Schmollywood Babylon

Kongsploitation: Goliathon (Meng Hua Ho, 1977)

More known as The Mighty Peking Man, I kinda prefer the Goliathon. I mean, Peking has nothing to do with the story ("Colossus of Congo" is even worse, a titled used in parts of Europe)! Goliathon is a damn fine monster-name, which invokes both Godzilla and Gorilla and just sounding very cool. I've always felt confused while watching it. No, I'm not feeling straight vibes just becaues there's a half-naked women in more or less every scene! It's more because it's so damn cool, but still have the most boring first part every in a movie! EVER! 

It sounds fine. Somewhere in the Indian Himalayas a giant ape lives. His best friend is a stunning blonde, Russian actress Evelyn Kraft - with hardly any clothes on - and they live happily together close to where Evelyn once crashed together with her parents and now is a female Tarzan of some kind. But a couple of Hong Kongnese adventurers have heard about the ape and travels there, captures it and the adventure can being... no, not yet. Because first Evelyn and Danny Lee must fall in love and endless scenes of nothingness. Which goes on forever. In eternity. 

And then the ape is caught, delivered to Hong Kong and the fun can begin!

It feels terrible to say this, but that first half... with the romance... I mean, it shouldn't be there. It should be deleted, destroyed. Movies like this should not be allowed to be boring! But once you get through that, it turns into a helluva fun movie. The special effects, for example, is more or less up there with the Godzilla-films. At least the miniatures, which was supervised with people from Toho. So it's not surprising it looks so good! The monster-suit... it looks okay, but quite freaky. The face looks a bit too human to feel comfortable to look at. It's not a cute ape, like yesterday's King Kong! 

At least there's a lot of action. Buildings and bridges destroyed by angry ape, people running like they starred in a Japanese kaiju movie from the monster... and Evelyn's nipples have  a tendency to escape from their nest when you least expect it. At least when she's running. And she does that a lot.

This time I also watched it with the original language, which I guess is Cantonese or something. It hardly makes the film more serious, but it's easier to accept the craziness than when watching the infamous English version released in the US on DVD, under the Mighty Peking Man title. Maybe the English helped the first half a little bit, because of the cheesy dialogue - but I doubt I'll ever see that version again. Goliathon is just a lot more closer to what the original intention with the movie was suppose to be. 

Not counting the boring parts, Goliathon is a fun, fun, fun rip on the Dino De Laurentiis King Kong from the year before. When it's monster action it's really good monster action. The miniatures look fine and for you dykes and straight men out there, I guess Evelyn can be to some help while watching it!

Kongsploitation: Shikari (Mohammed Hussain, 1963)

One of my many goals in life is to collect every single King Kong-related ever made. It can be official Kong's or just good old rip-off's from all over the world. I haven't succeeded yet, but I'm getting damn close. Here we have Shikari, a 1963-hit that manages to combines King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, Dr Cyclops and the atmosphere of the old poverty row cinema but in colour and with lots of singing and dancing. Shikari means big game hunter, and this is also the central theme of the movie: to catch King Kong!

 

A greedy circus owner decides to go to some faraway country (Singapore is mentioned, but I'm not sure that's where they're going) to catch King Kong. They actually use that name, until they're there and the natives instead calls the big ape for Ottangu. They meet up with their guide, a famous hunter with - as usual - a beautiful daughter, who lives in the jungle. They find a totally destroyed village and our heroes wants to get the police and doctors there, but the greedy circus owner shoots the messenger and wants to catch Ottangu first! Some scenes in the print is missing, but a while later they're discovering that the famous Dr Cyclops has a secret lab in the jungle. It's he who created the big ape and now he's - in the name of peace - continuing the experiments. He can shrink people, transform to gorillas or just throw them down in his snake pit! What will happen to the good part of the circus crew? Will they survive... or will the wrath of Ottangu punish them?!?!?!?

 

Shikari, who clocks in at 130 minutes, could be a considered a bit talky for an un-experienced viewer of Bollywood cinema, but the fact is that it doesn't feel boring at all. There's a lot of musical numbers, but they are easy on the eyes and never too long. The biggest charm is the shameless atmosphere of matinee. It's just a very unpretentious movie. The bad guys are bad and the good guys are good. The monsters are monsters and it has jungle, hut-destruction, a very uncalled for ice-skating number and all the men are a bit to chubby to action heroes. Just the way I want my Bollywood-adventure.

