Directed by Ernest Schoedsack and featuring special effects by Willis O'Brien and Buzz Gibson, the film stars Robert Armstrong, Helen Mack and Frank Reicher.

A month after the destruction in New York City by Kong, filmmaker Carl Denham has been implicated in so many lawsuits that he is almost bankrupt.

Denham leaves the city aboard the Venture with Captain Englehorn, who knows he too will be similarly prosecuted if he stays, but their efforts to make money shipping cargo around Asia are not successful.

That night, Mr Petersen, Hilda's father who runs the monkey show, stays up drinking with a Norwegian skipper, Nils Helstrom, who had lost his ship under questionable circumstances.

Helstrom had actually made up his treasure-story to get a free ride away from Dakang, but with the ape's help, Denham and Hilda find a real treasure - a huge jewel on the head of a seemingly abandoned giant stone idol, which he takes.

Englehorn, Hilda and Charlie quickly retrieve and board the lifeboat, but a violent earthquake and hurricane strikes the island, and it begins to sink into the ocean.

Script writer Ruth Rose intentionally made no attempt to make a serious film on the logic that it could not surpass the first.

The script/screenplay featured scenes of tribal warfare and a climactic dinosaur stampede during the massive cyclone/earthquake that sinks Skull Island at the film's end.

[2] Also, the same Brontosaurus model used for the raft scene in King Kong can be glimpsed in the sea as the island is sinking.

The stop motion animation in the film (done by Willis O'Brien who also did the effects in King Kong) is not as extensive as in the original, but included is a sequence where a Styracosaurus chases the explorers through the jungle.

In 2005 it received a DVD release and was available both by itself and as part of a collector's set alongside King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949), with commentary by Ray Harryhausen.

In the New York Times review of the film, they described it as a "low melodrama with a number of laughs" that were deemed to be satisfying, though they added that the vision of comedy by the producers would be open to discussion.