Eva, la Venere selvaggia

KING OF KONG ISLAND is about Burt Dawson (Brad Harris), his incredible ordeal, and his ultimate quest to find a mad scientist named Muller (Marc Lawrence). This takes Dawson deep into the heart of dance clubs, where he dances like he's got spiders in his shirt.

Dawson also treks through the jungles of Africa, encountering things called "wild animals", as well as a woman known as the "Sacred Monkey" (Esmeralda Barros). Having lost her top, she runs free through the trees, her long, magic hair somehow covering her assets, no matter how she moves, or what she does!

For his part, Muller is building an army of remote-controlled go-rillas! He's definitely crackers, with only world conquest in mind.

Loaded to the gills with imbecilic characters and absurd dialogue, this is one of the few movies that can actually turn a brain to stone. So, be careful! Calling this movie "stupid" or "inane", is like calling a 5-lb. Cheeseburger with a shovel-full of fries... "fattening". It also has an extremely high boredom factor that only the hardiest of souls could possibly endure. As with all such hyper-sludge, it's best to simply go with it, for going against it could cause cranial collapse...

Nice and complex for a cheap 1968 movie. We have overlapping plots. What you may notice right off is there are no island and no Kong. However, there is an Eva, the savage girl (Esmeralda Barros) who exposes her uh talent. We have to put up with an Italian knockoff of a disco and even listen to cheap sci-fi sounds while a mad scientist Albert (Marc Lawrence) monkeys with remote brain control, not to mention the bongo background.

We start with the East Africa Trading Company's parole being pilfered and the head pilferer bumps into the others. Oops, co-pilferer Burt (Brad Harris) survives and intends to track Albert down. The plot thickens when we meat a bar owner, his wayward mistress, his blond "lights on, nobody home" daughter Diana (Ursula Davis), his puppy dog son, and a few mysterious characters.

The daughter wants to shoot the sacred monkey.

Mad scientist covets the monkey brain.

And Burt monkeys around.

Now quit looking for Kong! I told you there is no Kong!

Everyone double-crosses everyone else.

So, does the scientist get away?

Will we ever see the sacred monkey?

Who gets the blond?

Who gets the chimp?

Who gets to watch a ridicules movie?

The Italian title for this film was EVE, THE WILD WOMAN which makes a lot better sense than the one attached to it for foreign distribution, KING OF KONG ISLAND. There is no king, no kong, and no island! This is the sort of plot that Republic might have made a 12 chapter serial about. A mad scientist is performing brain operations on gorillas deep in the jungle (NOT on an island) to create an army of simian slaves. Why is he doing this? Because he is a MAD scientist and that is what mad scientists do! Enter the hero (Brad Harris from several muscleman movies) and the heroine (Esmeralda Barros as the Eve, the title character) to defeat the madman and restore the natural balance to the jungle.

Eve the jungle girl is topless for the whole picture but her long flowing hair is strategically arranged except at certain dramatic moments. Those gorillas with the stitches in their heads don't look like gorillas at all to me, they look like stuntmen in costumes! It takes forever for the plot to get going; in fact it starts like an action adventure with Harris' character as a mercenary looking for revenge against the guy who double crossed him. The science fiction element and the jungle girl subplot are introduced to wake the audience up later on.

Perhaps if they had thrown in a dinosaur or two and a nice big explosion at the end. Oh well. I am off to watch the old 1944 serial THE MONSTER AND THE APE . . at least that one delivered what the title promised!

We now go to East Africa, where life is cheap but clearly ape suits are expensive. And by Africa we mean a studio back-lot somewhere in Italy that doubles for the "island" in King Of Kong Island.

I must have denghi fever and it's my insane imaginings that jungle B-films were the property of the 1930s and 40s: what could be described as "Apesploitation", or the "Monkeys Going Bananas" genre. And yet in the 1960s, with Planet Of The Apes one of the most popular films of the year ("You dirty rotten stinking apes!") we have Night Of The Bloody Apes (1968) from Mexico, soon followed by the Italian sexploitation film Queen Kong (1976), and Hong Kong's Goliathon/Mighty Peking Man (1977). It may be man's endless fascination with our lesser-evolved simian twins, or we just can't help but get a cheap laugh out of a guy in a monkey suit.

King Of Kong Island opens with a dastardly scientist Dr Muller using stolen goods to fund his surgical experiments on gorillas. Now, seriously, "gorilla"? Even I own a better monkey suit than this. Cut to a hunting expedition led by Burt (Brad Harris, the American actor who played everyone from Samson to Goliath and Hercules) who is ambushed by not one but TWO "gorillas", complete with surgical scars, who kidnap Diana, the most attractive of the group. Despite his previous mission's complete and abject failure, Burt is charged with bringing Diana back, past miles of stock footage - although to be truthful the producers did find a parrot and a cockatoo and a few pink flamingos for a shirtless Burt, who at times resembles a shaved ape himself, to chase around a studio lagoon.

In an amalgam of every thirty-year old jungle cliché, Burt comes across some spooked natives in awe of the Sacred Monkey God, a helpful chimp and a jungle girl called Eva, who can't utter a word of English but speaks fluent monk-ese, which leads Burt to look her square in the eye and ask, "Are you the Sacred Monkey?" Unbelievable. The hunt ends at Dr Muller's underground dungeon-cum-laboratory in the middle of the jungle where the insane megalomaniac - and the King of the title - has turned the apes into radio-controlled zombies, manipulated by an enormous Electronic Brain.

