King Kong (1933)

Presenting: the grandfather of all monster movies. I recently watched this one for my film music class to do a report on Max Steiner's score. Safe to say, the score is very impressive and pretty much makes up half of the movie's quality. My opinion may be daunted by the fact that I was born fifty years after the original King Kong was released, so with that being said, I may not have been thoroughly entertained, but have developed a great appreciation for this classic.

I have yet to see the remake, but given the era this film came out in, you can just tell how groundbreaking it was for American cinema. King Kong takes potentially mysterious ideas that the average 1930's person would find at least slightly disturbing, and creates Skull Island, a fictional place inhabited by all that which would frighten a typical 1930's audience. The natives and the creatures, including Kong, are all presented dynamically and our group of main characters sort of "Scooby-Doo" their way through the island, battling it out with Ray Harryhousen's stop-motion effects.

The message of this one is quite clear. Mankind has brought a beast out of its natural habitat, and by doing so and showcasing it for money, we have become the monsters. It's amazing how many genres of film this movie glides across, Action, Adventure, Romance, Suspense, etc. I found myself realizing King Kong wasn't known for just delivering realistic thrills, but as one of the first films to cram so much into such a short and simple film. Definitely a good one to watch, if you're willing to travel that far down the root.

Fido (2006)

Within the wide world of zombie movies, I've never come across one that stands out as much as this one. Fido is an interesting take on what would happen after the main story of most undead lore. What if zombies were enslaved and trained to work under mankind?

What Fido does that I enjoyed so much, is it almost satirizes the idea of the caged animal. Zombies pretty much have their own genre of anything these days, and because of that there are things that any horror fan would know right off the top of their head. Zombies eat people, are a great threat in numbers and can only be defeated by severe head trauma or decapitation. Since the movie is a new take on zombies, reducing the flesh-eaters into household pets (hence the name "Fido"), it certainly calls for some real zombie aggression, as they are being forced out of their fictional nature to do the jobs that we would all rather have someone else do. A zombie can be hired to do your gardening, deliver papers, or even be a milk man. A concept that Romero somewhat introduced in Day of the Dead.

Fido is set in a 1960's post-nuclear era in a world conquered by zombies with the exception of an isolated society. Years ago a meteor impacted Earth that carried a strange virus, causing humans to turn zombie upon first sign of death. Suffice to say, this is where the film gets a lot of its humor.

Among all of the dainty, brightly colored theme of a perfect life there is a paranoia that is very well portrayed by actor Dylan Baker, who plays a highly tense opposite to a rather open-minded family that puts up quite a resistance to this walled society's rules. Baker says what is probably my favorite line from the movie, "Old people can't be trusted."