The Mighty Gorga
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, G, 84 m, 1969
Directed by David L. Hewitt. Stars Anthony Eisley, Megan Timothy, Scott Brady, et al. 

Just when I thought there couldn’t be a worse giant gorilla movie than A*P*E, along comes The Mighty Gorga to make a monkey out of me. If A*P*E was a poor man’s King Kong, then The Mighty Gorga is an even poorer man’s A*P*E. No, scratch that—it’s worse: The Mighty Gorga is a bleeding-gummed, crank-addicted, lice-infested, HIV-positive, ten-dollar-an-hour ho’s A*P*E. In the immortal words of Hans and Franz, hear me now and believe me later: This is one of the most mindless, slapdash, and aesthetically unprepossessing movies you’ll ever see. In fact, if you watched A*P*E in an alcoholic haze at two o’clock in the morning through smarting, blood-shot eyes on a broken-down 1948 six-inch Motorola table top TV set with a smoking picture tube and a wire hanger serving as an antenna, it would still look better than The Mighty Gorga. The wretched thing plods along for forty minutes before director/producer/writer/“monster builder” David L. Hewitt (he oversaw the depressingly sub-par effects work on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) appears in his Gorga get-up, but even Ray “Crash” Corrigan would think twice about donning a gorilla suit of such inferior quality. Actually, the budget on this hastily thrown together piece of primate poop was so minuscule that the folks involved couldn’t spring for the fur to wrap Hewitt’s legs and feet, so Gorga is never shot below the waist. But what we do see is so pathetic that even the smallest of fries will be howling with derision. (Those with a low threshold for schlock cinema will most likely commit hara-kiri before the appearance of the first cigarette burn.) Expressionless and cross-eyed, Gorga’s face is about as threatening as a 99¢ Ben Cooper Halloween mask. (The poor ape didn’t enjoy even that level of merchandising; all the treats in Wonkaland couldn’t get a first-grader to wear a Gorga mask at his elementary school’s Halloween doings.) Hewitt and his band of luckless dodos didn’t have the horse sense to conceive of a way for Gorga to convincingly share the screen with the actors either, so those interactions are limited to cutting between the actors’ POV of the ape and then the ape’s POV of the actors. There are a few split screen or rear projection shots that permit the actors to inhabit the same frame as Gorga (and a couple of prehistoric whatchamacallits), but nobody stopped to consider the scale, so you can never get a handle on how big Gorga is supposed to be. Worse, the actors don’t know where they need to look in order to match the monster’s eyeline, but I’m sure if they had been able to play off of a full-scale mockup, they wouldn’t have been able to stop laughing their third-rate keesters off. When special-effects are this crumby, playing things straight seems rather sap-headed, but even a winking approach couldn’t help this lazily designed bore from collapsing under the weight of its own ineptness.  

Mark Remington (played by Anthony Eisley, an undistinguished television actor who reminds me a bit of Robert Forster) owns a cut-rate circus or zoo or carnival or something in The Golden State. For just a few coins, you can watch a lion tamer whip his subjects into performing crazy eights and split-lifts, debate evolution with some scrotum-scratching chimpanzees, and lob spitballs at an inebriated clown. But business has been off of late, and poor Remington is destined to go bust inside of six months. To make matters worse, there’s a slimy competitor named Arnold Shye (Gary Kent from Sinthia, the Devil’s Doll) who’s trying every dirty trick in the book to push Remington into selling the dump to him just so he can shut it down. But Remington isn’t ready to throw in the towel; he has, as they say, an ace in the hole. He’s heard stories about a gargantuan ape that’s been lurking around Africa, so he hitches a plane to the Dark Continent with the hope of bagging the beast and turning it into a sideshow attraction. But “distant jungle drums” have forewarned an African tribe about the white man coming to plunder their stockpile of sparkly riches (which turns out to be a mound of cheap costume jewelry not even fit for a gumball machine), so they enlist Gorga’s protection by sacrificing a scantily clad maiden with flabby arms and sagging boobs. The tribesmen are a proud and utterly humorless lot, and their chief (whose unfortunate Moe Howard-style hairpiece lies atop his crown like a dead animal) speaks to them in a sort of broken English reminiscent of Tonto or Tarzan or Frankenstein’s monster. What’s most laughable about these supposed natives is that they’re all clearly Anglo-Saxon; black fright wigs and skin smeared with shoe polish can’t conceal the fact that their African roots run about as deep as Sean Hannity’s. 

