Monday, June 1, 2020

The Mighty Peking Man (1977)

A superbly weird film just as you imagine the HK version of King Kong would be. Johnny Fang (Danny Lee) heads to the Himalayas to track down the mythical Peking Man or Utam, some sort of gigantic (although the size seems to vary between scenes) monstrous ape. Finally he discovers the creature but he is about to be crushed by it... until the arrival of a female Tarzan called Samantha (Evelyne Kraft) who was lost as a child in a plane crash in the Himalayas and bought up by Utam in the ..er.. jungles of the Himalayas.

Samantha falls for Johnny and he persuades her to bring Utam to HK so the whole world can see him. Utam ends up in a show but you just know it will end up badly...

An epic in monster mayhem, the destroyed buildings are so obviously models but the action scenes are tremendous set pieces. Samantha is a terrifically strange character, the fact she seems to hate wearing clothes adds to the sheer camp of much of the film. However amid the camp there is a lot of darkness in this film, Utam dies with honour, many of the humans die after being crushed by his giant feet. In fact Samantha (and maybe Johnny) apart, the humans in this film act terribly.