THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977)
The dividing line on what makes for the designation of “cult” cinema often hinges on some combination of poor box office, technical limitations, obscurity, and the sheer strangeness of a film’s central concept. Usually, this tricky to parse set of factors gets reduced to some tired variation of the phrase "so bad it's good", but that fails to really express the experience of watching this class of movies. There are plenty of films that meet all four criteria that drag on endlessly while you're viewing them, but that don't particularly stick with you once the credits roll. Some movies demand more than a subjective judgement of quality. Some movies' magic lie in the sneaking suspicion that you might be watching something that vibrates at their own unique wavelengths, transmissions from a frequency that makes the usual frames of reference essentially irrelevant.
1977’s THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN wasn't the first of the wave of "I can't believe it's not KING KONG" copyright infringing cinema meant to ride the coattails of Dino De Laurentiis' 1976 remake, but it is probably the most successful at creating something that feels distinct (while skirting the edge of legality). The basic beats of the familiar formula are all present: Johnnie Fang (Danny Lee) is our brokenhearted explorer in search of a monster who may be myth.
Samantha Ah Wei (Evelyne Kraft) is an animal skin bikini-wearing blonde bombshell who lives in the deep jungles and has a unique rapport with a massive monkey, whom she affectionately has named Utam. Lu Tien (Feng Ku) is the bundle of hubris and tunnel vision that sees dollar signs in exhibiting the creature to an amazed public. Swap a beautiful actress for a beautiful feral orphan, Skull Island for the Himalayas, and New York for Hong Kong, and you already know exactly how the main plot will play out.
While funded and conceived by martial arts film impresarios The Shaw Brothers as a cinematic game of Mad Libs, where PEKING MAN becomes something far more brilliantly bonkers is in all of the other references they manage to cram between the lines in a tight 90 minute runtime. This was likely a shameless attempt to appeal to the Western market, but in divorcing a pastiche of pop iconography from its usual cultural context, THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN becomes both far more fun and far more strange than the sum of its parts would suggest. The film is not so much a rip off of KING KONG as it is a recreation of a fever dream someone had while watching the original KING KONG in a poorly ventilated theater.
Johnnie's expedition is full of the outdated technology and nonsensical derring-do that littered ‘40s adventure serials. Bonds are formed in all of 60 seconds of screentime, the contemporary setting somehow still requiring the use of ox-drawn carts and analog weaponry, and soon a poor glorified extra is wrestling a tiger for no other reason than to display some quick gore and to fast track some dramatic stakes for our ineffectual hero. The introduction of Samantha's tragic backstory, and assortment of animal friends, is a riff on Irish Mcalla's short-lived ‘50s stint on Sheena: Queen Of The Jingle. The cheetah print swimwear has been updated to a buckskin bikini, but the impossibly impressive coif and constant threat of wardrobe malfunction remains.
Not satisfied with just one soapy love triangle (having previously established that Johnnie's willingness to undertake such a dangerous journey was due to discovering his former girlfriend in bed with his brother), soon Johnnie and Samantha are an item. There's a disco-scored romance montage that involves lots of golden light and the inexplicable joys of twirling a peeved looking live cheetah across one's shoulders while smiling like the star of a Breck shampoo commercial. Bringing the original film's highly questionable romantic subtext to the forefront, soon a tearful Utam is peeping on their lovemaking, the rubber mask unable to fully express the pathos on an intra species cuckold, but every last bit of the disquiet the introduction of that concept brings.
By the time the movie remembers its actual purpose in riding the coattails of KING KONG, it's an afterthought to all of the freeform camp pastiche that proceeded it. In the face of gratuitous inner thigh snake bites, scorned giant primates, and the entire city of Hong Kong barely looking askance at a buxom blonde running barefoot through the streets like misguided exoticism Barbie, the classic kaiju rampage is almost an anticlimax.
Lu Tien chomps cigars like the cartoonishly sleazy villain he is, and his vile treatment of Samantha is the straw that breaks the monkey's back, inspiring the expected monster melee. The miniature model work is far more accomplished than the incorrectly scaled rear projection shots of Utam, but this sort of effects heavy fare is best left to films with bigger budgets and better actors.
While it slips from the highest gear of its goofy groove in the final stretch, THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN is never less than entertaining. As such, it will always hold a special place in my schlock-fueled heart amongst all of the intellectual property infringing monkey madness. While not as patently self aware as A.P.E., it is far more fun than the supposedly comedic QUEEN KONG. THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN is the perfect sort of gateway drug to the wider world of exploitation cinema. It's just tame enough to have earned frequent play on late night television, but just tilted enough to encourage exploration of what other off-kilter oddities the more disreputable corners of midnight movie history has in store.
