“King Kong Escapes” Theatrical Poster
Director: Honda Ishiro
Cast: Rhodes Reason, Linda Miller, Mie Hama, Akira Takarada, Hideyo Amamoto, Yoshifumi Tajima, Yoshifumi Tajima, Andrew Hughes, Shoichi Hirose, Ryuji Kita
Running Time: 96/104 min.
By Ian Whittle
Following the colossal success of King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), Toho did not rush to bring back the giant ape in a hurry – the cost of licensing the character from RKO was high, and Toho had been left holding the bill by KKvG’s American co-producer, John Beck. But by 1966, American animation company Rankin-Bass had produced The King Kong Show in collaboration with Japan’s Toei Animation and a new live action Kong film was put into development between Rankin-Bass and Toho. Sekizawa Shinichi’s original script, Operation Robinson Crusoe: King Kong, was rejected and instead turned into the Godzilla film Ebirah, Horror of the Deep – which explain why that film has a scene where Godzilla takes an interest in a bikini-clad island girl.
Whilst Ebirah was in effect a B-movie, the resultant King Kong Escapes was very much top-grade, with direction (Honda Ishiro), music (Ifukube Akira) and SPFX direction (Tsuburaya Eiji) all being handled by Toho’s main monster specialists, in what would turn out to their final true collaboration.
Escapes is not a continuation of KKvG, and instead acts for the first 20 min or so as a potted remake of the 1933 original. A UN submarine lands on the mysterious Mondo Island, which Commander Carl Nelson (token US import Rhodes Reason) knows to be home to the legendary King Kong – Nelson being the sort of UN submarine captain who is also a big old Monster Kid. Barely have they arrived, then the sub’s nurse, Susan (Linda Miller, a Japanese based model dubbed in the US version with a child-like squawk by Julie Bennet) is attacked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex (Sekita Hiroshi) with a kangaroo kick (that the following year’s Destroy All Monsters would name Gorosaurus). Luckily, King Kong (Nakajima Harou) is no legend and he saves, and naturally falls in love with her (something sadly lacking in the most recent Kong pictures, but to be fair if Kong fancying a woman the relative size of a Barbie doll was pushing it, Kong and a girl the size of an ant is too yucky to contemplate!). And because the 1933 did the same, Kong also fights off a sea serpent (which here make a weird bird-like sound), but no pterodactyl this time! And for the record, whereas Skull Island in the 1933 film (and Faro Island in KKvG) had a whole tribe of Africans (in the South Seas?), Mondo Island’s human population is one crazy old man (Sawamura Ikio), possibly named Ben Gunn.
Meanwhile, at the North Pole, nefarious international crooks under the command of one Madame X (Hama Mie, who was a Bond girl in the same year’s You Only Live Twice) are attempting to mine the rare Element X…with a giant mechanical Kong doppelganger, Mechani-Kong (also Sekita). Created by Doctor Who (Amamato Eisei). I swear I’m not making any of this up.
Now, Doctor Who was a character in The King Kong Show, where he was a bald bespectacled man with a large cranium dressed in a lab coat. Yes, totally nothing like Professor Farnsworth from Futurama. But, for some reason, in King Kong Escapes he is a dead ringer for William Hartnell as Doctor Who in the BBC sci-fi series (which, in 1967, had yet to be broadcast in the USA or Japan) -the long white hair, the black Astrakhan hat and cape, the badly crooked fang-like teeth are all there! I’d be fascinated to know the reason behind this – it may be something as trivial as the Toho costume designer being given the wrong picture from the reference library – and Who, dubbed in the US version by the great Paul Frees (who voiced everything from the voice-of-doom narrator in the 1953 The War of the Worlds to Hanna-Barbera’s Squiddily Diddily) is far and away the best thing in the whole movie.
Since Element X short-circuits Mechani-Kong, Who rationalises that the only other possible way to extract the element is the real Kong. I’d have suggested a drill and crane, but then I only have a Masters, and that’s in Librarianship to boot. So Who kidnaps Kong, and the submarine crew to boot, but Kong escapes (duh!) and is pursued to Tokyo by Mechani-Kong for a climatic fight atop Tokyo Tower.
It’s just as well the film is such delirious fun, because as a Kong film, it’s somewhat lacking. Whilst the principal new suit does a better job of hiding the human shape of the actor, the face is ghastly, with large glassy eyes that make Kong appear perpetually stoned – indeed our first sight of him is a close-up of those eyes, which resemble fried-eggs with cataracts. The back-up suit used for stunt sequences that required Nakajima to use his real arms is even worse, looking uncannily like Animal from The Muppets. One wouldn’t think that Toho could have come with a worse gorilla suit than the road-kill Kong of KKvG but they found a way…and this is all the more frustrating when one considers their excellent ape-man suits from the previous year’s The War of the Gargantuas. Thankfully, Gorosaurus is much better (a clever way of building a dinosaur suit that doesn’t look too humanoid), and even if Mechani-Kong looks like a toy, he looks like an awesome toy.
Indeed, that is the overall effect of the film. It’s pretty feeble as a dramatic sci-fi picture (no matter how hard Ifukube tries to sell it as such with his downbeat music) but as a filming of the best toy-box a 60s kid could dream of, this is undeniably charming in spite of its flaws.
And speaking of Muppets, looks like Mechani-Kong got work after this…
Ian Whittle’s Rating: 7/10
