So Bad It's Good Rating:
When an earthquake unleashes a giant, ten story tall ape in the Himalayas, the legend of the Mighty Peking Man is born! An expedition that’s created to capture the MPM is led by Johnnie Feng, all around hunter and drunkard who hit the bottle big time when the girl of his dreams hit the sheets with his brother. And that is so not cool in Johnnie’s book, you know? After braving elephant rampages (the elephants always get real surly around the drinking hole on Saturday nights), tiger attacks and bad dubbing, Johnnie doesn’t find the MPM so much as the MPM finds him! The Mighty Peking Man is about to use Johnnie as a ping pong ball when our intrepid hunter is saved by Samantha--a beautiful, blonde, bona-fide jungle girl.
The MPM is actually cooler than King Kong, because--unlike Kong--he doesn’t need a native village to set him up with a blind date every now and then. After frolicking in the jungles with Samantha (and who can blame him?) Johnnie gets the bright idea to bring Samantha and MPM back to Hong Kong with him. It’ll be a riot--literally! It might have been better for the makers of Mighty Peking Man to have done an actual Kong remake set in Hong Kong, just so they could have called it King Kong in Hong Kong. But I suppose we’ve got to take what we can get--and that’s this unintentionally funny movie that’s filled with super mod ’70s disco music, even when they’re in the freaking jungle.
At least Samantha’s skimpy jungle girl outfit stands the test of time, because it’s a classic, old-school design--meaning that it’s barely clinging to her luscious body, leaving very little to the imagination, and she wears it throughout the entire film…thus Samantha really makes the extremely silly Mighty Peking Man all the more enjoyable to watch (do I have my priorities straight, or what?). The mini-towns created for the MPM to crash through are pretty impressive looking; so much so that they’d probably make the Toho/Godzilla boys real proud. And wouldn’t you know, the MPM even finds a tall building in Hong Kong to climb! We wouldn’t want the viewer to forget that this is a rip-ff of King Kong, now, would we?
Presented by Quentin Tarantino (who doesn’t appear on screen in any introduction,
but his face is lurking in the upper corner of the DVD box, looking oddly
contrite), Mighty Peking Man is presented in it’s original widescreen glory,
which reveals everything: the bad acting (Evelyne Kraft’s attempts at emoting
has to be seen to be believed), a terrible script (hey, it’s a rip off of the
crappy 1976 King Kong remake--so what do you expect?), and hokey effects (the
army of wind-up tinker toys that shoot at MPM look like stuff from Santa's workshop),
and yet all of this is what helps to make this such a fun film to watch. Mighty
Peking Man is definitely one of the ‘it’s-so-bad-it’s-good’ classics. Share it
with your friends…or not. --SF
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