El grandioso hombre de Pekín

Re-marketed by Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder Pictures,Might Peking Man could be considered Hong KOng's answer to such iconic creature features as King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. As such,this is a slightly more adult(the love scenes in this movie are somewhat less chaste and hopeful than any seen in the other two movies mentioned)and far more obscure.A B-Movie legend that was all but lost to the archive rooms of the Chinese Film Ministry,This is the kind of title that may easily float by your awareness if you're not looking for it. I say,if you like silly,high camp movies,you can't miss this.

Very similar to Kong, a group of city boys(led by DAnny Lee)looking for adventure and money for big game,travel to a remote PAcific island in search of the eponymous legend. Soon enough,the hunting party is winnowed down to Lee's JOhnnie Feng,who runs across the giant Ape man(who actually kind of saves him)and his lovely,blonde,blue-eyed lady friend(Evelyn Kraft)and Feng falls in love with the lady and comes to see the beauty and sanctity of this hunting ground he'd been so readily trying to exploit.

PLenty of quick cuts of bad stunts and action fakes(one scene,where a group of the party falls off a cliff,presumably to their deaths in the rocky crag below,it's plainly evident that piles of something or other is used to be thrown of the edge,used to look like bodies)and sort of a Disco-esquire music treatment make this MST-like laughable,but there's something almost reassuring about that. It's clearly an action movie,with little need for concern over authentic action sequences or technical accuracy,and in their haste to create something fast and interesting,they've made something that's fun. A staple of any film festival or movie party where people enjoy campy 70s entertainment.

At one time, this was the most expensive movie in the history of Hong Kong cinema. It's campiness exceeds words. It is hard to believe that the filmmakers were actually serious when they made this hilariously horrible movie. The film is good as a comedy simply because of its being so terrible. I saw the re-release of this film at QT3 in Austin and the audience laughed their asses off.

"The Mighty Peking Man" has dashes of originality, laughable special effects, and a busty babe without much clothing, but it isn't inspired and is pretty lifeless. It probably would have made a good MST3K episode, but it's really dull in its regular format. You must admit that it's better than many "Godzilla" pictures, though. (*/****)

I learned a lot of things from "Mighty Peking Man":

• The Himalayas are tropical

• Leopards really enjoy it if you put them on your shoulders and spin them around

• A woman raised in the jungle can function perfectly well in society while still wearing a chamois bikini and barely speaking any sort of language

• After you've captured a one-of-a-kind animal completely unknown to science, the best way to profit from him is to stage a monster truck rally

"Mighty Peking Man" is a weird mutant hybrid of "King Kong" and all those 1950s giant bug movies, where whole blocks of downtown Hong Kong (or wherever they are) are made of very fragile models and toy vehicles. There is no way on Earth you can approach a movie like this seriously, to try to use the same standards of criticism and taste that apply to normal movies. There's a certain majesty here, an aura of utter ineptitude that transcends mere bad filmmaking and becomes art.

You gotta admire the can-do spirit of everyone involved in this movie -- I just know they were convinced they were making a classic. They probably wanted to surpass "King Kong" in grandeur and drama; instead they surpassed "Plan 9 From Outer Space" in camp and sheer manic idiocy. "Mighty Peking Man" sets a new standard in bad movies -- utterly inept and laughable, and yet highly entertaining.

This movie is terrible, I am not even moderately kidding. However, because it is so, so bad you have to see it. I laughed tonnes through the movie. Big guy in a gorilla suit, blonde jungle girl in an animal skin bikini with blue eye shadow, tonka trucks and other cheesy models, cheesy green screen scenes, blattant edits, lots of bad dialogue ('kill peking man, anyway you can') and a complete king kong rip-off.

I guarantee you'll laugh all the way through.

1/10 as a real movie 9/10 as a bad B movie