It’s December and you can already hear the sound of carols filling the air, which means it’s time for another round of Christmas Apes—and the seventies are at it again with yet another low budget King Kong parody, and one with a history as strange as the previous ones. King Kung Fu was a project by local Wichita, Kansas filmmakers Bob Walterschied (producer) and Lance D. Hayes (writer/director) that they hoped would potentially bring the movie business to their state, but after filming from 1974 to 1976 (when they hoped to take advantage of the King Kong remake’s premier), they ran out of money before they could finish editing the movie. It was eventually completed and had a very small theatrical run in 1987, and who did they hire as editor in the end? Why, it was Herbert L. Strock, director of previous subject Gog. Funny how that works out.
You saw the title, so you can probably tell that this is a movie that combines Kong with the martial arts movies that were also popular at the time, but in reality this is meant to be a vehicle for extremely goofy comedy, another pre-Airplane spoof that tries hard to live up to its live action cartoon potential. I’ve always thought that a guy in a gorilla suit doing stuff is inherently funny—some may call it cheap entertainment, but I like to think of it as economical entertainment—so watching a full-length film consisting mostly of that is a real test of my beliefs. What it really feels like is a ninety-minute long Hilarious House of Frightenstein sketch, embracing its low production values, mostly amateur local actors, and dopey sense of humour in a way that is maybe hard to gush about, but is also hard to hate. Despite not being released until the eighties, too, the hair, clothes, and pretty much everything else indicate that we are once again dealing with the Most Seventies thing ever, which is the third year in a row that I’ve said that.
The titular gorilla is the “monster master of the martial arts” (played by John Balee, a local Wichita martial arts instructor) taught kung-fu, karate, and vaguely Eastern wisdom by a Chinese master (played by a white guy, of course, but the character is such an intentionally stupid take on the trope that it’s barely worth calling out as racist—he regularly drops his accent for humorous effect) and seemingly sent to America just so he can get rid of him, changing his name from “Jungle Jumper” to King Kung Fu for the publicity. News reports treat the coming of King Kung Fu as a cultural exchange with China, like a zoo getting panda, and during his cross-country tour from San Francisco to New York he has a stop at a zoo in Wichita, where a pair of bumbling wannabe TV personalities decide to release the ape and pair him up with local Pizza Hut employee Ray Faye (the third thing I’ve written about to use that exact joke name) in order to give themselves a scoop. The gorilla ends up making a break for it and silliness ensues.
The lead of the duo is Bo Burgess, whose name is likely a play on Beau Bridges, brother of King Kong ’76 star Jeff Bridges, which is a pretty tortured reference. Also, just in case you weren’t clear that this is a goofball movie, the ape’s primary nemesis is police captain J.W. Duke (played by local television personality Tom Leahy, known as children’s TV presenter Major Astro), who looks, talks, and acts exactly like John Wayne and is assisted by an officer named Pilgrim. This movie feels like it was written by ten-year-olds, and by the time Duke shows up you are either for it or against it.
What feels like the first half of the movie focuses on Bo and his hapless sidekick Herman, who live in an attic with movie posters all over the walls (including an original 1933 Kong one that I think also appears in Queen Kong), and their attempts to set up their scoop, which includes convincing Ray to cavort around in a bikini after going out on a date with Bo (they end up dressing nicely and then going to Pizza Hut so he can take advantage of her employee discount) and Herman’s multiple failed attempts to unlock the ape’s cage. At one point, we get an elaborate fantasy sequence where Herman imagines being a suave criminal succeeding in his mission, and then follows it with his actual attempt where he gets everything wrong. Bo eventually gets a job as an overly enthusiastic TV news reporter (which creates some open animosity with the self-important lead news anchor) so he can appear throughout the movie interviewing various wacky characters, including the couple from Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”, but this set-up takes far too long.
