Sunday, March 8, 2015

Kong Island - 1968

"It was gorillas that ruined our plan." Yeah, real quote from this movie which is also known as King of Kong Island.  Coincidentally King of Kong would later be used in the name of that documentary I still haven't seen.

This movie is pretty bad quality on the DVD that I have, this being part of the Grindhouse Sci-Fi Collection.  I don't know if it's entirely due to production value of the movie originally or if it's due to a bad transfer or whatever, but everything is very murky and dark.  It seems they did not have adequate lighting for most of the scenes, and others they obviously did not have a tripod and shaky camera ensues.

No information is given about where this movie was filmed, also, but it does appear to be filmed somewhere exotic.  Now, I'm not a person to hit the nail on the head as far as filming locations.  I am pretty good at guessing the year of these movies (I was only one year off on my guess for this) but if I had to guess location on this I would think they might've actually filmed somewhere exotic, perhaps South Africa.

The plot concerns a mad doctor man, Albert Muller, who is inserting radio-controls into the brains of apes.  These controls make the apes do whatever he commands.  He has about 2-3 of these guys under his control, and he is going to use them to make a fortune (somehow).  Turk is an evil henchman, sort of, who is helping him out.  Then there's Burt, a very muscled up explorer guy who gets thrown into the plot as the good guy, and mixed up in here somewhere is native forest girl Eva, who used to be friends with the apes until they got these new radio implants.

The movie plays out okay.  The pacing is alright, it does keep you watching for the most part, and the movie looks pretty decent in terms of the real location shooting and the real animals involved.  It definitely makes plenty usage of stock footage of animals, and it's all pretty silly.  There's a ridiculous scene wherein they're taking a cruise through the African safari, and every time it shows an animal, a stock sound effect plays.  You can clearly tell the animal it is showing is not making the sound.  The best is when it shows the lions, clearly bored and I think one is laying down, and the sound does a ferocious roar.  Ha, stupid sound people.

It's a very easy movie to riff, it's very easy to forget is playing and distract yourself texting or looking up old friends on facebook.  It's definitely forgettable and doesn't have much replay value.  One thing that I have to say is that mostly due to the very dark footage of the ape costumes, they don't look that bad.  There is also almost nudity from Eva.  So, win.

I'll give it like, 3 stars.  2.5 stars.  I don't know.  It is fun!  Just not like, tons of fun.

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