Stillborn Again

...Not so, however, with John Guillermin, whose direction is pedestrian where it is not obtrustive, or John Barry, whose ponderous score deadens the ear almost as much as Semple's tinny dialogue does...

...The rest of the cast fares a bit better than the poor ape with the three-way personality...

...The most egregious of the lot is Nickelodeon, written (with W.D...

...Richter) and directed by Peter Bogdanovich, surely the most wistful and least successful purveyor of warmed-over celluloid garbage...

...Although they were shrewd enough to finance Rocky, letting Bogdanovich fall flat on his face once more with Nickelodeon was a little like torturing a dumb animal...

...This $25 million spectacle has been billed as "the most exciting original motion picture event of all time...

...In all fairness, though, it should be admitted that Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s smarmy screenplay puts Lange in an especially difficult position...

...Charles Gro-din occasionally mugs shamelessly and Jeff Bridges is often a trifle too hip and hirsute as a Princeton professor of primate paleontology, yet both bring an air of professional solidity to this otherwise gas-filled epic...

...Whatever, the new King Kong doesn't provide much entertainment even for those with addled brains...

...There ought to be a way to stop this blunderer from making films—something he clearly loves doing, his complete lack of talent notwithstanding...

...He plays and sings heavy rock...

...alas, the lady had other plans—including her own gargantuan spectacle, a remake of A Star Is Born...

...that it is not particularly exciting is apparent from the rather clumsy and unthrilling special effects...

...Nevertheless, De Laurentiis' money would have been more wisely spent if he had hired Ray Harry-hausen, the master animator and former student of Willis O'Brien, to build a working model for stop-motion photography—used quite successfully 34 years ago...

...All three exhibit a syndrome currently widespread in the movie wasteland: the cynical mixing of memory and desire in the hope that nostalgia can pack 'em in and resur rect the Golden Age of Hollywood...

...when King Kong was being conceived again in early 1975, it was rumored that Barbra Streisand would be sought for the lead?as the girl, that is, not the gorilla...

...That is saying a lot, considering that this year alone he produced Lipstick, Drum, The Shootist, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians...

...In addition, her cross-eyed, double-chinned hussy is so brazen that the whole idea of the movie is rendered ridiculous—how could she possibly need Kristofferson as a mentor...

...Only her Shirley Temple Afro, a laughable testimony to the "skills" of her hairdresser/boyfriend Jon Peters (who is billed as "producer"), seems to have been out of her direct control...

...The one weak ray of light in this darkness is Jane Hitchcock, still another former fashion model and presumably the successor to Cybill Shepherd in Bog-danovich's movies, if not his heart...

...There were two remakes of earlier productions, King Kong and A Star Is Born, and one backward-looking comedy about the early days of the cinema, Nickelodeon...

...This kind of updating immediately leads to some problems...

...AH McGraw, Lauren Hutton, and Candice Bergen does not seem sufficient to justify such legislation, producer Dino De Laurentiis has provided us with Jessica Lange, the unknown he chose as the love object of the title character in the new King Kong...

...Barbra Streisand has not yet had the decency to stop singing or acting, but with her latest orgy of exhibitionism she has done the next best thing: Like Bogdanovich and De Laurentiis, she has practically embalmed herself...

...Is it a preoccupation with the cinematic past or merely the December doldrums that turns critics' minds into mush...

...The movie closes with a 10-minute close-up take of Streisand singing a reprise of the film's songs—a perfectly self-indulgent finish to a tedious (two hours and 20 minutes), narcissistic epic...

...Streisand's new version is actually the fourth time around for this old chestnut, which only goes to show that the poverty of the Hollywood imagination allows the same old junk to surface over and over...

...The slightest familiarity with the early works of Hal Roach—not to mention D.W...

...But such difficulties are insignificant compared to the headaches stemming from Streisand's egotistical domination of the picture...

...The physical humor is so willfully engineered and so awkwardly executed that the effect is simply a coarse patronization of those old one- and two-reelers...

...In any event, he has now topped himself by delivering one of the stupidest films of this or any other year...

...The line, incidentally, is a fair sample of the trendy updating that is the ruin of this remake...

...Landing her might have resulted in one of the all-time camp classics...

...The latest reincarnation is different in the single respect that it is what Stanley Kauffmann has appropriately labeled "glittery trash"—the identical cardboard plots and characters decked out in hip tinsel...