With King Kung Fu on the loose, the movie becomes a series of very broad comedy scenes—costume changes, slapstick, car chases, editing tricks, cartoon sound effects (mostly added by Strock, and even the producer and director think he might have gone overboard), silly lines like “We’ll just put out an APB on that A-P-E”, and most importantly lots of footage of mid-seventies Wichita (apparently that alone makes this a piece of beloved nostalgia among residents, and in one scene the movie uses an apparently real Wichita tourism jingle to decent comedic effect.) It’s a bit like A*P*E, except more consistent. Here’s King Kung Fu dressed as a cowboy at an old west town fighting stunt gunfighters and then riding away on a horse; now he’s on a roller coaster with Herman dressed in a pink female gorilla costume. They’ll have flashbacks to the gorilla’s youth—which is indicated by him either in diapers or wearing a propeller beanie—receiving more confusing wisdom from his master. Also, King King Fu can talk sometimes (and laughs at people constantly), usually to say lines like “No use crying over spilled paint!”, which is frankly bizarre even in the context of this movie. We also spend a lot of time with Captain Duke and his legion of bumbling cops (who all wear American flag motorcycle helmets—is that supposed to be an Easy Rider reference?), with the funniest moment in the entire movie probably being Duke tearfully “mercy killing” his busted police van like a horse.
This all culminates with King Kung Fu and Ray, the only person who seems to understand the ape and his desire to sightsee “like any other tourist”, jacking a hot air balloon and then finding themselves on top of the tallest building in town: the Holiday Inn. See, that’s a pretty all right way to parody the classic King Kong climax, and at that point they even start throwing in some crude stop motion effects, using modified G.I. Joe dolls, as another homage, which is honestly kind of adorable. That’s kind of the recurring thing with this movie—nothing is necessarily laugh out loud funny, some of it is very groan-worthy seventies cheese, but it can be amusing.
In terms of spoofery, despite the low production values and uneven acting quality, I feel like this movie ultimately does better within its means than Queen Kong does. There is something somewhat charming about scenes where the gorilla fights a whole baseball team while a Howard Cosell-impersonating announcer narrates the whole thing, with people back-flipping off of off-screen trampolines or getting bowled over. As you’d expect, you’re not really going to see much in the way of real skilled martial arts in this, although an actor in a gorilla suit being able to leap around and spin-kick people is honestly pretty impressive considering how encumbered he is. This is a movie that revels in its own homemade tomfoolery, with a constant stream of jokey dialogue and as many different scenes of monkey mischief as they can fit in—it feels like a dopey seventies variety show comedy, but at least there aren’t many laugh-light dead zones or overworked gags. Of course, it lacks the effortless comic timing that makes the best parody movies work, and most of the time its gags are more amusing for being brazenly childish than being clever—although sometimes it straddles the line (example: a US military general explaining their lack of direct action by pointing to a map of the country, with Wichita in the centre, saying “Quite simply, we have him surrounded.”) Even the end credits get in on it, not only using a song called “The Gorilla Rag”, but also briefly featuring commentary from the producer and his wife, not only acknowledging that they finally finished the movie, but also that all their kids were part of the film crew (“Cheap help, huh?” the wife says.) It’s the rather genial tone of it, without any of the exploitation elements or cynicism that I see in other cheapo seventies movies, that I think makes it tolerable—if only just to me. Maybe you have less patience for an extended John Wayne caricature.
King Kung Fu aims for silly and mostly gets close enough—if what you’re putting together is just an excuse to have a guy in a gorilla suit get into antics, it would probably be unreasonable to expect more than that. In terms of the “cheap comedy takes on King Kong” that I’ve somehow managed to become an expert in, this is probably the most relatively successful, and most of its “so bad its good” elements are an understandable result of being a low budget film made outside Hollywood, so it would be pointlessly mean to even call it incompetence. You even get a bit of historical local colour throughout (I learned a lot about the making of this movie from a short documentary made by a local film student—Walterscheid, Hayes, and the actors are all pretty candid.) Ultimately, this is a strange product that was strange even in a strange time for movies—aiming for something of a broad appeal that wouldn’t have had any capability of being broadly seen even if it wasn’t basically put on hold for eleven years. It feels like a movie that shouldn’t even be watched outside Wichita, but part of me is glad I did watch it.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 