10 King Kong Movies Ranked Worst To Best

Directed by Ernest B Schoedsack and Merian C Cooper, King Kong (1933) is far from the first monster movie though it can lay claim to being the father of today’s effects-heavy, destruction-filled blockbusters. Without Kong, there’s no Godzilla, Alien or Jurassic Park.

In his debut, Kong is brought to life by Willis O’Brien’s frame-by-frame stop-motion technique, and the filmmakers take a bit of poetic licence when it comes to telling us how tall their leading man actually is. According to Roger Ebert, Kong is eighteen feet tall on Skull Island, twenty-four feet on stage and fifty feet tall on the Empire State Building.

But then, Kong has been taking poetic licence throughout his long and illustrious screen career. He’s tall enough to stand head to head with Godzilla, who seems to tower over Tokyo’s buildings, yet still has to climb up the side of skyscrapers to reach the roof.

More than any other screen monster, though, Kong retains the ability to fascinate and enthral. More than eighty years after he first reached the screen, he remains the “eighth wonder of the world”, his very name a byword for size and strength.

The following list includes remakes as well as the best known spinoffs and rip-offs but excludes animated films and TV movies. It should keep monster fans busy until Kong: Skull Island reaches screens in March.

Laughable in every respect apart from when it attempts to be funny, this no-budget sex comedy knock-off of Dino de Laurentiis’s King Kong remake is so lame-brained and amateurish you can’t imagine anyone queuing up to see it. In fact, viewers never had the chance – “legal difficulties” meant it was never released theatrically and remained unseen until its DVD debut twenty-five years later.

Rula Lenska is looking for a “real man” to star in her jungle adventure film, but in 70s England the best she can find is Robin Askwith, who also played Timothy Lea in the Confessions movies. Venturing to “Lazanga, where they do the konga”, Askwith is kidnapped by the bikinied natives who want him as a mate for their goddess, Queen Kong.

Throughout the film, the score sounds like ersatz Benny Hill Show theme music, which is apt because Queen Kong is basically an overextended sketch, filled with dreadful puns (“so that’s gorilla warfare!”), casual sexism and politically incorrect ‘humour’. Oddest of all is the end credits song, which includes the couplet, “You would stop yelling ‘rape’/ If I was just an ordinary household ape.”