-guff pilot contending with James Brolin’s mad bomber at 30,000 feet. Fittingly enough, Guillerman landed the next big bang boom, 1974’s The Towering Inferno, the success of which led to his assignment on the decade’s highest profile extravaganza to that point: Dino de Laurentiis’ then-staggering 24-million dollar remake of the classic Beauty and the Beast tale. It proved to be the perfect blend of 1970s big-budget mayhem and the “Nature Strikes Back” Eco-horror wave that was just hitting its peak with Jaws.

SATURN 3 (1980) DVD/Blu-ray Review

Saturn 3 (1980) d. Stanley Donen (UK)

A pair of botanists (Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas), manning an experimental agricultural outpost on one of Saturn’s moons, is visited by a stiff-necked military gent (Harvey Keitel) bearing lots of attitude and a revolutionary new robot, Hector. Powered by strange colored liquids, electricity, and a huge tube of human gray matter, the android is designed to replace one or both of the current residents to increase productivity and feed a starving Mother Earth. But, as so often happens in movies of this sort, malfunctions occur during the programming stage – turns out our metal guest has a direct feed into the roughneck’s psychopathic nature, and both have a yen for the fairer sex. With communications blocked due to a solar eclipse, the battle of man vs. machine vs. man will be waged for the love of a beautiful blonde.