Apocalypse Now with a King Kong

Rating: 4/10 (3 April 2017)

Here's a tip for keeping me at least interested for a B-grade monster movie. When you take off with 4 huey choppers from the deck of your science ship, please don't almost immediately breed them into 8 choppers. I was looking at the deck, going hmmmmm, small load, they're going to need more against kong... but oh, never mind, they just randomly spawned MORE choppers after take off. Oh good....
All eight, plus the other two heavy lift ones, all proceed to get as close as possible to kong's flailing arms, so they can all get crashed. Now, the heavy lift chopper is literally STUFFED with bombs and napalm... yet does not explode when it crashes.
The choppers go in to skull island with speakers blaring. Like the rip off of Apocalypse Now could not be any more blatant. Instead of Ride of the Valkryes though, they play Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid', the ONE highlight of this movie.
Kong is NOT a giant gorilla, like the excellent Jack Black version of King Kong, the best ever done and never to be topped. No, this guy looks more like a squat short legged sasquatch.
This Island should have been called 'The Island of Misfit Monsters', because that's what it was. A gigantic spider with legs designed to look like bamboo??? WHY??? A humongous water buffalo with horns designed to get him stuck in swamps? Tiny bat pterosaurs that can somehow lift a human being and then tear them to pieces in the air? Giant lizards that are missing their back legs?? A random giant squid just hangin' out in a small lake, even though King Kong is clearly only up to his knees in water, and the water is Way to shallow there for a humongous kraken squid, wth, through er in.
Then we have John Reilly. As in well known comedian. From such low brow hilarity as step brothers. And he's in fine form, cracking John Reilly step brother jokes ('I may stab you tonight... just kidding...') His character is completely out of place and completely unbelievable. The skipper from Gilligan's Island would have worked better.
This is a Vietnam war flick with stupid monsters and King Kong. And that's all it is. The soldiers, after tramping over mountains and through swamps all day, magically produce a flame thrower and a .50 cal machine gun in one battle. Anyone tell the director how heavy those things are and why didn't we see them before? At 2 hours this movie CRAWLS, and it feels like 4. The predictable final show down at the end with Kong facing the BIG legless stupid lizard, is boring and cringe-worthy.
Samuel Jackson is also cringe-worthy. A 2D cardboard cut-out character with zero depth, very much played as a Captain Ahab.
I can't recommend you dodge this in the theatres enough. And there was Zero 3D in it.