Space 1979 Extra: The ripoff of the remake nobody remembers

 

Title: Mighty Peking Man aka Goliathon

What Year?: 1977 (Mandarin language release)/ 1980 (US/ dubbed release)

Classification: Knockoff

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

In the course of this feature, I have had a fair number of movies that I thought of at the very beginning but took a long time to get to. Some were very hard to obtain, like Silent Running. Some didn’t quite fit in with what I set out to do but eventually found their way in, like Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Then there were ones that I just kept putting off, like The Shape of Things To Come. With this review, I’m finally getting to the one that has waited the longest. As a further milestone, it’s a ripoff/ knockoff of a movie that was notorious enough that I considered it for inclusion in its own right. Here is Mighty Peking Man, a foreign imitation of the 1976 remake of King Kong.

Our story begins with a giant ape-like monster devastating a village. In the aftermath, certain civil and scientific authorities send an expedition to capture the creature, led by an adventurer trying to stay ahead of trouble at home. In the jungles and mountains of mainland Asia, they discover a secluded realm where elephants, tigers and leopards still roam with no fear of man, ruled by a giant called Utam. They also discover a stranded, feralized blonde woman living on friendly terms with the creature and the rest of the fauna, who swings through the trees in a fur bikini that makes Raquel Welch’s in One Million BC look modest but still keeps her legs immaculately smooth. With her help, they lead the giant on a voyage back to civilization, and naturally, a romance blooms between the girl and the adventurer. But those who want to capture the creature plan to make a profit, and the demands of society won’t be any easier for the adventurer than for the jungle woman. When the giant breaks loose, they must choose between saving him or themselves!

Mighty Peking Man was a production of Shaw Brothers, a Hong Kong studio also responsible for funding Inseminoid. While the movie was universally considered a knockoff of Dino Delaurentiis’ 1976 King Kong remake (see also Flash Gordon and… Transformers?), it was also more broadly part of a wave of new interest in the character, arguably beginning with the 1962 Toho production King Kong Vs. Godzilla. The movie was reportedly made for $6 million over a period of 1 year, indicating that the movie was in production and possibly relatively complete by the time Delaurentiis’ film was released. The film starred the late Evelynne Kraft as the jungle woman Samantha and Shaw Bros regular Danny Lee as the adventurer. Assistant director Koichi Kawakita went on to work for Toho on productions such as Gunhed (maybe..,). A version of the film was released in Asian markets by April 1977, reportedly 100 minutes long. A significantly shorter dubbed version was released in the US in 1980 under the title Goliathon. The movie’s rating is sometimes listed as PG-13, which was not introduced until 1985, possibly given during a 1999 rerelease.

For my personal experiences, I find it difficult to separate this movie from the 1976 Kong and especially the very frustrating experience of finding it instead of the original at the ‘90s video store. With two more remakes/ reboots in the rear view mirror and vastly improved access to older movies, the 1976 version is now the one sliding into obscurity, which I no longer consider quite what it deserved. In the midst of this reversal of fortune, it’s been all the more surprising to see the rising profile of Mighty Peking Man, which by now is better liked and conceivably even better known than the remake it imitated. Around the time I thought of this feature, I watched it when it was available for streaming, and it came up a number of times on my preliminary lists. Still, I didn’t get back to it until the present review, after deciding to put together a little additional material before retooling for another phase of the feature, and I still do not quite understand what others have seen in it.

Moving to the movie itself, there is still room for argument about classification. With the facts in order, my assessment is that it is an early example of what would now be called a “mockbuster”, a ripoff/ knockoff intended to hit theaters (or video racks) at about the same time as the property being imitated. As such, it remains solidly in knockoff territory, but can at least be credited with assuming a measure of risk, especially considering how mixed the reception of the actual remake was. This is very much reflected in the design choices of the movie, which in the best knockoff/ runnerup tradition look less like a direct copy than an eccentric reverse engineering. This especially shows in the design of the creature, more like the Brown Gargantua than Kong, which loremasters will recognize as akin to “half ape/ half human” concepts that were considered both for the original King Kong and the ’76 version. There’s a further intriguing twist in the shift to Asia, which could have worked better in a 1930s setting. Then there’s a whole pile of random in the jungle woman, which makes it feel like a copy of the Tarzan movies (also subject of a minor ‘70s revival) as much as Kong.

The cost of these choices is that nobody involved seems to have understood when or how to hold back. To me, the whole thing feels like an over-restored painting, with shading and texture wiped away until only the basic outline and colors remain. The violence is jarring and brutal, with a fair amount of gore and a gratuitous volume of pyrotechnics. The already wobbly proportions of Kong get blown up to kaiju proportions, albeit with some decent and consistent reference shots that put him in the 50-100 foot range. The hubris of Carl Denham is replaced with a caricature of the entitled businessman, while the exploitation of the creature is a literal monster truck rally. The romance is mostly watered down to bad soap opera, though Samantha’s “fish out of water” arc makes for some satisfying moments (especially the fate of the expensive outfit she’s provided with). Then there is the outlandish montage of the pair in the jungle, set to a song so egregiously yet generically 1970s that I literally assumed it had been added as a joke when I saw isolated clips. This sequence also begins the pattern of pushing Utam off camera in his own movie.

For the “one scene”, my choice had to be an early moment between the adventurer and  Samantha. Since it’s obvious she’s not a local, he asks her about her family. She responds to “mamma” and “pappa”, and promptly leads him away. One would expect this to lead to a somber and subdued graveside scene, but anyone familiar with this operation will know subtlety isn’t in their vocabulary. Instead, we get the actual wreckage of a plane, rather inexplicably intact considering it must have been here at least a decade. You might still figure the jungle woman has buried the others, as humans have been doing since Neandertals were still around, but nope, there’s “Mamma” and “Pappa” still in the cockpit. Samantha starts to get distressed, which is genuinely poignant, so of course the scene is interrupted by a flashback of the plane crashing in enough flames to burn a waterpark to the ground. This is the true pinnacle of the Shaw Brothers’ approach to the material, overwrought, overdone, totally nonsensical, yet still impressive.

In closing, I have a little more to say about the rating. With the way I apply my ratings, 2 out of 5 can mean very different things, and it’s pretty much in inverse proportion to the budget. For a big-budget movie with genuine potential like Star Trek The Motion Picture or Superman 3, it’s a harsh indictment; for no-budget messes like Planet of Dinosaurs, it can mean a reprieve for a movie I genuinely enjoy. In this context, Mighty Peking Man falls in the middle. It’s not nearly as bad as many of the movies to receive the rating, but I can’t quite find the “so bad it’s good” spark others find in it. Sure, there’s plenty of good laughs, some of them even intentional. But there’s plenty of other movies in the Kong lineage far more worthy of reappraisal, particularly the 1976 version that inspired it. I would go so far as to recommend the Toho sequel King Kong Escapes over this; at the very least, it at least manages the light-hearted, self-aware approach that most people are really thinking of when talk of “so bad it’s good” comes up. By comparison, this one is strange enough to be interesting, but not nearly enough to be great.