Most viewers are savvy enough to recognize a bad movie when they see one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t instantly going to fall in love with it regardless, a category in which the unquestionably awful but still utterly glorious Congo resides.
The adaptation of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton’s novel was a big box office success after earning upwards of $150 million during its theatrical run, but the critical response was scathing to put it lightly. A 22 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and no less than seven Razzie nominations painted the picture of an irredeemable dud, but that isn’t quite the case.
After all, how can you actively dislike a sci-fi adventure that features such luminaries as Laura Linney, Ernie Hudson, Delroy Lindo, Bruce Campbell, and Tim Curry on fantastically unhinged scenery-chewing form heading deep into the jungle to track down a missing team of diamond hunters, only to get drawn into a battle for survival that obviously ends up in laser-powered rifles being fired at a rogue band of furious gorillas?
Congo is positively, absolutely, and insanely off the map insane, which is precisely why it’s the best kind of cinematic dumpster fire. It’s loud, stupid, and doesn’t make a lick of sense, but when a supposedly serious moment is punctuated by Lindo’s bellowing of the legendary line “Stop eating my sesame cake!,” it’s hard not to get swept up in the madness of it all.
To that end, an attempt on Reddit to blasphemously claim that Congo hasn’t aged very well at all has caused plenty of disagreements, because more than a quarter of a century later, it’s somehow become more enjoyable as it gets increasingly dated and cheesy.
Published: Feb 27, 2023 03:40 am