bensonmum2
A sleazy (and we'll find out just how sleazy later) Hong Kong based businessman hires a man named Johnny to lead an expedition into the jungles of India to find a giant, mythical, ape-like creature. One disaster after another strikes the party and they're separated. Johnny is rescued by a bikini-clad, blond, Tarzan-like woman named Samantha (Evelyne Kraft). Samantha introduces Johnny to her protector, Utam – the giant beast Johnny was hired to find. In no time at all, Johnny and Samantha fall for each other, they set off for Hong Kong with Utam, and, as you could probably predict, Utam escapes and destroys a good chunk of the city. A few months ago, I went to the theater to see Kong: Skull Island. I wrote that Kong was, "Big, dumb fun. If you went into Kong: Skull Island expecting much more than that, you were in the wrong theater." The same holds true for The Mighty Peking Man. With a giant ape smashing Hong Kong, a British army officer willing to destroy the other half of the city to get the creature, Evelyne Kraft and her leather bikini, and some truly amazing looking miniatures, I can't imagine expecting much more than big, dumb fun.Instead of rattling on about what I liked or didn't like about The Mighty Peking Man (you can read any number of better written reviews on the internet), I want to spend the rest of this discussing what I feel is the stupidest character ever put on film. The giant Utam is already in a bad mood. He's chained, caged, and kept away from Samantha. The sleazy business man I mentioned earlier picks this time to show us just how sleazy he truly is. He abducts Samantha and attempts to rape her. But does he do all this in some out of the way place like a dark alley? No. Instead, he picks a location just feet away from where Utam is being housed. The apartment or whatever is right at Utam's eye level. Utam can clearly see what's happening. This guy has to be the most incredibly stupid individual imaginable. He decides to rape a woman in the presence of her giant protector who is already in a foul mood. Dude – you've got a death wish. Bye bye sleazy business guy!
Scott LeBrun
Wacky, if obvious, Hong Kong made update of the classic King Kong story. The title character is an enormous ape, discovered by an expedition into the Himalayas. Naturally, Mighty Peking Man is soon brought back to civilization where he goes on the expected rampage. Evelyne Kraft plays Samantha, an incredibly sexy blonde jungle woman who's fond of the big guy.While the tone is sometimes more serious than expected, this is still quite the agreeable diversion, with enough things in it to make its audience laugh. It even gets reasonably energetic and exciting, with MPM doing an amount of damage to HK that easily rivals anything Godzilla ever did to Tokyo. A production of those reliable folk at Shaw Brothers, this is very nicely shot in widescreen, and its special effects are quite amusing and entertaining overall (with much use of miniatures). The music, credited to Yung-Yu Chen and "DeWolfe", is suitably rousing.The acting is of the "not so hot, but admirably sincere" variety. Kraft is extremely appealing, both as a performer and a scenery attraction. Danny Lee is likewise ingratiating as Johnnie Fang, the adventurer hired to lead the expedition. We have an appropriately disgusting human villain, as well as an enjoyable title antagonist. Sometimes MPM has some pretty priceless expressions on his face.Director Meng Hua Ho gets right down to business, with MPM terrorizing village residents in an uproarious opening action set piece, and delivers brainless thrills for a well paced 91 minutes.Seven out of 10.
ferbs54
Well, I suppose I didn't do adequate homework before venturing into Meng Hua Ho's 1977 camp classic "The Mighty Peking Man." For some reason, I had thought the titular protagonist was a man-sized survivor of the Paleolithic Age; a caveman type; a troglodyte displaced in time. But as most psychotronic-film fans have long since discovered, this is hardly the case at all, and the film in question turns out to be nothing more than a cheesy Hong Kong rip-off of 1933's "King Kong"...or, perhaps, more specifically, a cash-in "homage" to the Dino De Laurentiis travesty of the preceding year. A production of the Shaw Brothers, whose "Infra-Man" of 1975 had proved to be so memorably jaw dropping, the film is a goofy, fast-moving and wholly enjoyable experience, with better production values than you might be expecting, and lovably ersatz special FX.The picture opens with a tremendous initial 20 minutes, which not only shows us the awakening of the P.M. amidst a Himalayan earthquake around 90 seconds in (I would've loved this as a kid; back then, I always grew impatient with films that withheld a glimpse of the monster for too long), but also the subsequent destruction of the nearby native village, the P.M. running amok, the outfitting of an H.K. expedition to track down the beast, the hiring of lovelorn hunter Johnnie Fang (played by "Infra-Man" star Danny Lee), an elephant stampede, a quicksand scene, a tiger attack and a deadly cliff ascent. Whew! The film pauses for breath when Johnnie is abandoned in the wild by his fellow adventurers, only to fall into the grips of the P.M. himself, in all his 100-foot-tall, hirsute glory. Johnnie also meets the big hairy galoot's only friend: Samantha, a beautiful blonde Tarzan type who had been living in the jungle since surviving an otherwise fatal plane crash with her parents many years before. Samantha is played here by Evelyne Kraft, a Swiss actress who I had previously encountered in the 1972 giallo "The French Sex Murders"; an actress so remarkably beautiful that she easily held her own in that film alongside such stunning Eurobabes as Barbara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri and Anita Ekberg. Despite living in paradise with Samantha, Johnnie stupidly forsakes his jungle idyll in favor of bringing the girl and the P.M. (who Samantha, for some reason, calls "Utam") back to civilization; predictably, his money-making scheme goes horribly wrong, as Utam eventually goes wild with an unusual case of P.M.S. (Peking Man Syndrome) and lays half of Hong Kong to waste, before a doubly tragic conclusion....In a film with so many memorably campy moments, two stand out especially for this viewer. In the first, Johnnie and Samantha romp through the jungle in a slow-mo montage, while a supermellow pop song that is most likely entitled "Could It Be I'm In Love, Maybe" is heard in accompaniment. This kind of love scene can work marvelously if done right (for example, witness the use of Roberta Flack's "The Last Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in Clint Eastwood's "Play Misty For Me" montage), but here, the result is pure hilarity. And my other favorite camp moment? During Utam's H.K. rampage, one citizen declares, "There's a giant gorilla!" To which his friend replies, "My wife is a gorilla, too!" (Granted, something may have been lost in translation here; the dubbing on this fine-looking Miramax DVD IS fairly horrendous.) And in a film filled with so many half-baked performances, perhaps the most convincing bit of thesping turned in is by Samantha's pet leopard, who really does look to be almost crying as his mistress leaves their jungle home. The film, to be fair, does seem to bust a gut to guarantee a good time for the viewer, and manages to also incorporate a high-seas typhoon, an eye-popping finale (I love it when Utam, standing atop H.K.'s highest building, grabs an attacking helicopter and sends it ablaze down into the streets) and even some surprising gross-out sequences (a safari member has his leg torn off by a tiger; a yucky close-up of Samantha's snakebite wound on her otherwise yummy thigh). Genially zany throughout, its twofold bummer of an ending does come as a real surprise, and one that surely serves Johnnie right. Viewers who are expecting a "happily ever after" windup here, a la 1949's "Mighty Joe Young," may be in for an unpleasant surprise at how things unreel. Perhaps, to prepare themselves and cushion the blows, they might use "The Mighty Peking Man" as a sort of drinking game, imbibing a snort every time Samantha cries out "Utam!" Even Ann Darrow didn't have to go through the punishment that this jungle nymph does!
