TWT #160 –

On June 9th, 1995, Paramount released the movie “Congo,” an absolutely absurd and perfectly terrible adaptation of a Michael Crichton book that has astounded audiences for decades.

Seriously. If you haven’t seen Congo, stop what you’re doing and go watch it now. (Wait… don’t stop reading this… read a few more articles and then go watch it).

Let me just set up the premise for anyone who has yet to see this glorious film.

A couple of dudes, Peter and Richard, have trained a monkey, Amy, to use sign language (“not too crazy so far” you may say, but just wait…). They then create a machine to transform Amy’s sign language into a robot voice, so Amy can talk just like Stephan Hawkins.

And that’s all set up within the first ten minutes. Not joking, this movie is insane.

For whatever dumb reason, they decide Amy needs to get sent back to the jungle. And for another dumb reason they allow Karen to tag along. Karen wants to get to that jungle because her research buddies were all killed there and she wants to find out why.

Yada yada yada, the group gets to Africa and are captured by Captain Wanta. Then, we the viewers are granted with this amazing scene:

Yada yada yada. I’ll cut to the chase.

Our heroes are attacked by a large tribe of super-strong “grey gorillas” that look a little bit like this:

Kind of cute…

I wont ruin the ending, but it might involve Karen using a diamond to make a lazer gun, lots of gorillas deaths, and a lava-flow escape in a hot air balloon.

Triple kill, great shot!

While the movie itself was pretty incredible, it was based off of a Micheal Crichton book of the same name. I can’t speak to that novel because I stopped reading Crichton after unfortunately reading his entire book “Timeline” where some history students travel back in time to 14th-century France.

(Crichton was kind of a one-hit-wonder with Jurassic Park)

All in all, the Congo team did get nominated for seven awards… granted they were all “Razzies” and thus the nominations were for: Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst Original Song, and Worst Supporting Actor (for Tim Curry).

The saddest part is that Amy the animatronic gorilla who spoke like Stephan Hawkins, was also nominated for Worst New Star AND Worst Supporting Actress.

Poor gal.

(p.s. possibly the best line in the movie comes from Peter and goes something like “Oh no! The bad apes have the crystal lasers!” – Brilliant!)

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