Leave it to B movie mogul Herman Cohen (I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF) to give us two movies for the price of one low budget effort and that’s what KONGA is. The first hour of the film is remarkably well done with an intelligent script (under the circumstances) and a creative use of color for the background sets. The unique carnivorous plants are cleverly done and the movie is professionally shot by celebrated cameraman Desmond Dickinson (HORROR HOTEL/CITY OF THE DEAD). Add to that an increasingly demented performance by Michael Gough as the mad doctor and a study in feminine frustration from Margo Johns as his assistant and you had the makings of a true classic. However once the “gorilla” enters the picture, it, as the Brits would say, “goes straight into the crapper”.
I don’t have any qualms about them using a guy in a gorilla suit but this is the worst gorilla suit I have ever seen. It was borrowed from celebrated “apeman” George Barrows who should have been hired because whoever they got had no idea how to act like a monkey. Once KONGA was introduced , it’s as if the filmmakers knew the jig was up and they just threw in the towel. The special effects become increasingly substandard and there isn’t even a pretense of disguising how bad they are. The last fifteen minutes of the film left the audience in hysterics according to people who saw it in 1961 and it’s easy to see why. That’s what makes KONGA such a guilty pleasure. Adding to the fun is the fact that the cast plays it with an incredibly straight face with no hint of camp. The final shot of the poor little chimp lying dead in the street has to be seen to be believed.
The remarkable thing about this DVD (as mentioned in an earlier review) is how good it looks. I had never seen KONGA in color before much less in widescreen. The color is very important as the first half of the film (as mentioned earlier) seems to have a psychological basis for its color scheme. The widescreen actually makes it looks more expensive than it is until it falls apart at the end. There’s no way that they couldn’t know how bad it looked and I think they deliberately made it that way. Either way KONGA is one of those movies that is so bad that it’s good and they just don’t make em like that anymore. If you love old style bad movies than you can’t afford to pass this one up. The second of three films Michael Gough made for producer Herman Cohen.
The Capsule Critic 