Animal crackers | 6 July 2017

The Vaults at Waterloo are gallantly trying to pose as the party spot for hipsters in the world’s coolest city. Brickwork alone may frustrate this goal. The venue is half-buried in a warren of arches beneath the western approaches to the terminus. The foyer is scruffy, poorly lit, and its dank air is scented with mildewed plaster and decaying concrete. It stinks, to be blunt, of tuberculosis. The auditorium features balding velvet pews salvaged from a condemned Odeon. Each seat receives its burden with a groan of reluctance. Every few minutes a train passing overhead rattles out a tom-tom beat.

This is the unpromising location for King Kong (A Comedy), which turns the 1933 horror flick into a satirical cartoon. The tone is brash and larky but the show sticks closely to the original storyline. A mad zoologist exhibits a giant gorilla in New York but the beast escapes and is killed by militant philistines in deadly aeroplanes. The script is rich in gags of varying quality. Everything is delivered with self-exonerating silliness and there’s so much nudge-wink cynicism that the weakness of the material becomes a strength. Well, almost. A sample joke: a smoke grenade is passed to a bungling sailor. ‘Remove the pin,’ he’s told, ‘and throw it.’ He removes the pin. And throws the pin. And yes, that’s the joke.

There’s some ingenious comic puppetry when the expedition reaches Skull Island, where tribesmen are about to be sacrificed to King Kong. The gag is that the victims belong to a privileged clan who believe the sacrificial rituals are a mark of favour, not a preparation for death. What’s entirely missing is the unique emotional appeal of the film. Viewers felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for the tormented gorilla and became uncomfortably aware that a genuine romantic bond might exist between Fay Wray’s character and her animal captor.