Eva, la Venere selvaggia

Kong Island, or Eva the Wild Woman is a little difficult to rate. From the point of view of campy b-movie fun, it's goofy and good, but basically, the film isn't really good. It does make more of an effort than a lot of similar films, and is, at times, actually interesting.

Burt (Brad Harris) is double-crossed by Albert (Marc Lawrence, who gives a career-low performance) after a payroll heist in Africa (not an island). After an undisclosed time, Burt returns to Africa to reap revenge. But, as it turns out, Albert is waiting for him, with a small army of remote controlled gorillas. Add a few subplots and season with a generally attractive cast then half-bake for a few hours.

Let's start with the worst aspects:

With the exception of Esmeralda Barros and Mark Farran, the acting is abominable. Of course, the script didn't give any of the actors much to work with, and Ms. Barros (Eva AKA the Sacred Monkey) has a non-speaking role). Brad Harris is ripped, that's about all. I am sure he could have carried the production equipment, but he didn't carry the film. Marc Lawrence has done some interesting work, but his performance here is remarkably bad.

The gorilla costumes are hilarious, and the actors in them are not particularly good at aping apes. The stock footage of African animals is not very well integrated into the action (especially the animals that are obviously living in captivity).

And now, the OK:

The story line is a bit better thought out than most b-grade mad scientist movies, and some of the characters actually seem to have personalities (though not necessarily consistent ones).

The directing is OK. There are some pacing problems - with a few lengthy and unnecessary scenes of people walking through the jungle and safari trucks driving about. The camera work and editing are both pretty good, but there are a couple of rather glaring errors.

And the good:

I liked Esmeralda Barros' character, and felt that she should have been introduced into the film earlier than she was.

Generally, the film keeps moving, and, with the exception of the ridiculous Brad Harris swimming scene (which happens just after one of his companions is murdered - always take a dip immediately after watching somebody get eviscerated, that's what I say), stays focused on the main story.

Ursula Davis has very nice eyes.

Campy B movie buffs WILL LIKE THIS. Can't recommend it for anybody else.

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.

While there's something for everyone (almost) in this action sci-fi, it's unlikely to be your most memorable movie experience. Amiable he-man Brad Harris stars as a mercenary soldier who's double crossed by his medic companion (Lawrence) in a bungled heist, but survives to seek revenge upon the mad doctor now experimenting on gorillas with mind control programming.

Aside from the shirtless Harris, flexing his body-built physique as he cavorts in a jungle pool, Tarzan style, there's also the scantily clad trio Esmerelda Barros (as a fabled native girl accompanied by the ubiquitous cheeky chimp), Adriana Alben (as Harris' sultry, former flame) and Ursula Davis as the short-shorts wearing pawn in Lawrence's diabolical plan to lure Harris to his lair for the purposes of programming him for mind control.

There's a great dancing scene to showcase Harris' moves, a couple of violent ape attacks, some safari wildlife-spotting, and the promise of much more that never really eventuates. Like an early James Bond film meets "King Kong" or "Planet of the Apes", it has camp moments, but is mostly just clichéd and boring with an anti climax that's disappointing and uninspired.

One of the things I've discovered as I make my way through a bunch of B (or C), movies, is that they seem to plod along forever. We enter this film with a group of crooks turning on each other over some stolen money. As things unwind, we are introduced to a mercenary who was wounded by a man he trusted during the opening scene. He obsesses over revenge. We have a couple of women. One a kind of Rita Hayworth type without the good looks (no offense), and a sixties kind of go go dancing looking type, who can handle a rifle. Her father, who is the Ernest Hemingway type, and her brother live with these people. Anyway, there is a subplot of a mad scientist (why are they always mad?) who has done things to affect the brains of gorillas. They can then be controlled by the scientist (the odd thing is that it also transforms them into upright creatures that look like skinny men in cheap monkey suits). Through a series of convoluted plot developments and some deaths, some tribal unrest, a few organized gorilla attacks, the young go go dancer girl ends up in the clutches of the mad scientist. Somehow she ends up with less clothes on than she used to. The scientist ogles her and has future plans which we can only imagine. There's also a native woman who is a kind of queen of the gorillas. They love and respect her, and she always was able to talk to them and get them to do what she wants. Unfortunately, the brain thing messes this up. Need I go on, There is some ridiculous finale with people exchanging the upper hand. The only thing missing is the word "Aha!" My poorly written explanation actually makes the movie sound better than it is. Sorry!

...certainly not in the league of, say, "Manos - The Hands of Fate" or Coleman Francis' 'Unholy Trinity', but also not very good either. Maltin gives this a 'BOMB' rating, which for me automatically means that I must seek it out for viewing.

The music is very groovy, very Italian disco and that's a plus. Most of the women are not too bad-looking and Brad Harris (formerly Hercules from numerous films) is pretty damn cut. The 'Ape Girl' is cute and wears no top, but her hair is always covering her breasts, the effect being actually rather sexy (kind of like how you never actually see any of Catherine Deneuve's naughty bits in "Repulsion"). The gorilla costumes are AWFUL.

In a lot of ways this films is like a jungle serial from the '30s - but it was made forty years too late! Still, there are far worse ways to spend 85 minutes.