Sunday, November 18, 2012

Kongo

Kongo is a 1932 movie. It's often classified as a horror film, though it's more horrible than horror. It stars Walter Huston (from Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Virginia Bruce (Jane Eyre in the 1934 film by that name), Lupe VĂ©lez, Mitchell Lewis (who played the head of the Winkie Guard in Wizard of Oz) and Forrester Harvey (who was Twiddle in the 1941 Wolf Man, Fezziwigg in the 1938 Reginald Owen Christmas Carol and who had an uncredited part in the 1944 Merle Oberon/George Sanders/Laird Cregar Lodger).

You can watch this online at this link. Here's a trailer:



DVD Talk praises the acting but warns: "Even for a Pre-Code feature Kongo is a catalog of perversions not seen again until the 1970s" and says,
They don't make them like Kongo any more. Today's perverse torture porn may have the edge in realistic effects and outright violence, but it can't match the psychological malice of The Bad Old Days.
10K Bullets says,
If you seek the most perverse and sordid pre-code melodrama ever made, look no further than MGM’s Kongo. It’s a quaint tale of adultery, alcoholism, forced drug dependency and prostitution, voodoo, human sacrifice, sadism, rape, madness, murder and revenge.
TCM has has an overview and a succinct plot description: "A crippled madman seeks revenge on the daughter of the man who betrayed him."

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