SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 29 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The American actor Sam J. Jones, who rose to fame with the 1980 classic ‘Flash Gordon’, inspired by the comic book character created by Alex Raymond, will visit the Canary Islands Fantastic Film Festival next November from La Laguna Isla Calavera to collect the Legend of the Fantastic Award.
The mythical international star will participate in a meeting with his fans as part of a special event at Multicines Tenerife, in which the cult film in which he starred alongside Max von Sydow, Ornella Muti and Timothy Dalton will be screened. The ambitious Dino de Laurentiis production, directed by Mike Hodges, featured original music by Queen and was nominated for three BAFTA Awards in the categories of Score, Art Design and Costume Design.
As a final touch to the seventh edition of the Festival, Sunday, November 19, will be entirely dedicated to the legendary giant gorilla of Skull Island, King Kong, who this year celebrates his 90th anniversary. The proposal consists of a marathon of projections that will begin with the classic directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and with Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot in the cast. ‘King Kong’, originally titled ‘The Eighth Wonder’, premiered on March 7, 1933 at Radio City Music Hall in New York and became an immediate box office hit.
The show will continue with John Guillermin’s 1976 adaptation, starring Jessica Lange (Golden Globe for Best New Actress for her performance) and Jeff Bridges, a $24 million Dino de Laurentiis production. The film won the Oscar for best special effects and left many iconic scenes for history.
Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’, with a budget of more than 200 million dollars, will close the triple program. Starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody and Andy Serkis, it won the Oscars for best special effects, sound and sound editing in 2006.
The tribute to King Kong will be completed with a series of parallel activities, such as the exhibition ‘Kong Universe: 90 years of the giant ape’ or the presentation of the book ‘King Kong. The book of the 90th anniversary’ by Jesús Palacios, which has just seen the light. The author, Isla Calavera Award for the Diffusion of Fantastic 2022, will visit the Festival again to talk about the mythical primate.
These first announcements of the VII Isla Calavera Festival took place within the framework of the first special event of the year, dedicated to ‘Alien, the eighth passenger’ (1979), with full capacity. The audience that filled the Multicines Tenerife room enjoyed the horror and science fiction classic and the film forum led by the journalist Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Villar with the participation of the film critic and historian Jesús Palacios, the fantastic literature writer Víctor Conde and Daniel Alonso, president of the Royal Canarian Academy of Sciences, a collaborating entity of the cycle of the Cinema Classroom of the University of La Laguna dedicated in April to Artificial Intelligence and which had a golden finish with this projection.
