"The Son of Kong" is a film unjustly maligned in some circles, as comparing it to its legendary "father" is simply unfair. Any attempt to make the follow-up as another adventure/horror hybrid would have been doomed to be less than the original--lightning just doesn't strike the same place twice that quickly, so Cooper, et. al., intelligently chose another route. And speaking of quickly, it WAS hurriedly put together--only nine months passed between the two openings, and making the first one cost RKO so much money, they had to have waited for the box office returns to come in before giving ANY thought to producing a sequel, let alone actually green-lighting one, further reducing the time available to make it. The real short-comings here are in the script, and I feel strongly that one rewrite--no doubt prohibited by how quickly the studio wanted the film in theaters--would have helped tremendously. I'll admit that the live-action build-up to the Kong's island sequence should have played much better than it did, but the real problem here is that several important aspects of the story are not made very clear. For example, while the main-cast introductions in the opening titles tell us that Helen Mack plays Hilda, the name appears absolutely nowhere else in the picture (Denham calls her "Kid" more than anything else). Similarly, the promotional poster for her and her father's show bears the name "Petersen's" (if you make a point of trying to read it during the moment it's on screen), implying that this is their surname, but again that's the only place in the film you can find it. Minor details, admittedly, but they still point to a need for a rewrite. Elsewhere, Englehorn has perceptively used the term "Dutch jurisdiction" concerning Helstrom's desire to leave Da Kang, yet he and Denham are eager to believe the Norwegian's story of a treasure hidden on Kong's island, and that he didn't tell Carl when he gave him the map and told him everything else because HE was thinking about looking for it some day. By this point, the average viewer has gotten the impression that Denham is cleanly away from the many lawsuits filed against him back in New York, provided he not go back there, but it doesn't really work that way, and things are even worse if that grand jury did indeed hand down one or more criminal indictments against him (all that was actually said was that he was being subpoenaed to testify before it). Also, Englehorn used his savings to get them back to the Orient, and their shipping business is not doing well. They both are in such dire financial straits when Helstrom feeds them this line that neither gives any thought to its credibility, but I saw the film more times than I'd care to try and count before I came to understand all this. I still don't comprehend why Hilda stowed away on their ship instead of waiting for the magistrate and filing her report of her father's death. One good rewrite of the script before they started shooting, and that 40 minute live-action build-up would have had plenty of the dramatic "impetus" that Neil Pettigrew ("The Stop-Motion Filmography", MacFarland & Co., 1999, p. 648, a typical comment) found lacking.
Review of Son of Kong
