Congo Review

By Adam Goldstein

Nominated for 7 Razzies in 1995 (including Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Original Song), Congo failed to bring home a single award. But don’t let that fool you, because with Showgirls and Waterworld released the same year, the competition was strong. And Congo, ladies and gentlemen, is awful… awful great.

Adapted from the hyper-plausible, ripped-from-the-headlines Michael Crichton novel, Congo chronicles the jungle adventures of a fresh-faced primatologist (Dylan Walsh), a former CIA agent (Laura Linney), a dashing South African mercenary (Ernie Hudson), a double-crossing Romanian treasure hunter (Tim Curry), and a talking gorilla in their quest to find the lost city of Zinj and its special diamonds that you can make awesome lasers with.

As one might expect, the team members all have differing but largely congruent reasons for undertaking the trip. The former CIA agent needs the diamonds for her new boss, a laser-obsessed communications magnate (Joe Don Baker in a performance both hammy and vacant). While she’s at it, she figures she might try and track down former fiancé Bruce Campbell, who may or may not have been murdered by trained gorillas while searching for the same diamonds, for the same Joe Don Baker. Also, JDB is Bruce Campbell’s dad. No, it doesn’t really matter.

The treasure hunter, Herkermer Homolka (yay!), wants the diamonds too, but for the usual, non-laser-oriented reasons. The primatologist wants to return his gorilla to her home, which luckily for everybody else, happens to be right next door to Zinj. Ernie Hudson, for his part, just wants to act in movies.

After not that many travails and a few semi-celebrity cameos (e.g. Joe “Joey Pants” Pantoliano), the crew parachutes into the African jungle, relying on their intrepid talking ape to lead them to the ancient diamond mines. But what horrors await them there? Turns out there are two - an active volcano and the aforementioned murderous gorillas. Cue some long overdue deaths and a ludicrous climax. The end.

Like its source material, the film (by mind-bogglingly prolific producer and occasional hack director Frank Marshall) is inane. But where the book is a modest failure, dull and forgettable, the film is a full tilt catastrophe - a delightful and hilarious mélange of big budget production values, over-the-top performances, and soaring, giddy ineptitude. A true camp gem (or super laser-diamond, if you will), even the scenes that should be boring (i.e. the ones not featuring Hudson or Curry) are elevated by the script’s unwavering clumsiness.

Take for example an early scene wherein Walsh’s character, Dr. Peter Elliot, visits with his gorilla, Amy. Amy’s just completed another one of her finger paintings, which, at a glance, resembles a jungle landscape. Somehow unimpressed by the ape’s improbable talent for drawing tropical vistas, Pete blithely hangs the painting on the wall next to, like, fifty other paintings that look exactly the same, and then, Archimedean comprehension suddenly lighting up his blank cow eyes, he asks, “Wait a minute… what’s it starting to look like in here?”

A preschool classroom, perhaps? But no, for what initially seemed an awkward, non sequitur of a scene about an unbelievably skilled gorilla impressionist and her neglectful, dimwitted steward, was actually intended as a pithy episode about a visionary genius who is able to deduce from careful study of his monkey’s incomprehensible scribbles that the green tree-like things she’s always drawing are trees. See, what threw me off was the part where you could tell right away what she was painting… because I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to know what she was painting, see? Oh, also that other part where the brilliant scientist needed to be surrounded by an unbroken 360-degree rainforest panorama, for days presumably, before he noticed. That part was also confusing. In fact, the moment was executed with such distracting incompetence that - though I had seen versions of the very same scene many times before, thanks primarily to the first two acts of Project X - I honestly failed to understand what I was watching until after the fact. Bravo, Congo. Bra. Effing. Vo.

Which, oh yeah, brings me to Amy the Talking Gorilla (who, by the way, lost the Worst Supporting Actress award to Madonna in Four Rooms). Congo commits the ultimate folly of featuring an actor in a monkey suit. To be fair, it includes several, but Amy, unfortunately, is the only one that qualifies as a lead. Furthermore, having decided that a gorilla that only speaks sign language constituted an insurmountable filmmaking challenge, the “screenwriters” equip the “character” with a plot contrivance that translates her silent gestures into spoken words. As a result, Amy the Monkey Suit spends the bulk of the movie running around with a Power Glove on her signing hand and an amp in her backpack, spouting sentence fragments, like, “Tickle. Amy. Tickle,” in a childish computer voice like some perverse hybrid of Steven Hawking and a Teletubby. It is… amazing.

But more amazing, and the truest testament to the film’s unique magic, is the fact that among Congo’s myriad treats, Amy the Stunning Miscalculation gets lost in the shuffle. Despite drinking a martini (from a martini glass!) and looking not at all like a real monkey, she still has to compete with, for instance, the “Delroy Lindo yells about sesame cake scene”, the “ha ha, that dumb customs agent didn’t get the strained Kafka reference scene” and even the “Sol Star from Deadwood dies for the second time scene.” Folks, the movie is stacked. Indeed, like the mythical city of Zinj - that fabled, Crichtonic, laser-diamond repository in the verdurous heart of darkest Zaire - Congo comprises an embarrassment of riches.

Other highlights include:

-Dylan Walsh performing “California Dreaming” for a doped Amy, with a crew of African porters singing back-up. Really, that happens.

-Ernie Hudson’s movie-long Errol Flynn impersonation.

-Laura Linney graphically dismembering killer gorillas with a laser gun - but only the killer gorillas who aren’t melted by rivers of lava. And yeah, that also happens.

-Tim Curry’s varying pronunciations of the word “hieroglyphics”.

Memorable quotes (a far-from-complete list):

“I’m your great white hunter for this trip, only I happen to be black.”

“I’m not a pound of sugar. I’m a primatologist.”

and, my personal favorite,

“Mother’s intuition: Long may she reig - What the hell are you doing?!”

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