Hmmm...

Uh oh -- you know what this means!

It's time for another Congo action figure review! If you've forgotten, the first chapter of this popular series dealt specifically with Kaheega. This time, I'm yanking out the big gun. Glory in four syllables: AMY. MONKEY.

Many times, I've tried to imagine what the public's reaction to Congo would've been like had they excluded the friendly, talking gorilla. While Amy's appearance was a necessity if they wanted to stay true to the novel, I don't believe that Michael Crichton foresaw the onscreen representation of Amy as a monkey who spoke English through the power of a Nintendo Power Glove.

But where many saw a fumble, I saw a legend. Amy Monkey turned Congo from a mere guilty pleasure to a film that I can watch 72 times in a row, no matter the circumstances. Not a single day has passed since Congo's 1995 debut that I haven't thought about Amy Monkey. She was infectious, and when you're vying for screen space against the likes of Tim Curry and Ernie Hudson, you need to be infectious. A movie starring Tim, Ernie and Amy seems nearly theoretical -- like some grand dream that a group of kids on methamphetamines dreamed up and then spent the subsequent 45 minutes laughing about.

Amy was a gem. From her showstopping lines ("Amy want lunch.") to her heroic display against a horde of mutant grey gorillas, Amy was the film's true star, and she completely deserved her own action figure. I wish Kenner's old Congo toys weren't such an epic failure, but I doubt that the sales records factored into Amy's clan's decision to name her top gorilla for all of time.

Right back atcha, Amy! Aloha!

Doing away with the needless oversized missile launchers that seemed to come with every other figure in the Congo collection, Kenner focused its attention on the only accessory that mattered: Amy's "communicator backpack," complete with cord-connected gauntlet. With these tools, we are free to imagine Amy speaking directly to us, shooting the breeze about whatever it is that interests domesticated gorillas.

Due to the molding and paint job around her face, Amy conveys a constant sense of indignity, as if someone just accused her of rummaging through the trash. But is this fact or fiction? I suppose it isn't out of the question for a gorilla to attack garbage, but classifying Amy as a "gorilla" seems somehow wrong. Is the bible just a book?

Overall, the figure is pretty simplistic, I guess because there was no sense tacking random baubles onto what was already perfect. A+.

And now, from monkey to murder:

I saw the new Friday the 13th flick, and did not love it. I think it captured some of the style of the franchise, but not the soul. Or maybe I'm just erratically passionate about Friday the 13th stuff. I kept hearing about how the writers were ginormous fans of the earlier films, but it seemed more to me like that they were just guys who studied up to make sure they were rehashing old bits faithfully.

But then, that might not be a fair assessment -- I'm not sure the writing was the problem at all. More the execution. For one, I just wasn't a huge fan of this version of Jason. I don't know who decided that Jason needed to be 800 feet tall, but I'd like to meet this person so I can cut parts off of his body and eat them. One of Jason's many charms was that, while certainly big and bulky, he was impossibly strong despite being of human build. Overall, the look was just too much, and he came off more like one of the nameless freaks from those Hills Have Eyes remakes -- albeit in a hockey mask.

Granted, I'm a tough sell. I would've much preferred to have a new chapter of "classic" F13 rather than a "re-imagining," because I am selfish and it really wouldn't have affected me if the film only took in 8 million at the box office. At the very least, I kinda wish they would've set the thing in the early '80s, which would've added a nice visual style and been a good way to really overdo the cliche kill fodder characters. Hell, the movie aped so much from the earlier films anyway -- why not the era?

I don't know. I got the impression that everyone loved the movie, so I feel like a bastard saying that I didn't. Maybe I'll feel differently after it comes out on DVD and I have a chance to watch it in the way that I've grown accustomed to watching F13 films: Half-crocked on a recliner, with Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crumbs all over my crotch.

In more uppity F13 news, there's this:

Yep, they've finally released Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D. The DVD barely costs a buck more than the non-3D version, and you get two pairs of 3D glasses, and plenty of other reasons to say "3D" over and over until somebody kills you.

The 3D isn't terrific, obviously. It could be argued that it doesn't work at all, perhaps owing to the fact that the 3D glasses are no more high-tech than the 3D glasses that came free inside boxes of Cap'n Crunch back in 1987. One tip, though: Flatscreen TV, as big as possible, in total darkness. I tried watching it on a smaller tube television, and I died six times.

Even if it doesn't work that well, it's neat to get a full sense of all of the film's 3D effects. I certainly wasn't ready for Friday the 13th movies in 1983, so my viewings have been limited to VHS and DVD. It was always easy to spot the 3D money shots, but I never realized how many simple things took advantage of the technology: Laundry hung out to dry, random bushes, so on and so forth. Totally worth buying.

I've been woefully out of the toy loop and thus have no idea if these are new, newish or not new at all, but the Transformers Universe collection is well deserving of a four-paragraph tribute on a lazily updated, ad-stuffed blog. Hasbro's been re-releasing the "retro" Transformers for years, but this particular series really does the concept right.

First off, the figures are cheap. I can't remember exactly what I paid, but it was 10 bucks or less per figure. Secondly, the packaging is far simpler than usual, so you can actually open the toys and not feel like a sucker for tearing apart an extra 10 bucks worth of cardboard and plastic. Thirdly, the series appears to span throughout all the many eras of Transformersdom, allowing our G1 Deceptions to battle against Beast Wars Maximals in a scale-appropriate arena.

While I typically admire new Transformers toys on the rack and never on the checkout line, Toys "R" Us carried two of my favorite characters in history -- Cyclonus and Dinobot. Owning them seemed natural.

Cyclonus, if you'll recall, was one of the "new" Decepticons from Transformers: The Movie, created by Unicron to help Galvatron defeat adversarial crons and trons. What many people forget is that Cyclonus was kind of the Decepticons' de facto leader for a while, during those strange post-movie episodes. I loved the guy. I don't know if it was just because he looked like some kind of purple robot devil or what, but I loved him. If Transformers had a Boba Fett, it was Cyclonus.

Dinobot is from the Beast Wars era, and aside from being responsible for a ton of great moments in the series, he was also the focus of the best episode of any Transformers series in history. (Spoiler: He died.) I can't tell if this new action figure is an exact replica of the '90s version, but whatever the case, it's a little bit bitchy and falls into 20 pieces as soon as I touch it. Unlike Amy Monkey, I do not have gorilla power hands. There's no excuse for this.

Overall, nice figures. Too bad they're doomed to sit in a storage bin until 2030.

Hrm. What else? Oh, I heard that the commercial I did for this SpongeBob DVD aired during American Idol this week. Why did I pick this year to stop watching Idol? (Bonus: I did both of the special features on that DVD. And by "I" I mean, "me and a team of wonderful people." But mostly me. All me.)

What's new with you?