Trash Day #3 Bicentennial Horrors

It's been a minute since Trash has been collected. My work tends to get particularly busy in May and May 2026 was Busy Phillips (very busy). But we're back! Kind of! I am still digging my way back to daylight.

I wanted to talk about the 1976 King Kong remake and the idea of celebrating America's Bicentennial via this particular take on a Hollywood classic. I ended up renting a DVD copy of Kong after revisiting Flash Gordon and craving more of screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. Semple will forever be in my good books because of his transformative work on Batman '66. "Selling a nuclear submarine to people who don't even leave their home addresses..." is a funny enough thing to write on its own, but the fact that Semple gave that to us in a scene involving Batman on the telephone with...actually hold on, I'm going to take a break and rewatch Batman '66 right now.

Anyway, King Kong '76 is part of a microgenre I am calling Bicentennial Horror mainly for the purpose of being annoying. More seriously, it was delightful to learn that the Paramount of 1976 celebrated the 200th birthday of The United States by perhaps inadvertently distributing a film about the violence and devastation of the colonial project and the ways that the American imaginary has transformed the country's present day into a living nightmare.

We follow American oil executive Fred Wilson (a game Charles Grodin) as he embarks on an expensive search for untapped natural resources on an island that has somehow escaped the gaze of Sauron's extractive desires. The belief in an Eden that houses unclaimed oil is pursued with religious fervor fitting of a high priest of corporate profits. On the journey to this imagined El Dorado the voyagers comes across a shipwrecked aspiring starlet (the debuting Jessica Lange). There's also a stowaway primatologist on board (a hairy Jeff Bridges) who brings his own ideals as baggage in the form of a kind of purist search for Knowledge of the unexplored world that might somehow leave the observed sights and inhabitants unsullied by the gaze of the explorer.

The first half of the movie bucks the trend of Big Budget Creature Features, in that the dynamics between these characters and their competing motivations are actually entertaining to watch, thanks in large part to Semple's snappy script and the smart casting. If you've been burned by the endless boat trip that takes up the majority of Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, I can assure you that King Kong '76 is a much more pleasant journey.

That being said, it's amusing to see the contrast between the massive sets and the steady build to the island and the debut of Kong, who is clearly just a normal sized dude in a gorilla suit. The problem is less the Rick Baker design and more the decisions to shoot around the practical limitations of this constraint in ways that, for the majority of Kong's presence, call more attention to those limitations. There's also a gigantic Kong arm that makes several appearances. In a sense, the filmmakers flew too close to the sun by creating such a compelling world on the way to Skull Island, reviving a star of the 1930s but then bringing him into a 1970s film aesthetic that seems to struggle to maintain its hold on reality once the cast reaches the island's shore. The decision to revive cartoonish racial stereotypes of nonwhite indigenous communities did not help. There's also A Lot of time spent exploring the relationship between our starlet and our kidnapped star, a decision that is clearly informed by a desire to playfully subvert the classic dynamic between Kong and Fay Wray. These scenes kind of hang the debuting Lange out to dry, though she does what she can with this massive ask of any actor.

Having discovered that the island's oil will not draw a profit for several lifetimes, our oil executive takes some inspiration from his rescued fame-seeker and decides to bring Kong to The Big Apple as a lucrative spectacle. Why would an oil company put on such a show? To 2026 audiences familiar with corporate desires to sell Brands and Experiences attached to an array of consumable products and programs, this all makes sense to us. And the nationalist sheen to the proceedings feels right at home in a country where UFC fights are held on the White House front lawn. The Kong show itself is shown to be half-assed and poorly conceived, a riff on the dangerous circumstances that Lange's character found herself in on the island. First as tragedy, then as farce. Semple really was cooking here, though his collaborators were as well.

The real Bicentennial Horror comes in the climax of King Kong 1976, where we watch this giant ape brutally gunned down on the top of the World Trade Center before falling to a second death. We see several bullets hit Kong and draw bright blood from these wounds. Having been extracted and quickly monetized, the spectacle is cruelly and quickly discarded. The cost to the performer, to the audience, to the city, all of it is secondary to the American Dream of the hypercapitalist and his desire to find profit at all ends of the earth.