 

It's hard not to dig the fine combination between not less than three of Ernest B. Schoedsack's classics. The mad doctor in Shikari even calls himself Dr Cyclops. Shikari more feels like a homage to Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper than a simple rip-off or a "Bollywood remake". Like Spielberg and Lucas did with the Indiana Jones franchise, this movie is rooted in the nostalgia of older American adventure movies.

 

King Kong, or Ottangu himself is a fun creature. One of the more creepier giant apes out there. Mostly because the actor inside the suit choose use a very spastic, weird, almost zombie/monster-style of moving around. There's not smooth movements here, and it just looks wicked! Like Ottangu is a fucked-up robot-ape! The bad thing is that there's only one destruction scenes, when Ottangu attacks a village in the end. This is well-made and looks cool, but it would have been nice with more ape-action. As a bonus, under Dr Cyclops lair, we also meet a very odd monster. It's some kind of mutant, played by a man in suit, who's gigantic and chained to the wall. Pity we didn't see him fight with Ottangu!

 

Shikari is a fun adventure-romp that entertained me. Don't be fooled by the monsterless cover, this is way more cool than you might think. 

 

This review was published earlier on Ninja Dixon.

Kongsploitation: Banglar King Kong (Iftekar Jahan, 2010)

Finally the legendary - the obscure - the awful - the amazing... Banglar King Kong! I'm proud to say that I think I've seen every King Kong movie, every rip-off and every similar movie made (except The Asylum's King of Kong Island, but I need to watch it soon!). The original King Kong was one of the first movies I ever saw and it still haunts me since I was 4-5 years old and it was aired on Swedish television. Because I have a smart and cool mother she let me see it and since then I've been obsessed with monsters, big apes and miniature destruction. Thank you mom.

But back to Banglar King Kong. You all now the story and I have no intention to tell you what everyone already knows: female scream queen, boat, island, big ape, hero (with a nose that literary becomes invisible because of the bad picture quality of the movie), mad director, show in big city, ape climbing up skyscraper and falls down. This version is an interesting combination between the 1933 and 1976 version, the best of both shows so to say. Even if I have nothing against the message-heavy seventies version it's nice to see that they just aimed for simple (and I mean Simple with a capital S) entertainment and lots of silliness instead of going the more serious root.

Actually, if you turn of the colour on your TV - and the sound - this would look like a real silent movie, complete with unsteady and light-sensitive cinematography and actors doing their best to be as far away as possible from acting in a realistic way. Prepare for a lot of scene-chewing and dramatic poses and rolling eyes!

The effects ranges from bad to terrible with a crappy ape-suit (according to the filmmakers purchased from the US, so we can once again blame that country for all the horrible things in the world!) and very, very, very simple blue screen effects and miniatures that's so primitive I'm not sure I would like to call them miniatures - maybe just "cardboard boxes with holes in them"? It's interesting to see that it actually works and the sole reason for that is that the effects are crappy all the way, every single one of them - except those few shots that are actually stolen directly from the 1976 version, and they fit in anyway.

I also need to come out from the closet and say that I prefer bad musical numbers before good ones, and Banglar King Kong has plenty of badly staged, moronic and tacky sing- and dance-numbers for the whole family. Often shot with a handheld camera, very few other dancers, simple choreography and even the most pointless supporting characters gets a chance to rap - or what ever they try to do. And I love it. I love Love LOVE it! I mean, if I can participate in one of these musicals number then they must be good!

Banglar King Kong is one of those movies that can be used to separate real cult movie fans from fake ones. The fake ones are those who only have seen (brilliant) movies like The Evil Dead, Halloween, Re-Animator, Hellraiser, Dawn of the Dead etc and claims to be fans of subversive, original, odd, exploitative cinema. But they can't even get through a movie like an unsubbed monster-mash like Banglar King Kong or a three hour slasher-epic with kung fu fights from India. They're too lazy and therefore they just belong to those mainstream "cult movie fans" who happily share specific scenes on Facebook from Banglar King Kong but never dares to the watch the whole movie.

I might be making fun of some movies here, but remember one thing: if I didn't love them I wouldn't watch them. What's the point of watching (and writing about) movies you dislike or even hate? I love primitive movies because I'm tired if big, smart productions. Along the way a lot of love and passion disappears it seems.