The film was picked up by American producer Dick Randall, an old-fashioned expert in hullabaloo who was as colorful as the characters in his own Z-grade pickups. Born in the US but based mainly in Rome, Randall was the guy who filmed Jayne Mansfield's grieving family a week after her death and immediately edited the footage into his 1968 mondo film The Wild World Of Jayne Mansfield. He also sold the Filipino midget James Bond spoof For Your Height Only (1981) to the world and turned the two foot nine star Weng Weng into an unlikely international superstar. He could sell a chainsaw massacre to Texas with the 1982 Spanish slasher film Pieces, and could sell a turkey-baster to Foghorn Leghorn in the same breath as he sold this turkey.

Did I say "turkey"? I meant "gorilla", and as honorary Great White Hunters we should approach this film with the right spirit, whose concepts are as absurd as the very idea of white colonialism itself.

An Italian Spanish Co-production with America's own Dick Randall involved in the ‘presenting'- King of Kong Island mixes horror movie, nudie-cutie and jungle adventure with toppings of National Geographic stock footage- all set to a jungle beat of exotica. A mercenarie's life is a tough one- at least for Burt Dawson (Brad Harris) shot in the back by his ex-friend Albert Muller (Marc Lawrence) and left for dead. Albert retreats deep into the jungle where he performs brain operations on man sized gorillas and makes them his robot like slaves. Burt survives the shooting and vows vengeance, tracking down his ‘mad Doctor friend' in Nairobi. Reacquainting himself with his buddy Theodore, Burt is drawn back into Albert's orbit when Theodore's thrill seeking daughter Diana is kidnapped by the gorillas while on safari. Although forewarned that ‘you may find that it's actually dangerous to violate ancient taboos' macho Burt cannot be stopped and before you can say ‘let's grow a hairy chest, write books and shoot some elephants' Burt is venturing into the dark continent to put an end to Albert's monkey business. Amidst an almost comical amount of double crosses, secrets and revelations Burt has to fight off attacks from Albert's simian heavies, get his collar felt by a tribe of savages and also finds time to befriend Eva The Wild Woman (The Devil's Wedding Night's Esmeralda Barros). As Burt's guide explains ‘she is the daughter of the forest, she understands the language of the trees and the wild beasts, she appears in the morning with the sun who is her father, she has always existed like the forest itself with its ancient mysteries she is everywhere and nowhere'. And its the jungle woman with her power over the animals who proves to be the spanner in the works for Albert's plan to take over the world with his gorillas (as well as his kinky sideline in experimenting on women and locking them in cages). In the Sixties Italian cinema was going through a Golden Era and became a retreat for Americans and Brits who were either being kicked out or couldn't get a foot in the door of their native film industries. Dick Randall (1926- 1996) was no exception and by the time of King of Kong Island he was living La Dolce Vita in Rome. Randall a chubby, small guy with glasses, a pencil thin moustache and a penchant for huge cigars- is vividly remembered by friends and associates for his keen business sense matched by an equal sense of humour. Randall was never it seems above sending himself up either- witness his tour de force performance as a ‘pig with binoculars' in Bava's Four Times that Night or his cameo in 1986's Slaughter High where he lampoons his B-movie King image. As in The Bogeyman and the French Murders here Randall surrounds himself with a journeyman director hiding under a phony name, a memorable cast, and a crew well versed in the ways of them exploitation films including Bloody Pit of Horror's Ralph Zucker and Walter Brandt. If Italian horror films were the new rock n roll, Zucker and Brandt would have been the equivalent of first rate session musicians. The actual music itself by Roberto Pregadio is suitably ‘Congo Psychedelia', wildly inappropriate for any movie apart from one whose curious geography believes go-go discotheques can be found in the midst of a jungle (even today Pregadio's score still haunts the tracks of lounge music compilations). In retrospect King of Kong Island could be considered a throwback to jungle adventure movies of yore but perhaps only as Randall's doorman character in Four Times That Night might have remembered with every situation subverted to its sex-charged, exaggerated extreme. The introduction of Eva the Wild Woman is set to her running naked in the wilderness (in slow motion no less) to stress her ‘naturalness' a sequence reprised for the finale but not even this can match the priceless ‘va-va vroom' moment when the gorillas seemingly ogle Diana- watching her strip down to pea green underwear before letting their presence be known. Curiously many of these elements were downplayed on its Italian release which sold it on the value of matinee idol Harris with not a gorilla in sight, but as connoisseurs know all manner of insanity could and usually does happen in Italian movies of the period and King of Kong Island is hardly a sober exception to the rule. With its hodgepodge of oversexed women, Interpol agents, remote controlled primates, catfights and mad scientists conducting strange experiments in the jungle this was exactly the sort of ‘fantastique' escapism audiences would flock to in less cynical times. Today King of Kong Island is one of several Dick Randall productions just ripe for rediscovery. Fun, endearing and with as much God given trashyness as anything else Randall ever put his name to, King of Kong Island will have you mourning the era in the Italian film industry when vivid imaginations and spectacular traders ran amok.