Unfortunately for many residents of New York City and the country at-large, the rise of the yuppies and their attendant desires of financialization and gentrification would soon prove to be a threat bigger than Kong. If you're interested in That story, I recommend the recently-published Yuppies by Dylan Gottlieb. But if you want to see an oil executive crushed to death, you might enjoy King Kong 1976.

As recounted in Kong Unmade: The Lost Films of Skull Island (a fun read that has apparently been revised and expanded more recently), Kong producer Dino de Laurentis and Paramount's Barry Diller saw Kong as a way to cash in on a 1970s appetite for disaster films. The 1976 release timing does seem like a Bicentennial calculation, acknowledging the original film's stature as an American cultural product. And the presence of destruction and gore were likely desired elements to sate their hoped-for blockbuster audience.

But it's also hard to watch King Kong 1976 and not see a work produced by at least some parties who are all too aware of America's past and the sanitization of that past in acts like the Bicentennial celebration. Kong in this context feels less like a cautionary tale or a call to action and more like a document of a moment in time. And revisiting it fifty years later, it's clear that these delusions and drives still beat within the heart of our culture.

Oh also, Jessica Lange's startlet is named Dwan. Lorenzo Semple Junior! OH and it turns out Lorenzo Semple Jr. was actually Lorenzo Semple The Third?!

I don't want to wade too deeply into 2026 Horror Movie Discourse, but so far I haven't encountered a Kong 1976 equivalent that offers some implicit or explicit commentary on America At 250. But we do still have half a year to go and Kong didn't come out until December, so maybe something is on the way!

I suppose Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day might count as a genre-infused take on These Times, but I prefer Kong. Disclosure Day feels like a misguided Hail Mary pass from a generational touchstone that still doesn't seem to understand that the average Baby Boomer's legacy is more high school bully than star quarterback. Should we have some empathy for everyone who has spent most of the last several decades burying us in debt and violence and misery? I'd rather not. Anyway, I did not like Disclosure Day at all lol.

I guess you could read Obsession as kind of an anti-Disclosure Day, where a desire for easy wish fulfillment and magical escape from modern misery is held up as problematic from the outset, but I don't want to give that movie that much credit to be honest since it's a story that has been told many times and in more compelling ways.

OK, a few quick links and comments and then we are out of here.

I stopped off at The Archive in Bridgeport (CT) a few weeks back on a trip from Boston to New Jersey. Definitely worth popping in to if you are a blu-ray and 4K fiend for Vinegar Syndrome and related stuff.

This was my haul from the trip. I am a big fan of Vinegar Syndrome's Shaw-Sploitation series so I am particularly excited to check out Killers on Wheels.

I was sad to hear that Bizarro-Wuxtry in Athens (GA) is losing their storefront! I was in town for work in 2019 and ended up taking more than one trip to this amazing store.

@pitchfork

Kurt Vile's Perfect 10 is an MF DOOM collab that carries on hip-hop tradition

♬ original sound - Pitchfork

Really enjoyed Kurt Vile's recent appearance on Pitchfork's "Perfect 10" series. I've been increasingly getting into Czarface and this video motivated me to grap a copy of Super What? on CD for my car.

I have not been keeping up with a ton of wrestling in the last month or so, but I did catch AEW Dynamite this past week and I absolutely loved the Owen Hart Tournament match between Mercedes Moné and Hazuki! I fear I will be paying money to watch Forbidden Door next weekend.

I am still rolling out collages on Instagram! Here's a recent one I scanned and shared over there for the non-IG folks reading this:

OK, that's all for this installment. Sorry for the delay! I have been watching a lot of World Cup and spending time outside. But Trash will always lure me back!

Feel free to chat with me on Bluesky or email me: jimmcgrath[dot]us[at]gmail