Disasterotica

Its funny about Kong, saw it when I was 12 years old in 1953 at kiddie matinee, scared the pee didly out of me, which I thought was delicious. I loved the fact that Kong was nobodies sweetheart, an aspect of giant monster movies that has been done on a few time, can't stand what they did to Godzilla and his ilk, with the kiddy-fication and bowdlerization. (The American Zilla was about as scary as giant wet chicken running amok in Manhattan , don't create much suspense when mayhem breaks out no one even stumps a toe.)

Giant monsters and alien invasion films always fascinated me (even if ninety per cent of them were crap).

I think erotic mayhem idea came to me from reading EC in the 50's, remember a Wally Wood cover or drawing showing , I think I remember this right, a pile of women being transported to a alien space ship for god knows what purpose! (Funny started reading science fiction at that time but did not know till years later about the earlier pulpy BEM menace women on the garish covers.)

I remember seeing a film called The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms in the early fifties when I was about 12. There is a scence where the dinosaour attacks a group of people going into a Subway terminal and kills them.

One of the victims in that attack is a blond who gets knocked down the long flight of steps, and as she is dying her coat , skirt and slip seem to wind up around her long legs reveling hosiery and panties. I thought this mixture of sort of inadvertent eroticism and violence was really cool. I thought this could have been done in other monster movies or disaster films. Slow motion ‘undressing’ of women as fall or are crushed to death would be a nice erotic touch. GORGO has tiny slices , almost, the original Godzilla , which I like, does not seem to have anything like that in it, even in the original Japanese production. Tho! I remember in 1957 staring in wonder at the big B sheet poster for that film and marveling at the 5 or 6 falling women from a wrecked train and seeing ‘skirts ahoy’ , heels, skirts , petticoats and pink and grey panties on display in a kind of ‘muddy’ painting, funny that was only on the American poster for Zilla. (Can’t seem to find an image of it on copies of the poster or reproductions that shows this well, even the one enclosed.)

I did not know about the ‘wrong woman’ scene, cut from the 33 Kong , until I read about it years later. That was really the origin of this story, when I did see it, liked the fact that Kong stayed in character , thought the fall was kind of clever for 33, but seemed tame to me. The same scene in the 76 Kong is even lamer, being it was the 70’s and could have gotten away with all kinds of cheesecake, somebody had a failure of imagination. As for Peter Jackson’s Kong, the MPAA’s defacto censorship put the kybosh on that.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

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Disasterotica

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