Tim Curry vs. Tiny Flesh Eating Mutant Apes

Michael Crichton's recent passing saddens the literary and film worlds, but he has a special significance to me, as i just realized his books were the first i ever read and then immediately saw adapted to the big screen. I read Congo sometime around 1994, when i was listening to a lot of Coolio and feeling confused about life in general. I found a paperback copy of Congo in my grandmother's library, though in retrospect it seems unlikely she was responsible for putting it there. I read it cover to cover, and though i can't remember being particularly horrified in the reading process, i was big time into it.

A few months later, i coerced another kid's parents into taking us to see the movie, despite the fact that we were 11. There, i witnessed Tim Curry being eaten alive by miniature ravenous apes, who fell into an erupting volcano of molten lava. This, as i recall, was as traumatizing an experience as the time i saw Stargate with the same exact friend, and he fell asleep about ten minutes in, leaving me with Kurt Russell for a babysitter. This was my first experience of disappointment with film adaptation, and astonishment that a director had the power to interpret a book differently for a film. How dare they?


I immediately moved on to Jurassic Park, which, with one exception, did NOT disappoint in its film adaptation. Jeff Goldblum was the difference. He alone made up for the fact that the old guy/owner of the island escapes clean on the helicopter at the end, to wistfully look out the window and lament something like "god, what have i done?" In the book, that guy is eaten alive by about a hundred tiny, ravenous green dinosaurs. Not until 2008 would i piece together this tradition of Crichton's, having his characters meet a very chewy end, by a pack of overtly small, carnivorous animals. Oh well.

Then, if i remember correctly, i tried to read Sphere. On that one, i got about 40 pages in, and gave up. I think i saw the first half of that movie too, with Samuel L. Jackson and Queen Latifah. Things kind of went downhill around this point for my Crichton fanclub membership. Something about puberty really wrecked that whole author for me.