Crappy Movies I Love: Congo

I have a lot of time on my hands, given that I’m currently a housewife.  One of the ways I pass the time (read: procrastinate from cleaning the litter-boxes) is to trawl Netflix for streaming video worth watching for more than five minutes.  As anyone with a Netflix streaming video habit can attest, that gets difficult after a while.  Soon you’re down to Syfy monster movies and direct-to-video nerds-have-a-party-with-boobs stuff, and …yeah.  A whole lot of bad movies.

That said, I love some bad movies.  LOVE.  So while some are on Netflix, I figured I’d share.  While they’re “free” (read: cost of a monthly streaming membership, so about $10/month).

CONGO

Why I love it (and big spoilers) after the cut:

Laura Linney!  This is one of the first projects in which I saw Laura Linney, and even with a completely inane script, she manages to bring a little bit of Laura Linneyness to the role.  She’s bad-ass, enigmatic, and for a former CIA agent turned corporate shark, she’s surprisingly mushy about gorillas and Dylan Walsh.  Also, she and Ernie Hudson get to shoot down surface-to-air missiles with flares.

Ernie Hudson!  He gets to try on a British accent.  It comes and goes.  But he faces this turkey of a movie with remarkable élan.  He has to utter immortal lines like, “I’m your great white hunter for this trip, though I happen to be black.”  He elevates all of his scenes.  Cigar-chewing, scene-chewing, etc.

Tim Curry!  Okay, I will go out on a limb to say that Tim-Curry-being-weird is a trope that can end anytime.  I have no connection to Rocky Horror, I’ve only seen it turned into teenage musical fare on Glee, and I don’t really get the whole Tim Curry thing.  But he’s an awful racist greedy treasure-hunting ape-hater named Herkemer Homolka who gets his well-deserved comeuppance, and he gets to say, “The myth of the killer ape is TRUE” in an accent like the Count on Sesame Street.

The rest of the movie contains Dylan Walsh mugging furiously, Amy the Good Gorilla (my brother and I still do “GOOD GORILLA” at each other now and again), five minutes of Bruce Campbell, a wafer-thin plot about corporate greed and lasers, and really smart Bad Gorillas doing things.  It’s a Hollywood movie about Africa, so of course it both invents “exotic” tribes AND features singing porters.  It is not a good movie.  Do not think that it is a good movie.

But, it is a movie with a lost city and lava and gems and lasers and olde-time adventure and “the myth of the killer ape is TRUE” (one! killer gorilla.  two! killer gorillas, ah-ah-ah) and Laura Linney and Ernie Hudson.

Plus it was nominated for several Razzies in 1996.  Enjoy!

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