Konga
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

90 m, UK/USA, NR, 1961
Directed by John Lemont. Stars Michael Gough, Margo Johns, Jess Conrad, et al.

It’s not all that uncommon for a good film to go splat in its final reel, but, my God, I don’t I’ve ever seen one take as monumental a dump as Konga. For its first hour and fifteen minutes, Konga (which was made in the UK) is delightful camp, but come its FX-laden climax, everything falls to pieces. It’s heartbreaking to watch a rock-solid entry in the mad scientist genre suddenly collapse into a rank King Kong knock-off—but, hey, at least it gave the US distributor, AIP, something upon which it could hang its promotional campaign. The climax of Konga looks removed from the rest of the picture, as if it was tacked on at the last minute, and it’s so thoroughly dreadful that it causes viewers to forget about all the grand time they had leading up to it and unduly reject the whole shebang. The final act of Konga stinks to high Heaven, but getting there is more fun that a barrel full of genetically mutated monkeys.  

Michael Gough (whom contemporary audiences might recognize as Alfred the butler from the Batman movies) has a grand time hamming it up as Konga’s resident mad medic, Dr. Charles Decker. Long-thought dead after his plane went down somewhere in Uganda, Decker returns to London with a chimp named Konga and a head full of weird ideas on how to reproduce the missing link between plants and animals. (More than a few echoes here of AIP’s own The Little Shop of Horrors.) After regaling the reporters at the airport with accounts of his jungle exploits, Decker returns to his professorship at the stately Essex College. When he’s not boring his students blind with the movies he shot of some Ugandi primitives, Decker is holing himself up in his basement lab and working feverishly to breathe life into his new theories. His assistant (and former lover), Margaret, is happy to join him in burning the midnight oil, even putting up with the old crank’s put-downs because—God only knows why—she still carries an Olympic-sized torch for him. But Decker’s too immersed in his batty botany to take notice. In his backyard greenhouse, he callously rips apart the exotic flowers that Margaret has lovingly maintained over the last year, and drops new seedlings in their stead. Soon the flower boxes are replete with overgrown eggplants with long forked tongues and Venus fly traps the size of garbage can lids. I’d be surprised if more than an afternoon was spent on papermacheting these puppets together; a third-grade art class could whip up something more convincing. (Though you may get a kick out of watching the things lustily devour the scraps of raw meat that Decker tosses into their gaping pie holes.) He takes a few choice clippings from the plants, and uses them to fashion a growth serum that he then boosts with a mind-control additive. (I’m not making any of this up.) We’re finally sold on what a total shit Decker is after he sends a pussy cat to the hereafter after it laps up some of the experimental serum that has dribbled on the floor. “We can’t have cats the size of leopards running through the streets,” he sneers. In time, he injects the stuff into poor Konga (who has been serving as the house nigger, fetching tea and crumpets for his snooty masters), which enlarges the chimp to the size of a twelve-year-old boy. It’s upon Konga’s first transformation scene that we learn the spfx here aren’t going to be on the level of King Kong. (Or even Godzilla vs King Kong, for that matter.) Oddly enough, Konga’s second growth spurt turns him not into a larger chimpanzee, but rather a hulking gorilla, purportedly played by an unidentified stuntman in an ill-fitting costume on loan from the legendary George Barrows. (Students of simian cinema will recall that Barrows played the titular beasties in Gorilla at Large and Robot Monster, the latter being the most confounding bad movie ever made. By that I mean I still can’t decide if it’s a work of colossal ineptitude or a misunderstood masterpiece of surrealism.) But many schlock scholars contend that Konga was actually played by Steve Calvert in one of the two moth-eaten monkey suits he bought from Ray “Crash” Corrigan. (Calvert is best known for his work in the unjustly maligned Bride of the Gorilla, and, of course, The Bride and the Beast, which was penned by the one and only—thank God at least for that—Ed Wood.) There may be some legitimacy to this premise: Konga’s costume does look decidedly Corriganesque, though his movements don’t suggest Calvert. But irrespective of the man behind the mask, the creature is about as frightening as an overgrown Furby.  

Dr. Decker is so covetous of his new findings that he orders Konga (by way of the aforementioned mind-control additive) to wipe out anybody that threatens to impede his research. Konga breaks his cherry by doing in the stuffy Dean Foster (Austin Trevor), who suggested Decker take a leave of absence after reading his kooky pronouncements in the paper. Next on the hit list is Decker’s chief rival, Professor Tagore (George Pastel sporting a turban and pencil-line mustache), who’s about to go public with some botanical break-throughs that threaten to overshadow all of Decker’s hard work. Decker pays a visit to Tagore’s lab under the pretense of sharing notes, but in reality he’s brought Konga along to off Tagore and trash his lab.  

At first I thought Decker was too consumed with his experiments to give matters like the ol’ in-out in-out much attention, but it turns out he has a thing for the young gals. He cajoles one of his pretty pupils, Sandra (Claire Gordon), into assisting him in the hothouse, and when Margaret spies him practically raping the poor girl, she shoots Konga up with some more growth serum. Waving a penlight in front of his eyes, she commands him to go forth and squash Decker like the little turd he is. Konga then spurts to the size of Skull Island’s most celebrated resident, but before he tends to Decker, he decides to take care of his new female master. (She must not have delivered those commands correctly.) After inadvertently setting the joint ablaze, he picks up Margaret (who has now miraculously transformed into a Barbie doll) and chucks her against the wall. I’m not sure if she dies, but the movie certainly does.  

Konga inadvertently spares Sandra from an ugly deflowering when he scoops up Decker (who has now miraculously transformed into a Ken doll), and carries him along as he goes about terrorizing London. Well, that’s something of an exaggeration; Konga doesn’t really do much but stand around while Decker yells, “Konga, put me down!” over and over again. I think having Decker carry on like a big ninny is out of step with the character’s egotism; this guy has such a hard-on for power that he should’ve been ordering Konga to destroy the whole goddamned city, whooping maniacally all the while. Eventually the military meets up with the gargantuan gorilla in front of Big Ben, and though it looks like they’re firing everything in their arsenal at him, they fail to even knick his hide. This goes on for a good while until Konga wearies of Decker’s yelping and does us all a big favor by throwing him away. 

Konga (shot in SpectaMation, whatever the hell that is) was co-written (with frequent collaborator Aben Kandel) and executive-produced by Herman Cohen, whose myriad achievements included helping those uncanny Martin and Lewis imposters, Mitchell and Petrillo, land their one and only flicker show, the improbably amusing Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. (Cohen also served as an assistant to producer Jack Broder on Bride of the Gorilla.) Two years before Konga, Cohen teamed up with Gough for Horrors of the Black Museum, and this led to a partnership that ultimately spawned four more so-so fright flicks, including Black Zoo and Trog. The direction here by John Lemont is serviceable, yet flat, unwelcoming. It would seem that Lemont didn’t make much of an impression on anyone in the show business either: he went on to direct an episode of the British TV series “Sir Francis Drake,” and that was that. Though most people probably haven’t even heard of Konga, it did have something of a legacy: Charlton Publishing put out no less than twenty comic books based on the damned dirty ape.

February 17, 2006 

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.