King of Kong Island (1968)

People are voting emotionally.

hyped garbage

Good concept, poorly executed.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A trashy Italian jungle adventure, with a mad scientist implanting radios into gorillas' brains, so they will do his bidding. The film is sleazy and slow, a kind of scummy imprint of White Africa in the age of decolonization. The bureaucrats have fled the continent, and all who are left are the mercs, the drunks, and the cranks. Too many scenes in a dive bar, too much footage from big game hunts, no point in the end. A perfect nihilistic Z movie.Any nudity has been edited out of the American cut, making this trashy film even more pointless. The film is still plenty sleazy, though. Everyone sweats and snarls their way across the frame, and each new location looks grimier than the last. I think I caught beri beri just watching this movie.And yet, the whole time, I was happy. I was entertained. There is nothing so sweet as a movie that plays completely beyond the bounds of good taste. A movie that DARES you to watch.It deserves its rotten, budget DVD presentation.

Veteran character actor Marc Lawrence stars as your basic evil scientist who creates a dangerous, murderous, not-to-be-trifled race of robotic killer gorilla slaves. Lawrence's plans to overthrow the world are thwarted by a musclebound lunk (stolidly played by former Hercules Brad Harris, who shows off his brawny chest as often as possible) who's ventured into the doc's remote corner of the jungle in order to rescue some beautiful gal Lawrence has abducted. Seedy, grim, slow and humorless, with only the lovely presence of bodacious jungle babe Esmeralda Barros walking around mostly nude and the sporadic cheeseball gorilla gore effects offering any slight relief from Roger Morris' static direction, a drab, talk-heavy script, uniformly stiff acting from an understandably uninspired cast, tatty production values, inert pacing, pathetically crummy and unconvincing ape suits, and a general air of ponderous, unrelenting tedium, this flick overall sizes up as a sleep-inducing dead slug of a stinker.

We now go to East Africa, where life is cheap but clearly ape suits are expensive. And by Africa we mean a studio back-lot somewhere in Italy that doubles for the "island" in King Of Kong Island.I must have denghi fever and it's my insane imaginings that jungle B-films were the property of the 1930s and 40s: what could be described as "Apesploitation", or the "Monkeys Going Bananas" genre. And yet in the 1960s, with Planet Of The Apes one of the most popular films of the year ("You dirty rotten stinking apes!") we have Night Of The Bloody Apes (1968) from Mexico, soon followed by the Italian sexploitation film Queen Kong (1976), and Hong Kong's Goliathon/Mighty Peking Man (1977). It may be man's endless fascination with our lesser-evolved simian twins, or we just can't help but get a cheap laugh out of a guy in a monkey suit.King Of Kong Island opens with a dastardly scientist Dr Muller using stolen goods to fund his surgical experiments on gorillas. Now, seriously, "gorilla"? Even I own a better monkey suit than this. Cut to a hunting expedition led by Burt (Brad Harris, the American actor who played everyone from Samson to Goliath and Hercules) who is ambushed by not one but TWO "gorillas", complete with surgical scars, who kidnap Diana, the most attractive of the group. Despite his previous mission's complete and abject failure, Burt is charged with bringing Diana back, past miles of stock footage - although to be truthful the producers did find a parrot and a cockatoo and a few pink flamingos for a shirtless Burt, who at times resembles a shaved ape himself, to chase around a studio lagoon.In an amalgam of every thirty-year old jungle cliché, Burt comes across some spooked natives in awe of the Sacred Monkey God, a helpful chimp and a jungle girl called Eva, who can't utter a word of English but speaks fluent monk-ese, which leads Burt to look her square in the eye and ask, "Are you the Sacred Monkey?" Unbelievable. The hunt ends at Dr Muller's underground dungeon-cum-laboratory in the middle of the jungle where the insane megalomaniac - and the King of the title - has turned the apes into radio-controlled zombies, manipulated by an enormous Electronic Brain.The film was picked up by American producer Dick Randall, an old-fashioned expert in hullabaloo who was as colorful as the characters in his own Z-grade pickups. Born in the US but based mainly in Rome, Randall was the guy who filmed Jayne Mansfield's grieving family a week after her death and immediately edited the footage into his 1968 mondo film The Wild World Of Jayne Mansfield. He also sold the Filipino midget James Bond spoof For Your Height Only (1981) to the world and turned the two foot nine star Weng Weng into an unlikely international superstar. He could sell a chainsaw massacre to Texas with the 1982 Spanish slasher film Pieces, and could sell a turkey-baster to Foghorn Leghorn in the same breath as he sold this turkey. Did I say "turkey"? I meant "gorilla", and as honorary Great White Hunters we should approach this film with the right spirit, whose concepts are as absurd as the very idea of white colonialism itself.

Eva, La Venere Selvaggia goes by various titles – English-speaking audiences probably know it best as either Kong Island or King Of Kong Island. Regardless of what title you know it by, the film is awful. It is a masterpiece of ineptitude to rank alongside Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster, Astro Zombies and the Bo Derek version of Tarzan The Ape-Man. Truly one of the worst movies ever made.Mercenary Burt Dawson (Brad Harris) is involved in a payroll robbery in the African bush, but during the operation he is shot and left for dead by a supposed partner-in-crime named Albert Muller (Marc Lawrence). Months later, Muller has retreated to a secret cave where he is using the stolen fortune to finance scientific research into brain control. But Dawson – who somehow survived the earlier double-cross – turns up once again in Africa seeking revenge. Dawson's vengeance trail begins in a night-club, where he visits an old acquaintance called Theodore (Aldo Cecconi) and asks for information about Muller's whereabouts. Later, Dawson meets up with Theodore's kids – adventurous son Robert (Mark Farran) and sexy daughter Diana (Ursula Davis), both of whom are about to set off on a hunting expedition to track down the legendary Sacred Monkey. Whilst out in the bush searching for this fabled creature, Diana is kidnapped by a pair of robotic gorillas. Only later does it become clear that the gorillas are actually acting under the influence of mind control, having had microchips implanted in their brain by Albert Muller. When Dawson learns of Diana's abduction – and hears that Muller is responsible for it – he jumps at the chance to track down his treacherous ex-pal. He joins an expedition into the jungle, but along the way they stumble across Eva (Esmerelda Barros), a female savage who has grown up in the wild (think "lady-Tarzan" who likes nothing better than to cavort around topless). Eventually, Dawson and Eva join forces to track down Muller, leading to a final confrontation in his underground laboratory.There are some films that are so bad they become enjoyable in a twisted sort of way. Sadly Eva, La Venere Selvaggia is NOT one of them. This one is just plain bad, to such an extent that watching it becomes a test of willpower and writing a review of it merely reminds you what a painful experience it was to endure. Everything about the film fails – the acting, the music, the story, the photography, the directing. Lawrence hams it up embarrassingly as the mad villain, while Harris is impossibly wooden as the hero. Barros simply jogs around naked with her hair combed strategically over her breasts, smiling her way through perhaps the lamest role ever asked of any actress in a motion picture. Robert Pregadio provides the music, but rather than trying to perk up the proceedings with a bit of dramatic scoring, he settles for something that makes you think you're strolling through a 1960s department store. The story itself would be funny were it not so tedious, with interminable shots of people trekking through the jungle interspersed with wildlife footage clearly dug up from other sources. Eva, La Venere Selvaggia is essential viewing if you're trying to pick a candidate for "The Worst Film Of All-Time" competition. Apart from that - or should that be because of it? - it is utterly worthless grade-Z garbage.