Insisting that all the 70s remake of King Kong was missing was more Asians and a far hornier ape, Shaw Brothers studios broke away from Kung Fu epics for five minutes in order to give us Mighty Peking Man, a made in China, Kaiju extravaganza, that approached the 8th Wonder Of The World from a slightly more eccentric angle than the ones previously crafted by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack and John Guillermin.
Simply put, the rather amusing reason that The Mighty Peking Man exists at all is because the producers at Shaw Brothers heard that Dino De Laurentiis was hard at work bankrolling his remake and fancied a piece of that giant monkey pie – however, when the smoke cleared, the 1976 version of Kong was roundly slated for being too silly. However, “silly” only seemed to make the Mighty Peking Man stronger and the result was one of the most enjoyably ludicrous Kaiju movies to ever rampage in front of a camera.
Typically unscrupulous promoter Liu Tem has come up with a weirdly cost ineffective way to make money by mounting an exhibition to go to the Himalayas in order to hunt down and capture the legendary Mighty Peking Man, a mythical ape-creature that is said to have emerged from the group after an earthquake and who stands at an impressive 60ft. Betting the farm on this outlandish story being true, Tem hires depressed adventurer Johnny Feng to lead his search party and get out of the funko he’s been in ever since he caught his girlfriend in bed with his brother.
While trekking though India, the group loses multiple members due to a random elephant stampede and an attack from a leg noshing tiger, but after Tem gets cold feet after sustaining too many losses, he and everybody else abandons poor Johnny in the wild and fucks off home to chill out by the hotel pool. Understandably shocked, Johnny tries to make the best of his shitty situation, but after running smack bang into the Mighty Peking Man barely 20 minutes after realising he’s been abandoned, he learns that the giant monkey monster has more layers to him than your average giant creature. For a start, he has an accomplice in the form of bleach-blonde, bikini wearing, jungle nymph, Samantha, who was rescued as a child from her parents plane crash and the sparks between both Johnny and this savage woman who has managed to survive in the wilderness with only her wits, guile, a 60 foot ape and what looks to be a sizable stockpile of hair and beauty products, soon begin to fly.
While Peking Man (real name: Utam) is initially jealous that his female best buddy has found a boyfriend, Utam soon gets used to their slow motion frolicking; but as anyone familiar with the King Kong legend already knows, civilisation and disaster soon comes calling…
While’s there is barely an original bone in Mighty Peking Man’s vast, hairy body, what the big, fuzzy bastard lacks in originality, he more than makes up for in the kind of head scratching weirdness you only get with a brazen, foreign rip off and barely a minute goes by in Meng Hua Ho’s goofy epic without some hysterical happenstance bringing the house down. Renamed Goliathon in the US, the movie starts with all the usual King Kong beats all present and correct as a money grubbing bastard bankrolls a trip to nab a legend. Thankfully, the Himalayas are far closer than Skull Island and its wildlife is far cheaper to replicate, so the adventure beings with numerous expendable background actors getting periodically stomped by rubber elephant feet or wrestling with clearly docile tigers as the jungle mercilessly claims the week. However, Shaw Brothers obviously have no intention of making a two hour plus epic, and so a lot of the plot is amusingly fast tracked in order to get to the point – thus our beleaguered hero Johnny (an ernest Danny Lee) is suddenly abandoned in the middle of a hostile jungle while he sleeps because the dastardly Liu Tem can’t be arsed to continue.
However, this means that we get to our other characters all the faster and they prove to definitely be worth speeding too.
The notion of a giant cinematic ape has been realised chiefly by two ways, either the stop motion alchemy of Willis O’Brien or the suitmation efforts of many, including Rick Baker and considering their limited budget, Shaw Brothers understandably goes for a dude in a suit – but the results are so rubbery and strange looking Utam looks less like a skyscraping gorilla and more like a melting neanderthal and during numerous times you can clearly spot the suit performers mouth lurking nighmarishly with the suit’s. The animatronic head isn’t much better with the bug eyed thing looking like an overly hirsute sleep paralysis demon has gotten lockjaw after a particularly long yawn. However, when shit goes south, Utam can thrown giant monkey hands with the best of them, stomping his enemies as they cough up fake blood and punching out numerous apartment buildings in order to get to the squishy humans who have wronged him.
However, stealing the show is Evelyne Kraft’s impossibly nubile bikini enthusiast whose unsubtle sex appeal probably caused countless adolescent loins to explode back during its first screenings. In fact, at numerous times, the movie seems to perfer keeping the camera on her, rather than her titanic co-star and the film keeps putting her in oddly sexual jeopardy. When Johnny isn’t sucking snake venom out of her inner thigh while she make gasping orgasm sounds, she’s reclining in Utam’s giant mit like she’s posing for a Playboy shot and while the poor actress is required to sprint around the streets of Hong Kong in the world’s flimsiest bikini, no doubt everyone around her is playing a high-stakes game of Spot The Nip-slip.
Still, the scene where we get a montage depicting both Samantha and Johnny falling in love may actually be Pine of the greatest, unintentionally moments I’ve seen in years as the two prance around a lethal jungle (which suspiciously looks more like a National Park) while she wears a live leopard on her neck and then spins it around like a spotty, carnivorous toddler. Later, a mercilessly friend zoned Utam impassively watches Johnny and Samantha have sex (I guess he’s more like the mighty peeking man, amirite?), before having a full blown insel tantrum that sees him kicking boulders into the air.
However, none of this will prepare you for the utterly insane final third of the film that takes the basic King Kong story and strives to make it as spectacularly nasty as it possibly can. After breaking out after days spent indulging in tests of strength with roaring dump trucks while the audience throws fruit at him (don’t the Chinese have anything better to do?), the finale sees him pelted with helicopter fire that also catches Samantha and Johnny in the cross fire, after the building the ape is scaled is rigged to explode like Nakatomi Plaza.
It all results in a surprisingly nihilistic ending that’ll have you snickering in disbelief – but as Kong-adjacent cash ins go, The Mighty Peking Man is a cheesy good time for those eager to see Hong Kong trashed by the wrong Kong.
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