In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought the many riffs on King Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.
So, Dr. Charles Decker (Michael Gough, better known to you as Alfred in the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman movies) is a botanist whose plane explodes while flying over Africa—Uganda to be specific—as represented by a ridiculous effect that sets the visual tone for the rest of the film. The newspaper pusher on the corner is at first yelling about the plane incident, and not a moment later is yelling about Decker being found alive and returning to London. Met at the airport by about four reporters (I guess, despite being on the cover of the paper, the story wasn’t considered that interesting), it takes them until the end of their interview to ask Decker about the baby chimpanzee that he has been rather aggressively caressing the whole time, and he tells them that the ape, which he named Konga, saved his life by showing him the way to a nearby village, where he was taken care of for a year. When Decker returns to his laboratory and his competent but obsessively needy lab assistance/secretary Margaret (Margo Johns), we learn that Konga’s reward for saving his life is to become the first test subject for an experiment that will revolutionize the world, “bridging the evolutionary gap between plant and animal.” While in Uganda among the indigenous peoples, Decker discovered several species of carnivorous plant that grew at an astonishing rate, and has hypothesized that with their leaves he could potentially make a serum that can promote growth in animals—to that end, he cultivates a bunch of these plants in his greenhouse, and within days they grow into large specimens that are constantly, constantly moving like haunted house animatronics, which is not really an accurate representation of carnivorous plants. After injecting Konga with the serum, it grows from a baby chimp to a slightly larger young chimp, and then most unexpectedly, transforms from a chimp to a man in a gorilla costume.
Remember last week when I praised The Monster and the Girl for the quality of its ape suit and the naturalistic way the actor played the role? Konga is the exact opposite of that—a movie with a ridiculous-looking ape suit, and one where the (uncredited) actor (Paul Stockman) doesn’t bother to do anything other than comically lope around screen, which makes the costume look even more ridiculous, especially when it inevitably turns into a giant during the climax. It is impossible to take this movie even remotely seriously once that gorilla shows up, but that’s only fitting given the rest of it.
Going back to my The Monster and the Girl post, do you also remember the part of the censor note I quoted where they chastised that movie’s portrayal of scientists as “egomaniacs”? That applies even more to Konga: there is only about ten minutes at the beginning of the movie where we are not made abundantly aware that Decker is Not A Good Dude. He is clearly only out for the personal glory his experiments will bestow upon him, and uses everyone else to his own ends—and when people start getting in his way, he decides that monkey murder is necessary. Thankfully for him, he not only picked up the growth-enhancing plants in Uganda, but also learned from a “witch doctor” (despite the movie’s imperialistic overtones, though, Decker talks very respectfully of his African hosts and argues against calling them “primitive”) about another plant that makes people follow your commands, and he mixes that in with the formula so Konga also becomes susceptible to hypnosis, which seems like maybe over complicating this experiment a tad. He then sends the chimp-gorilla to kill the people he doesn’t like, beginning with the dean of the school he teaches at (and by “teach”, I mean “show stock footage of African natives and ramble on about them in a way that sounds like he’s making it up as he goes along”), who threatens his career if he keeps making his outlandish claims, and then a fellow botanist who is making similar discoveries. The final murder is related to one of Decker’s non-science obsessions: he is creepily in love with one of his students, Sandra (Claire Gordon), commenting on how much she has “grown” in the year he was away (try and guess what he briefly stares at when he says that), and attracts the anger of her equally obsessive, fuzzy sweater enthusiast boyfriend Bob (Jess Conrad), who attacks the doctor when they’re alone in a cabin, marking him for ape death. Eventually, Decker’s “love” leads to him cornering Sandra in his greenhouse, offering to take her with him when he flees London to avoid being found out by the police, and then sexually assaults her when she declines—an uncomfortably violent scene in a silly movie about an ape (Sandra ends up getting her arm stuck in a large Venus Flytrap, and we never find out what happens to her afterwards.) It must be said that Gough is really good at playing a scumbag with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Gough was hired because of his previous work with writer/producer Herman Cohen and co-writer Aben Kandel in their 1959 horror film Horrors of the Black Museum. That duo is mostly known in the creature feature circles for their teenybopper monster movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which was a follow-up to the Cohen-produced I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (directed by our old pal Herbert L. Strock of Gog.) I guess you could argue that there’s a bit of youth-exploiting energy in Konga as well, although it’s with university students who act like teenagers, and apparently American International Pictures dubbed this movie I Was a Teenage Gorilla during pre-production. As a complete aside, the comics rights to this movie were bought by Charlton Comics in the early sixties, and the run of Konga-based comics was sometimes illustrated by the legendary Steve Ditko at around the same time he was drawing The Amazing Spider-Man.
Given what the movie poster promises, you knew that Konga was going to have a growth spurt at some point, and the instigator is Margaret. Earlier in the movie, she asked Decker to marry her, a final justification for her infatuation with him (this movie does not…respect women much), and he rather unconvincingly promises to do so at some point after the experiment is over, primarily to buy her silence when she finds out about the dean’s murder (the best line in the movie is probably Decker telling Margaret “I can’t stand hysterics. Especially in the morning.”) “When she overhears Decker’s violent come-on to Sandra, she decides to take her own revenge, going to Konga (who she has shown ample affection for) and giving him another dose of serum so he’ll listen to her instead—but it instead makes him steadily grow to monster size. Margaret ends up dead, and then the ape grabs Decker from the greenhouse and runs off into London with him. Much like Queen Kong, this is a movie where the usual sex of the ape captive is reversed (and like Queen Kong, this has a final set piece involving Big Ben), but unlike that movie, there isn’t a knowing, parodic wink to it.
Most of the effects here are unconvincing, to say the least, relying on mattes and compositing to show Konga “grow” and eventually to interact with tiny humans as he bumbles through a miniature set—when he’s holding someone in his hand, it cuts between a composite shot and him holding an obvious doll. The “best” effects are probably the to-scale room made for the moment when Konga is only very large rather than when he’s “a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions”, as one policeman puts it. This is not a big budget movie, obviously, and this kind of thing has a low quality charm to it, I guess, especially when paired with the bug-eyed ape mask—but apparently these effects took eighteen months to finish, which is truly astounding given the end results. Part of the problem was just how colourful this movie is—Cohen bragged about making the first giant ape movie in colour, which is to be fair, some kind of achievement.
The final battle between a military fleet and Konga in front of Big Ben, where the ape stops for no discernible reason (one of the random onlookers bluntly tells us that Konga has stopped there just to rub its arbitrariness in our faces) is kind of anticlimactic, and I can’t help but notice how many of the army’s bullets miss Konga. He’s a building-sized ape, and he’s right in front of you! What’s the matter with you people? The movie’s final shot does live up to the ridiculousness of the rest of the movie, with Konga’s dead body reverting back to his original baby chimpanzee form for some reason (there’s a lot of “for some reason” in this finale), laying next to the dead body of Decker. Unlike most of the other Kong knock-offs, there’s no poetic closing remark, just a truly pathetic sight both in and out of the movie’s reality.
While the chintzy silliness is the primary quality of this movie, there’s a real nasty streak here that’s also notable. There are essentially no characters to root for—Gough’s Decker is obviously the worst (while also being the most entertaining thanks to an appropriately over-the-top portrayal), but he’s surrounded by weirdly damaged people like Margaret, dumb young people, and supporting nobodies—and while Konga is a victim, his goofy, grinning appearance kinda prevents us from feeling bad for him like we do for King Kong. As an “homage” to the classic giant ape movie, it removes all the humanity and replaces it with unpleasantness and utter nonsense.
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