There’s one very important area of monsterdom that I haven’t covered yet in this series: apes! After all, are we not all creature feature fanatics because of a certain giant gorilla from long ago? That’s why December is going to be another themed month, which I am dubbing “Christmas Apes”, all about our fellow simian citizens. And, almost as if I do plan these things ahead of time, our first monkey movie is, in fact, the follow-up to last week’s Super Inframan. What a segue!
The release of Dino De Laurentiis’ 1976 remake of King Kong caused a massive gold rush in giant ape movies, with production companies the world over putting people in gorilla suits and filming them climbing miniature buildings. It probably made even more sense for Shaw Brothers to get in on the action only a year or two after they made Super Inframan, where they showed some skill in making rubber suit monsters work in their style—so, studio co-founder Runme Shaw produced The Mighty Peking Man, the Hong Kong giant’s take on a giant taking Hong Kong. Much like Inframan, Peking Man follows the template set by another studio’s production and adds some inventive genre mashing and classic seventies exploitation silliness, but this one feels like it’s trying to be somewhat more of a “real” movie, so it never reaches the heights of hyperactive goofiness. Which isn’t to say that Mighty Peking Man is not goofy—because, boy, it sure is—but the pleasures in it are more in its peculiar interpretations of both the Kong narrative and the old-fashioned (even back then) jungle adventure genre, as well as some choices that are so seventies they might as well be wearing bell bottoms and carrying around a pet rock.
Much like Inframan, this movie gets things going immediately—we see a group of men enter a library, and start telling the story of how the so-called Peking Man appeared in the Indian Himalayas after an earthquake. This scene should theoretically provide the origins of the titular ape, but it really doesn’t explain anything (and where are they hearing this story from?), so it seems to exist mostly to give us a scene featuring the monster as early in the film as possible. After this flashback(?), they already have plans to go to India to track this thing down, and already have a person they’re going to hire to lead it: Johnny Feng, a talented hunter who “just lost his girl”, as the businessmen say rather casually. They find Johnny in a bar, drinking away his sorrows after he found out his girlfriend was cheating on him with his television producer brother, and he is very quickly and easily convinced to get out of Hong Kong for the expedition. We go straight to the jungle adventure portion of the film, containing all the things we expect to see: elephant stampedes, tiger attacks, poisonous snakes, and quicksand, all the hits firing out at a rapid pace, before Johnny is abandoned by the rest of the expedition crew and comes across both Peking Man and a wild girl named Samantha, who we learn survived a plane crash as a child and has been raised by the giant ape into animal skin bikini-wearing adulthood. Johnny and Samantha shack up, and he convinces her and her guardian to come with him to Hong Kong, which leads exactly to what you’d expect, although maybe with some interesting diversions along the way.
It really is the details of individual scenes that set this movie apart. Firstly, the choice to change the girl-gorilla dynamic from the Kong standard—not only is Samantha incorporating the old “white jungle goddess” trope into an already pulpy movie, but the relationship between her and Peking Man (who they call Utam) is entirely platonic, even familial, giving them both a more understandable connection and just a little more agency than normal. This also means we get a scene where the ape spies her and Johnny sexing it up in their cave, and then he goes stomping off like a dejected parent who realizes their child doesn’t need them anymore, only for Samantha to come out and tell him that nothing can ever separate them (except, as we later learn, machine gun fire.) In fact, almost all of the scenes between Samantha and Johnny from the first half are probably among the most purely entertaining—we see that Samantha is friend to all animals, except for one poisonous snake who bites her and then gets attacked by her leopard friend out of…revenge? That same leopard then appears throughout the romance montage between her and Johnny—set to the most seventies-sounding song I think I have ever heard—where he is repeatedly picked and spun around, looking entirely bemused the whole time. Later, when the two of them set sail to Hong Kong (after showing up with Utam/Peking Man in the middle of a major Indian city), Johnny tells her that she should be wearing more “modern” clothes instead of her barely-concealing rags—but the ones he gives her are a tight-looking snake skin crop top and short skirt (…did he make that out of the snake that bit her?), so she was honestly better off sticking with her old clothes.
(Going back a few sentences, the music deserves more mention—the soundtrack constantly moves back and forth between hyper-seventies and a booming orchestral score, so you never quite know what kind of atmosphere you’ll be getting.)
More interesting choices come when they get to Hong Kong (after a sailing adventure that includes the chained-up Peking Man saving the boat from running aground a big rock): on The Simpsons, they joked about how people were paying just to see King Kong stand around, but Mighty Peking Man addresses that as well by having an actual event, which is…Utam having a tug of war with a bunch of dump trucks? It actually makes the whole thing seem even more cruel, especially when it cuts to the stadium audience cackling along to this animal being tortured. People, in general, don’t come off well very in this movie: later, when the Johnny and the military ask everyone in the city to help them look for Samantha in order to calm down Utam (Johnny gets a good line there, when they question how they’ll find her: “She’s dressed entirely in animal skins…that ought to narrow it down a little”), we see mobs of people in the streets chase her around, which doesn’t really help matters much. On the other hand, when Samantha asks a couple to drive her to the stadium where Utam is being shown, they seem perfectly okay with giving this strange, half-naked woman a lift. So, not everyone is so bad, I guess.
Peking Man’s horrible treatment probably should’ve been expected, as the Hong Kong businessman equivalent of Carl Denham (who on Wikipedia is credited as “evil capitalist”)” is consistently shown to be a real scumbag: earlier in the movie, he gets in a fight with Johnny after, instead of trying to help an Indian guide after he loses his leg to a tiger (in a rather comical fashion, it must be said), he shoots the injured man in the head; not long after that, he decides to hightail it, leaving Johnny alone in the jungle, and then tells everyone back in civilization that he’s probably dead. He even provides the impetus for Utam’s final rampage: when Samantha (who had walked in on Johnny reconciling with his girlfriend a few scenes before) attempts to stop crewmembers from hitting the ape with sticks, the businessman takes her to his room, where he attempts to sexually assault her (this is a seventies exploitation movie, so of course…)—Utam sees it, breaks out of his cage, and chases after them, leading to the guy getting stomped. There is further destruction caused by the enraged Peking Man, ending with him climbing the Jardine House building (you have to have at least one real skyscraper to climb in these movies) while being fired on by the military, led by a particularly bloodthirsty British commander, and tragedy befalls pretty much everyone. The whole point of the latter half of Kong and its imitators is that humanity’s selfishness and abuse of nature brings it all upon themselves, but Mighty Peking Man really goes out of its way to be even more cynical, probably helped along by having the wild animal have a human counterpart to speak for it, and then get gunned down as well.
Most things in Mighty Peking Man seems heightened in that way—whether it be the silliness of some the scenes, or likewise the darkness in others. Again, like Inframan, it’s a consistent trait among cult movies that while they may look like something you’d expect, that only makes its strange choices and plot twists even more noticeable. The King Kong narrative is such an elemental one, which I think most people can recite even if they haven’t seen the movie itself, that the little differences found in this film stand out—the meanness, the music, the goofy sex scenes, the very modern (at the time) melodrama shoved in between the adventure and apes. All told, this movie doesn’t go anywhere so extreme, but it does show just some of the things you can do around the edges of another giant ape story. We shall be seeing more examples of that real soon…
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 