The Mighty Peking Man

Pekingese Pockets

The Mighty Peking Man
aka Xing xing wang
Hong Kong 1977
Directed by Meng-Hua Ho
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers I suppose but... it’s too funny not to.

I’m delighted that, midst all the Kung Fu mayhem in the new Arrow/Celestial Pictures Blu Ray ShawScope Volume One box set, they’ve also included one of the first Shaw Brothers films I saw, The Mighty Peking Man. It was around 19 years ago that I first saw this at the Curzon Soho, as the second of a four film all-nighter screening of Shaw Brothers movies, which also included The Monkey Goes West (I still can’t figure out why the four Monkey films have not hit Blu Ray as yet, they’d sell bucket loads), The Oily Maniac (reviewed here) and The Super Infra-Man. It’s also quite puzzling since, while Arrow have been quite careful not to step on the toes of another British label, 88 Films, with Arrow’s releases of Come Drink With Me (reviewed here) and The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter only going on release overseas, they’ve put this one in a box set when The Mighty Peking Man is also available as a single film from 88 Films in this country. Not sure what’s going on here but I didn’t think that was allowed to happen by the BBFC in the UK?

Anyway, the film is one of many Kongsploitation films made, this one starting off with a rich, sex pest of a business tycon, remembering that time a couple of decades ago in India when a giant gorilla attacked. He plans to go to India to capture it, bring it back to civilisation... aka Hong Kong... and then make a lot of money from it. He hires ace tracker Johnny Fang, played by Danny Lee, to lead the expedition, as we flashback to the sad back story of his career minded girlfriend in an over-zealous ‘couple in love’ montage, suddenly throwing him over for his TV producer brother. But a plague of misfortune hits the expedition fairly quickly after they arrive in India. A few guys are lost to quicksand for example... although the Shaw Brothers version of quicksand here is not the slow sucking under as it’s depicted in most movies... it really does live up to its name. And talking of quick things... when a guy on the expedition gets his leg hastily chomped off by a wild tiger in the most comical and unconvincing manner you could hope for (I remember the whole cinema was in fits of laughter), well, it sets the tone for the rest of the film.

A film so bad it’s good as, when Fang is left on his own and abandoned by his expedition, he is grabbed by Ah Wang, the giant sized ape of the film’s title. However, he is rescued by jungle girl Ah Wei, played by bosomy Swiss actress Evelyne Kraft, who spends almost the entire film with her animal skins pulled down so low that said bosom threatens to pop free and have someone’s eye out at various points throughout the picture. If you want to see a comically inept but blatant example of ‘the male gaze’ then, yeah, this one’s probably right up your street. She enters the picture literally swinging from a vine and doing her feminine version of the Tarzan yodel. It’s not long before Fang discovers that, after a plane crash a couple of decades before when she was a little girl, the somehow Mandarin speaking gal (who fluently speaks it to all her jungle friends with instant understanding, such as leopards and elephants... not just her big, hairy friend Ah Wang) was rescued by the giant ape who raised her as his own. However, love rears it’s head and it isn’t long before Johnny and the jungle queen are running around in love, with her literally swinging leopards around in her arms in slow motion to a truly awful, syrupy love song... in an extended love montage which is so unintentionally hilarious and incompetent that it almost achieves the level of perfect cinema.

After Fang also saves her life by sucking snake venom from her inner thigh, he persuades her and The Mighty Peking Man to accompany him back to civilisation where the cruel downfall of the characters begins. The big ape is in chains and being exploited by sex pest guy, who also tries to rape Ah Wei after she is already trying to deal with Fang possibly getting reacquainted, in a sexy way, with his ex. It all leads to death and destruction as, attempting to rescue Ah Wei from her would be rapist, Ah Wang gets loose and runs amok. Despite Ah Wei trying to coax him back to the jungle from atop the tallest building in Hong Kong at the time (the Connaught Centre Building, as it was back then) both her and her giant ape friend are brought down in a hail of bullets and explosions. Beauty in this version of the King Kong formula, dies alongside the beast and then her gaze is carried out to look at the waterfront in the arms of her newly unfaithful lover, as the film’s final credit rolls.

And it’s a grim ending to a greatly entertaining... for all the wrong reasons... piece of movie making. The new Blu Ray transfer shows the special effects off to their fullest... or should that be ‘shows up’ the special effects. Old, Showa-era kaiju style toy tanks look pretty clunky by 1977, it has to be said, and the substantial difference in quality of the film stock, with easily spotted rear projection to achieve the effects, is quite evident here. It’s just another reason to love this wonderful mess of a movie and so, ironically, I couldn’t recommend The Mighty Peking Man enough. As part of the bonus features on this Shawscope set, there are two discs of needle drop soundtrack cues from the De Wolfe library and the first of these included some of the ones used in The Mighty Peking Man. If you like King Kong rip offs and you’ve not seen this one, well, you might want to think about adding this behemoth to your selection.