With a chill in the air and the sidewalks slick with ice patches ready to instigate comedic pratfalls and concussions, we all know what time of the year it is: time for the return of Christmas Apes, a month-long celebration of seismic simians in the media. Just like last year, I’ll be beginning with another trip to the magical year of 1976, where everyone was putting men in gorilla suits in order to cash in on the imminent release of the hotly anticipated Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong. Yes, everyone was indeed wanting to ape that ape—the big difference between the other two Kong klones from that time, which I wrote about last Christmas Apes season, and Queen Kong is that only the latter got hit with an infringement suit, with both RKO (the original distributors of Kong Kong) and the De Laurentiis Company managing to block its theatrical release in all but a few countries. Director and co-writer Frank Agrama is mainly known as the CEO of Harmony Gold, which was a major distributor of anime in the eighties (specifically Robotech), of which there seems to be many heated opinions—he was also a business associate of infamous Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and ended up being convicted of tax fraud.
As you can probably tell, there’s a lot of seediness all around this production, which at least feels appropriate: this a relatively lowbrow spoof, going for a manic absurdity that would be perfected in Airplane!, but doesn’t land all that often here (maybe they were a little ahead of their time—they even have a singing nun on a plane joke, just like Airplane!) The primary source of comedy seems to be all the gender reversals at play (which was also part of their legal argument in the copyright case), which isn’t so much commenting on gender roles in the original King Kong as it is a way to revel in broad ridiculousness and a condescending view of second-wave feminism. It even has a theme song (played by The Peppers, who appear in the movie wearing ape masks under the name The Orangotangs), which is full of bass and includes lines such as “She’s the queenie for my weenie” and “When I’m feelin’ mighty spunky/I want to do it with my hunky monkey.” In short, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said this about every one of these seventies giant ape movies, but this feels like the most seventies thing in existence.
The plot is, of course, just King Kong, but with a few more jokes: Rula Lenska plays domineering filmmaker Luce Habit (har har), leader of the all-woman crew of the ship Liberated Lady (whose flag is a burning bra, of course), who is seeking a man to star in the ill-defined movie she is trying to make (she explains, in one of those moments that is more head-scratching than hilarious, that her films are like home movies, except that “no one waves at the camera”)—she finds her star in petty criminal and marijuana enthusiast Ray Fay (har har), who is caught trying to steal a framed poster of the original King Kong. After drugging Ray and taking him aboard the Liberated Lady, they head off to “Darkest Africa”, and specifically to the island of “Lazanga Where They Do the Konga”, where they discover a tribe of indigenous people preparing a giant picnic table for, guess what, a giant ape…but this time, the ape is female! Wow! When Queen Kong appears, she falls in love with the captive Ray, and after some low-budget recreations of the dinosaur scenes from the original, she is taken by Luce to London, where she is chained up to be shown at what appears to be a chintzy county fair (where the organizer demands that she be given a giant bra so as to not be indecent), where the Queen herself attends, and then breaks out and walks around town while bass guitar scores everything. She and Ray—who loves her just as much as she loves him—escape Luce and the police and climb Big Ben, which Ray notes is a fine enough substitute for the Empire State Building.
The tone here is one where anything could happen at any moment and the characters frequently break the fourth wall, an attempt at a live action Looney Tunes cartoon or a Mel Brooks-style spoof—but that tone also probably comes from the same popular British comedies of the era, full of groaners and juvenile ribaldry. I can’t really fault Lenska or Robin Askwith, who plays Ray, as they are at least trying to bring liveliness to their goofy characters, but it reminds you that part of the genius of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies is they often got actors like Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack to play it straight, which is way funnier. Those movies also benefited from the rapid-fire pace of their jokes, while there are several in here that are so lethargic that it kind of ruins their momentum—a good example is when we get a multi-minute sequence on the boat which transitions from a very slight Exorcist parody to a slightly-less-slight Jaws parody where Luce and Ray comment on the off-brand version of the John Williams theme they use while we see stock footage of a shark (and some stock footage of a completely different fish), and then it ends with an incredibly dumb punchline (a Jaws parody also parallels this with the A*P*E, although I think the funniest moments in that are funnier than everything in this movie.) When they get to the native village, it basically becomes a string of Flintstones-style gags, but at that the very least that whole part of the movie ended up being way less racist than I was anticipating, as it employs probably the most ethnically diverse group of islanders you’ll ever see. It also seems to love having characters repeat verbatim what another character has already said, and also giving things on-the-nose labels like a political cartoon. There are even moments where you’d expect there to be a string of gags, but just sort of go on without many, such as the battle between Queen Kong and a poorly-made T. Rex costume (nothing funny really happens until Ray tells her to kick it in the junk), or when their group is running away from Kong, which could even have benefited from some “Yakety Sax.”
The thing is, it’s never really painfully unfunny either—you get the sense that the jokes in here are close to being funny, even in only a dumb laughs sort of way, but just needed to be nudged a little more to get there. Sometimes there are details that are a little fun, such as the shoddily-constructed pteranodon puppet having a hook for a leg, but you wish there were more. Part of this comes down to the pacing issues I was talking about—these kinds of jokes should be snappy—but there’s also stuff that should be at least amusing that is sometimes be over-explained, such as the chief constable consulting his mother about what to do about Queen Kong, sitting next to a clearly labelled photo of her on his desk (the movie seems like a lack of confidence in your audience…much like in a political cartoon.) It feels like a draft or an edit or two away from reaching the kind of parody it wants to be.
Maybe part of the problem is that the people behind it thought the central premise of a gender-flipped King Kong was inherently funny enough to carry the whole thing. It sometimes goes out of its way to point it out—Luce has a tendency to explain how all men are weak and useless (most of the men in the movie itself are blithering incompetents, proving her point), and her creepy, sexually aggressive obsession with Ray is meant to parallel the leering attitude these types of movies have for their female leads. The eventual relationship between Ray and Queen Kong reflects the much less unrequited nature of the human/ape romance in the De Laurentiis remake (although this one has actual dinosaurs in it, so it’s actually closer to the original), but is taken to absurd lengths in just how mutual it ends up being. That also means that the ending has to be upbeat, which it manages through a monologue from Ray about how women like Queen Kong are repressed and subjugated by the patriarchy, leading to mass protests by the women of London, which forces the authorities to let Kong go. That whole part of the movie is predicated on finding the women’s lib movement funny on its face, because aside from the fact that they’re rallying around a giant gorilla, there aren’t that many pure jokes in it—it’s like, hey, women protesting something, how silly! Of course, the sheer lack of sincerity in its feminist surface was already exposed (har har) by the half-hearted sex farce elements earlier in the movie, as Luce’s crew consists entirely of women in bikinis who help fill the ass shot quota (although it never gets much dirtier than that—what, did they think kids were going to watch this?) What you get is a movie that feigns some sort of message, but is really just a lightly mean-spirited excuse for dumb jokes about then-modern sexual politics.
There have been innumerable parodies of King Kong, and even a few gender-flipped ones, but Queen Kong has the distinction of being one of the few extended film versions, as well as the one that the actual producers of King Kong saw fit to block from distribution—so in that sense, it is notable in the long history of Kong and Kong-related matters. Beyond that, it feels like something in a weird in-between phase between an older style of bawdy British comedy and the live action cartoons that would start showing up not long after, allowing itself to get pretty silly (as befits a riff on something as time worn and inherently ludicrous as King Kong) but lacking that extra spark of gleeful subversion or cleverly-constructed dumb jokes. Like the other giant ape movies riding the coattails of the Kong remake, it’s something that could only have come out of 1976, and should probably stay there.
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