Banglar King Kong IS incompetent and extremely silly but it has a lot of trashy love to share with us all. I wish it was easier to find, but with the stolen footage, music and story I guess it will never get a proper release outside Bangladesh - or even inside the country.

If you want to see a lot of cool screenshots (and read a superior review), head over to Tars Tarkas for an impressive piece of in-depth analysis of Banglar King Kong!

This review was published earlier on Ninja Dixon.

Kongsploitation: A*P*E (Paul Leder, 1976)

I once had a good friend, a pen pal you can call it, from South Korea. He's a slightly famous poet, at least so famous he can survive on his writing. One of the first things I asked him was if he'd seen Yongary (he had, and he hated it), if he had seen Wangmagwi (no) and if he ever heard of a American-South Korean co-production called A*P*E. He never heard of it and was extremely surprised to even learn something like that existed. Paul Leder, the father of Hollywood blockbuster director Mimi Leder, was a prolific exploitation director during the 70's and 80's and A*P*E (which stands for "Attacking Primate Monster") was meant both as a spoof and a cash-in on Dino De Laurentiis King Kong. There's even a movie director called Dino in Leder's film. To add to the exploitation vibe it was also shot in 3D.

Now, this is a very ambitious project which obviously never was meant to leave the script stage, but thanks to South Korean investors and the enthusiasm of Leder it went ahead... and it's a completely, wonderful disaster! Like Goliathon it spends a little bit too much time on pointless melodrama and love affairs, but this time it's faster into absurdity and very cheap miniatures in a story that goes like this (kinda): Dino is shooting a drama in South Korea. He brings his star there, Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) and everything goes well...until the giant ape that escapes from a boat (and battles an enormous shark!) in the beginning of the movie stomps closer to Seoul to create mayhem and scare children. The military, including the Americans, doesn't believe in the ape from the beginning but soon they need to battle this terrible, awful, horrible ape suit with everything the got!

This is stupid. It's very stupid. It's close to mentally challenged. It's also very entertaining and just watching the effects - none of them are good - embarress themselves in front of the camera is a beautiful thing to behold. The ape suit - or maybe more the person inside the suit - is extremely uconvincing and does a remarkably bad job imitating a primate. Also watch out for one of the seamen in the beginning - he's probably THE worst actor ever. Not kidding. 

What makes A*P*E fun is how it rarely stops to think. The drama is washed away by retared dialogue and lame attempts at comedy, the directing his highly questionable. Or maybe it's more the editing? It's hard to say, because everything is so sloppily executed. Now it seems like I'm hating it, yeah? The Evil A*P*E Hater? No, that's not just true. I love this flick. It's "special", but it's obviously made with some kind of misdirected passion and hardly any budget at all. To be fair, there's a couple of miniature scenes that look okay-ish, probably because they was shot in sunlight and not in studio, which adds to the realism. 

Come to think of it, Mimi Leder's Deep Impact is just like Paul Leder's A*P*E but with a tidal wave instead of a big ape. That's a fact according to me and you have nothing to say about it. 

Kongsploitation: Queen Kong (Frank Agrama, 1976)

Here's an idea, instead of a kongsploitation week I should have done a week of obscure spoofs, which I have a tendency to love and cherish more than what's healthy. Frank Agrama's Queen Kong belongs in both categories: a stupid comedy starring Robin Askwith and a lot of women in very little clothing AND a giant ape movie in the same vein as Goliathon and A*P*E. Agrama's spoof on Kong is actually extremely unfunny, but not without its merits. First of all, it reverses all the roles compared to the original King Kong: instead of leading lady Fay Ray we have Askwith as dope-smoking hippie Ray Fay, Rula Lenska plays Luce Habit, which of course is a take on the original actor Bruce Cabot... and then we have the title ape herself, Queen Kong - worshipped by a tribe of women who once in a while captures a man and feeds him to the ape. 

But this time the ape falls in love with him and of course it all ends up in London, where Queen Kong breaks free and starts to stomp down houses and becomes a feminsist role model. I'm not sure if there's an honest pro-feminist stance in this film, or if it's just spoofing the whole movement - it would be a pity if it was the last, because as an all-women comedy it's not that bad. It's just mostly unfunny. Hard to describe, but it's rare to see comedies where the women have the same amount of jokes - both word-plays and slapstick - as the men. That's something you rarely see even today, in this "enlightened" society. Askwith is not that fun, but still quite charming - I'm sure he was popular among the girls once upon a time. I actually think Rula Lenska is a lot more fun and perfectly captures a female version of the original's Carl Denham (that's why it's odd she's named after Bruce Cabot, Denham was played by Robert Armstrong!).

