YMMV / King Kong Lives

• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the film bombed spectacularly in North America, it actually proved one of the first American films to be a big hit in the Soviet Union, after Mikhail Gorbachev made it easier for American studios to release their films there.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Peter Cullen is famous for voicing Optimus Prime, and provided the vocals for Kong in an uncredited role for this movie. In Beast Wars, Optimus Primal, a direct descendant of Optimus Prime, transforms into a gorilla, which caused a hilarious meme 'TRUKK NOT MUNKY!'...
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Whereas the movie was horribly received, the Famicom tie-in game Ikari no Megaton Punch (which was never released outside of Japan) is actually pretty decent for the time. Its sister game for the MSX2, Yomigaeru Densetsu (also a Japanese-exclusive) was also decent.
• Sequelitis: The previous film was already a decent, albeit sub-standard remake, and this film wasn't an improvement. Unsurprisingly, it was savaged by critics upon its release (USA TODAY's Mike Clark suggested the reason "America's Biggest Hero Is Back...And He Is Not Happy" was that "Dino De Laurentiis showed him the rushes"), and flopped at the box office.
• So Bad, It's Good: The film is less serious than its predecessor, if not outright campy.
  Col. Nevitt: We should have no problem identifying the enemy; they're approximately 50 feet tall and wearing their birthday suits.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The suits, compared to the 1976 film at least — much less other big special effects-driven films of '86 — are rather hokey-looking and unimpressive. This might have to do with the film's lower budget of $18 million compared to the '76 film's $24 million. That the film's costumes were made by Carlo Rambaldi^note the man behind ET and the Alien. As well as the full-sized Kong from the '76 remake as opposed to Rick Baker might also be a factor.^note For what it's worth, Baker himself credited the 1976 version's cinematographer, Richard Kline for how well the suit came across on-screen. Kline also didn't return this film — the role instead being taken by frequent James Bond cameraman Alec Mills — as he was busy working on, of all things, Howard the Duck.
  • One of the most conspicuous problems with the suits is how the length of Kong's arms changes from scene to scene. Sometimes they're shorter than his legs, allowing only bipedal walk, sometimes they're long enough that he can knuckle-walk like a real gorilla. In the previous movie they were consistently short and Kong always walked bipedally.
  • The Chroma Key effects are just as cheap as the costumes, perhaps more so. Kong smashing an army man into a grave is a good example.
• Tear Jerker: King Kong’s final death.

---