How to Sell a Monster Movie with Zero Giant Apes, Three Party-Store Gorilla Suits, and a Very Confused Hollywood Mobster
It’s 3:15 AM. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, the cold pizza on my desk is starting to look back at me, and I am currently watching a man in a very baggy, poorly fitting gorilla suit—complete with a metallic radio transmitter glued to his hairy head—trying to strangle a rugged explorer, while a famous Hollywood gangster actor yells at him from behind a flashing plastic control panel.
Welcome, my friends, to the shameless, incredibly cheap, and utterly hysterical world of late-60s Italian exploitation cinema.
If you’ve never heard of Kong Island (also known as King of Kong Island or Eve, the Wild Woman), congratulations: your brain cells are still functioning in a healthy manner. For the uninitiated, this movie is a monument to absolute, top-tier false advertising. The Italian filmmakers had a simple, elegant, and highly deceptive strategy:
- Put the word “Kong” in the title so audiences think they are going to see a giant, city-smashing ape.
- Do not build, animate, or rent a giant ape because that costs money. Instead, go to a local costume rental shop and rent three cheap gorilla suits.
- Shoot the entire movie in a damp, sad-looking public park in Italy, hire a gorgeous actress to swing on vines in a leopard-print bikini, and call it a day.
The result? Kong Island (1968).
The “Plot” (If we can even call it that)
A sinister, mad scientist named Albert (played by Marc Lawrence) has set up a secret laboratory deep in the jungle. His grand plan for world domination? He is kidnapping local gorillas, surgically implanting radio-receiver chips into their brains, and controlling them with a massive, flashing control panel so he can build a remote-controlled primate army.
A rugged, macho mercenary named Burt (Brad Harris) goes into the jungle to rescue a kidnapped woman and stop this primate plot. Along the way, he teams up with Eve (Esmeralda Barros), a wild, native jungle woman who runs around in a bikini, speaks in grunts, and handles all the actual vine-swinging and snake-fighting while the men stand around talking.
It is a glorious, nonsensical soup of Eurospy tropes, mad science, and guys in monkey suits running through the bushes.
Why You Need to Watch This Tonight
- The Complete Absence of “Kong”: Let me repeat this, because it is the funniest part of the entire experience: there is no giant gorilla in this movie. There is no scaling of buildings, no stomping on tanks, and no helicopters. Every “monster” is just a regular-sized human stuntman in a gorilla suit that is so baggy it looks like he’s wearing his older brother’s pajamas.
- The High-Tech Mind-Control Antennas: To show that a gorilla is under Albert’s mind control, the special effects team literally glued a small, gray metal box with two bent copper wire antennas to the back of the gorilla’s head. It looks like a cheap car radio receiver from 1965, and it is glorious.
- The Tragically Overqualified Mad Scientist: Albert is played by Marc Lawrence—a legendary Hollywood character actor who spent the 1940s and 50s playing tough-guy mobsters in legendary film noirs opposite Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. Seeing this respected veteran actor standing in a fake jungle, screaming at a guy in a cheap monkey suit to “ATTACK! FORCE THE DOORS!” is a surreal, beautiful slice of B-movie history.
- The Visible Zippers: If you look closely during the fight scenes, you can actually see the metal zippers running down the backs of the gorilla costumes. The actors inside them move with the slow, awkward hesitation of men who know they are being filmed in a public park and are deeply embarrassed.
The Verdict
Is it a good movie? Absolutely not. It is a gloriously trashy, incredibly cheap, and endlessly stupid piece of Italian cinema. But if you are awake at 3 AM and want to laugh yourself to sleep, watching remote-controlled party-shop gorillas fight a muscular American actor while a jungle girl swings from the trees is the absolute best way to do it.
My Rating: 2 out of 5 visible zippers on a gorilla’s back.
Wanna see the ultimate bait-and-switch monster movie?
Dim the lights, lower your standards to absolute zero, and search for this trashy Italian classic on your favorite retro cinema or B-movie platform. Because it has slipped into the public domain, you can watch these mind-controlled, party-shop primates run amok for free.
[WATCH “KONG ISLAND (1968)” ON YOUTUBE (Opens in a new window)]