...In fact, "Born Again" seemed to be the common theme of last month's crop of big releases...

...This meager conceit is insufficient to generate anything except blatant and utterly arbitrary gags—pie throwing, feet stuck in buckets, capricious pratfalls—that are far less amusing when performed by Burt Reynolds and Ryan O'Neal, the unfortunate stars of the movie, than by even the Three Stooges...

...But my noting the failure to make King Kong contemporary should not be mistaken to mean the 1932 Merian C. Cooper-Ernest B. Sohoed-sack-Willis O'Brien version was all that good—an assumption underlying some of the sillier recent criticisms...

...Nonetheless, someone really should institute a ban against trying to turn models into movie stars...

...at a 40-foot monkey...

...Griffith, pretentiously quoted in Nickelodeon—reveals how little Bogdanovich understands his vastly superior predecessors...

...Finally, Streisand is credited for her wardrobe, for "musical concepts," and also as "executive producer...

...The producers employed a variety of sophisticated techniques, but the patently phony miniature sets and painted backgrounds cast a pall of sleaziness over the entire proceedings...

...Her stridency makes Esther Hoffman unbelievable, and when she flutters her eyelashes and utters cutsey lines like, "If you ever die, I'll kill you," even her die-hard fans must squirm...

...The mechanical beast, engineered by Carlo Rambaldi and Glen Robinson, performs adequately...

...and a man-sized, electronically controlled monkey suit worn by stuntman Rick Baker...

...That it is not original scarcely needs emphasizing...

...a giant mechanical ape with functioning hands to scoop up Lange and feet to squash extras...

...Nickelodeon suffers most of all from an imitative fallacy: You never quite find out why a movie about the early days of slapstick should itself be a slapstick comedy...

...Indeed, a great deal of the technical budget seems to have been squandered, since there were no less than three Kongs used during the filming: a 40-foot stationary model that appears in just one scene at the end of the movie, sprawled at the bottom of the World Trade Center...

...Reynolds, who is capable of displaying considerable comic flair when given adequate direction, turns in an equally dull performance...

...As usual, the director's incompetence is reflected in the ineptitude of his cast...

...The most that can be said for her is that she is also more attractive and competent than the justifiably maligned Shepherd...

...Despite a dismal track record, Bogdanovich was personally selected for this disaster by Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler...

...Molly Haskell, for example, in the kind of intellectual thesis-mongering that is its own best parody, compared the "sanitized and sentimentalized" remake with the "archetypal sexual tension" of the first issue, concluding after labored exegesis that the 1976 King Kong "can't hold a phallic candle to its predecessor...

...No actress could do much more than look uncomfortable hurling epithets like "You goddamned chauvinist pig ape...

...Unfortunately, the dummy looks like a dummy...

...as for the ape costume, Baker tries hard but the fake sets keep reminding us that he is inside...

...Streisand plays an unknown singer named Esther Hoffman, who makes her debut at a "live" rock concert under the sponsorship of a fading superstar named John Norman Howard, sleepily impersonated by Kris Kristofferson...

...The distributors invariably unleash a flood of cinematic trash just before the close of the year, hoping that holiday spenders with lots of cash and vacationing students with lots of time can be lured into theaters...

...Most of these attractions are promoted with all the fervor of a fundamentalist revival—no doubt reflecting Hollywood's recognition of the religious as well as commercial significance of the season...

...She is much prettier than her predecessor and already, in her first role, a much better actress...

...instead, it is set in the world of rock music...

...Perhaps in the future Chartoff and Winkler could end his misery and ours by simply paying him not to make movies...

...Erasing his dull, wooden face from the screen is an imperative second only to retiring Bogdanovich from Hollywood...

...when she comes on stage, though, the violins swell (they must have been hiding in the wings somewhere) and Streisand starts belting out the kind of cocktail-lounge show tunes that made her famous...

...O'Neal acts about as well as he ever has—which is to say very poorly...

...In all, King Kong is probably De Laurentiis' most expensive flop...

...It is, therefore, a little difficult to swallow when the crowd goes wild: All those kids couldn't be swept away by the schmaltz their parents love to hear in Las Vegas...

...In case the evidence provided by Shepherd...

...As part of that strategy, the new Star is no longer about Hollywood...