Following a lot of scratchy stock footage of a TWA bird taking off, barreling through the clouds, and then landing, Remington reaches his destination. (And if you’re stupid enough to believe that any of the ensuing action was actually shot in Africa, you deserve the minimal amount of intellectual stimulation this movie provides.) After spending God knows how much time strolling around a zoo (creepy music inexplicably plays over endless takes of giraffes, elephants, and monkeys basking in the sun), he learns from a contact that his main wild animal supplier, Tonga Jack Adams (Kent Taylor, whose first name was Siegel and Shuster’s inspiration for the surname of Superman’s alias), has not been heard from since he ventured into the jungle to seek out the legendary Gorga some six months ago. Tonga Jack’s daughter, April (Megan Timothy), was left behind to maintain the animal compound, which is now in danger of being foreclosed on due to waning business. The biggest thorn in April’s side, a J.R. Ewing-type of business rival named Dan Morgan (Scott Brady, whose last performance before succumbing to emphysema in 1985 was as Sheriff Frank in Joe Dante’s ‘84 horror comedy, Gremlins), has bought up her debt and is now out to collect. Wait a sec… Haven’t we already been down this road with Remington and Shye? Jeez Louise, how lazy can Witt be that he has to use two nearly identical plotlines within the same goddamned picture? Say what you want about George Lucas, but at least the guy waits until he starts another movie before ripping himself off. 

When Morgan’s threats fail to push April into signing the compound over to him, he sets one of her stables on fire, rendering the valuable critter inside extra-crispy. Morgan is confident that he now has April over a barrel, but before he can snatch the deed to her land, Remington steps in and pays the greedy old fuck what he’s owed. April decides to pay Remington back by helping him track down the giant ape, which will also give her a chance to find out what became of her pappy. (And let’s not forget about that rumor making the rounds about a cache of treasures sitting in a cave somewhere!) So, with a couple of half-naked natives in tow, they trudge into the jungle armed with a single shotgun and some sleep-inducing darts. The trek goes on and on and on. After we’re treated to God knows how many insert shots of assorted wild beasties frolicking in the foliage, our hunting party (which is whittled down to Remington and his gal pal after the hired hands chicken out and hightail it back home) comes upon a tyrannosaurus rex, which is unquestionably the worst looking dinosaur I’ve seen in a movie since One Million AC/DC. It’s really just a cheaply made hand puppet, and if the filmmakers paid more than two bucks for it at the corner Ben Franklin’s, I’ll eat my hat. The T. rex kind of bobs around and snarls at our adventurers, prompting Remington to fire off several rounds in the direction that he imagines the beast to be standing. This doesn’t deter the cut-rate Barney from snarling, but it pays dearly for its grumpy disposition when Gorga shows up and wrenches its jaw apart King Kong-style. During his chest thumping victory dance, Gorga notices that he cut a digit on one of his adversary’s teeth, and this sends him into a whiny fit. While he’s obsessing over his owie, Remington prepares to take him down, but—wouldn’t ya know it—the blasted gun jams. This affords Gorga oodles of time to squash Remington like a bug, but since the poor bastard hasn’t been equipped with legs (well, simian ones anyway), all he can do is stand there and watch Remington futz around with his weapon. After waiting forever and a day for Remington to get his shit together, Gorga takes one in the cocoanut and goes down for the count. While he dreams of a world where pesky humans aren’t always out to exploit his freakish height for the money to buy bigger homes and bigger cars, April grows a heart and wraps Gorga’s sore with a handkerchief. Of course, this piece of business happens completely off-camera as the filmmakers didn’t have enough scratch to construct an oversized monkey mitt.

Unfortunately, there’s more. Lots more. I’m sorry to say that my memory of the last act is a bit fuzzy due to an intense case of the nods, but I’m sure I’ve already relayed more of the storyline than you ever cared to know. If you’re an insatiable masochistic, Gorga just might be the answer to your prayers; all others should stay as far way as humanly possible. The whole affair appears to have been made in a lost weekend: actors often flub their lines or forget them entirely, footage is brazenly whipped from other pictures to help pad out the running time, and takes are often reused when editor (and cinematographer) Gary Graver doesn’t have enough coverage to shape a scene. My goodness, even Ed Wood had higher standards! 

In the ashcan of bad movies, Gorga is an anomaly: it blows on every level. As an unstinting optimist, I can usually find something to tout in even the most putrid of cinematic stinkfests. It might be a stirring musical score or an unexpectedly gripping method performance or a pretty angora sweater. But Gorga doesn’t offer up one cotton-pickin’ thing of note. Not since The Beast of Yucca Flats have I encountered a picture so bereft of quality. Scene by scene, shot by shot, frame by frame, The Mighty Gorga is completely and utterly worthless.

October 25, 2008

“The Mighty Gorga” Review. © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.