There's a lot of jokes here, at least - if not even more - on the same level as later flicks like Airplane and the same year's (brilliant) The Big Bus. Queen Kong even have a gag with a signing nun aboard an airplane! I guess that spoofs something from the Airport-films, but you know... every film with an airplane in peril looks the same and melts in to one boring piece of poo in my eyes. Except Airport '79 - pure brilliant considering the cheese-factor!

My biggest concern with the gags is that they're strangely out of sync. They never, never really fits in the rest of the script, being a bit too forced to feel natural. Not that these jokes must seem natural, but it's like watching your dad trie to tell a joke with modern references that he clearly doesn't understand. Thank Satan the monster action is quite fun, very cheap and with shitty effects, but at least it's not boring. The filmmakers used some real miniature town in Hampshire, about 55 miles outside London, which both is good (it looks quite nice) and bad (they can't really destroy anyhing!). Also watch out for some very early blue screen-effects, which could be right out from BBC sci-fi production quality-wise. And that's not necessary a good thing.

Queen Kong is clearly not for everyone. But if you like really, really, really, really bad jokes this might be the kongsploitation movie for you. 

Kongsploitation: King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976)

John Barry's score is among the best I've heard, and now - after rewatching King Kong - it's still the best thing with the movie. Not that it's a bad movie, far from actually, but the music by Barry really gives me goosebumps. Together with Laurence Rosenthal's masterful work for Ronald Neame's criminal underrated disaster movie Meteor, this is a score that literary creates the atmosphere of approaching danger, of doom. Just by writing about it gives me the chills. Not bad, eh? The first King Kong is basically THE movie that made me love cinema, made me love genre cinema to be more specific. You can read a little bit about it here. It took me many years to actually see the 1933 classic again, and before that one of the first tapes I ever bought was a x-rental of John Guillermin's King Kong, the blockbuster starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lang. 

I don't know why, but it's considered flop - but was actually a huge success! It costed the huge sum - at the time - of 24 million bucks, and generated 80 million at the box office. And according to some sources it went to break another record: "NBC bought the rights to air the movie and it was a ratings success. NBC paid De Laurentiis $19.5 million for the rights to two showings over five years; the highest amount any network had ever paid for a film at that time.". Not bad at all. Anyway, this is great, great adventure flick. It's dated and far from perfect, but it's also works very well even today (and I'm a big fan of Peter Jackson's 2005 version!). 

What doesn't work is Jessica Lange's underwritten bimbo. She's written as a naive, silly girl, someone who can't live with out men around her to save her from every problem that shows up. She's annoying. On the other hand, Lange is doing this character perfectly and there is, without a doubt, people like her. But together with Jeff Bridges environmentally conscious (and very hairy!) hero, it just seems so unlikely they ever would get along together. It's a very contrived part of the story, something that worked a lot better in both the old version and the latest. But it's also a part of the seventies, two cultures that clash. Which by itself is pretty interesting. 

The supporting parts is more interesting. From Charles Grodin and Rene Auberjonois to Julius Harris and Ed Lauter, a cameo by John Agar and super-sexy John Lone in an early part as "Chinese chef", this is a film packed with male talent. It's a pity the female characters are wasted on nothingness. I guess that's the closest it will come to the adventure romps of the 30's, even if Fay Wray had way more character. That old Republican bitch. 

Towards the end, after Kong breaks out from his cage, the movie is finally turning darker, the way the seventies treated their storylines. The sequence when Kong is shot down is bloody, bloody as hell considering this was rated PG. There's also some mayhem where he kills humans which still feels quite rough. If you've seen the deleted scenes there's even more action in the town, and it's a damn pity they removed it. Because the final, before the World Trade Center scene needs more action, more miniatures being destroyed.

But I guess you can't have it all.

Still a favorite movie of mine. Maybe because of nostalgia, but mostly because it's such a fun and crazy movie. You can see all the money that was spent on it, and especially the fantastic performance by Rick Baker and his ape-suit. Still impressive today.