YMMV / Congo

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• Adaptation Displacement
• Awesome Music: Jerry Goldsmith to the rescue again, with a little help from Lebo M. (and James Newton Howard).
• Critical Dissonance: While the film has only a 24% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Joel Siegel praised the effects and action and Roger Ebert called it "a splendid example of a genre no longer much in fashion, the jungle adventure story."
• Fountain of Memes: Stop. Eating. MY SESAME CAKE!
• Ham and Cheese: Tim Curry as Herkimer Homolka, a "Romanian philanthropist" who is "Travelink de vorld and doink goot!" The book had no equivalent character. Same with Bruce Campbell. And Delroy Lindo. It's like somebody realized what a lame movie they were making out of a boring book and said "Hey! Let's get some awesome over-actors to keep people's attention!"

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  • Ditto Ernie Hudson as Munro; the "Great White Hunter" of the group though he "happens to be black!" So damn cool he almost makes the film worth watching for his performance alone.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The scientist character saying that chopping down the rainforest won't change the world's climate. 30 years later and global warming/climate change is a thing...
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The statement that a 'worldwide network enabling billions of computers to communicate with each other' is theoretically impossible.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Both the Sega Saturn First-Person Shooter and the PC Adventure Game were met with mostly positive reception from critics and players alike.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Delroy Lindo as Captain Wanta (see Fountain Of Memes entry above).
  • Bruce Campbell definitely leaves an impression in the opening.

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• So Bad, It's Good.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • It's quite painfully obvious that all the apes in the film are men-in-suits. At least ILM's matte paintings, miniatures and animation are good.
  • Justified in that while computer animation in 1995 could make smooth or scaly creatures rather easily (i.e. Jurassic Park), trying it with hairy creatures (the filmmakers' first attempt) made the gorillas look cartoony.
  • Towards the end, there is a short Cat Scare, with a few birds flying suddenly over the group, when they enter the temple for The Reveal. But the hand of someone throwing them, not quite off-screen and clearly visible, makes it hilarious.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Dylan Walsh is pretty much the only actor for whom this is the case - as can be seen in Ham and Cheese above, everybody else knew exactly what kind of film they were making and acted accordingly.

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