Mighty Peking Man
Feb. 27th, 2006 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinYesterday I saw Mighty Peking Man, the Shaw brothers' 1977 Hong Kong take on King Kong, presumably intended to capitalize on the publicity for Dino De Laurentiis's 1976 remake of same.
The twist here is the movie's take on The Girl: the Ann Darrow character has been replaced by a Sheena, Queen of the Jungle type, one of those blonde white jungle goddesses with perfect hair and makeup who runs around in an animal-skin bikini (even in downtown Hong Kong, giving the movie a surreal Tarzan's New York Adventure angle), played by the very hot Evelyne Kraft, who does the best anyone could with the part. While it's strange to see this character done without a hint of revisionism as late as 1977, it actually makes more emotional sense as a Kong variant: the big ape's love for the woman can be explained as the result of a lifelong bond of friendship rather than some strange lust of giant gorillas for minute white women. (I suppose Mighty Joe Young used a strategy similar to this in some ways.)
I'd heard Mighty Peking Man mentioned often as a classic of cheese and staple of B-movie fests. It certainly is cheese of a high order and shamelessly exploitative in a million ways, but I have to hand it to them: for all its over-the-top silliness and frequently dodgy effects, it's a much better movie than the 1976 Kong. It clips right along, bogging down a little only in the perfunctory love-triangle subplot about the hero's other girlfriend back home, and it really delivers on the ape-suit kaiju spectacle. It's also unique as far as I know among King Kong knockoffs for actually coming up with a clever format for the stadium spectacle built around the chained Peking Man: it's basically a monster truck show, in which the caged ape has to play tug-of-war with machines.
It also manages to be funnier than the '76 Kong just by being straight-faced about all the goofy stuff in it, whereas the De Laurentiis movie aimed at satirical, self-mocking humor and missed, which is always incredibly sad to see.
The twist here is the movie's take on The Girl: the Ann Darrow character has been replaced by a Sheena, Queen of the Jungle type, one of those blonde white jungle goddesses with perfect hair and makeup who runs around in an animal-skin bikini (even in downtown Hong Kong, giving the movie a surreal Tarzan's New York Adventure angle), played by the very hot Evelyne Kraft, who does the best anyone could with the part. While it's strange to see this character done without a hint of revisionism as late as 1977, it actually makes more emotional sense as a Kong variant: the big ape's love for the woman can be explained as the result of a lifelong bond of friendship rather than some strange lust of giant gorillas for minute white women. (I suppose Mighty Joe Young used a strategy similar to this in some ways.)
I'd heard Mighty Peking Man mentioned often as a classic of cheese and staple of B-movie fests. It certainly is cheese of a high order and shamelessly exploitative in a million ways, but I have to hand it to them: for all its over-the-top silliness and frequently dodgy effects, it's a much better movie than the 1976 Kong. It clips right along, bogging down a little only in the perfunctory love-triangle subplot about the hero's other girlfriend back home, and it really delivers on the ape-suit kaiju spectacle. It's also unique as far as I know among King Kong knockoffs for actually coming up with a clever format for the stadium spectacle built around the chained Peking Man: it's basically a monster truck show, in which the caged ape has to play tug-of-war with machines.
It also manages to be funnier than the '76 Kong just by being straight-faced about all the goofy stuff in it, whereas the De Laurentiis movie aimed at satirical, self-mocking humor and missed, which is always incredibly sad to see.