Queen Kong!

It's hard to grade the movie Queen Kong simply because I have a hard time fitting it into a category. It's obviously a rip-off of King Kong, inspired by the Dino DeLaurentis remake of the same time, but what is it other than that. Is it comedy, a satire, a farce, a musical? Of course the answer is that it's some of all of these. In fact this movie works so very very hard to be funny in all sorts of ways that when it fails (which it does most of the time) the effort makes the failure all the more glaring. For instance it spouts a lot of dialogue in support of women's liberation but in many a scene undercuts that very message, if message it is.

Starring Rula Lenska as a liberated female variation of "Carl Denham" and some bloke name Robin Askwith is a rowdy "Ray Fay" (Get it?) this British flick thunders ahead at times wanting to Benny Hill and at other Monty Python and getting nowhere near either. It's that kind of too-on-the-nose humor that marks the bulk of his movie. Some of the gags I liked, such as a giant picnic table for Kong just inside the giant wall and some of the "chicken fat" signage in the movie is sort of clever. Queen Kong herself does little to same the family name, and in fact fights some pretty darn big dinosaurs before getting carted off to London. I suspect the dinos were built to the wrong scale but it was interesting to see anyway.

The most memorable thing in this 1976 movie is the women and and there are lots and lots and lots of them. All the crew of the ship are dames and practically all the villagers are of the fairer sex as well. But the thing is they all look pretty much alike, and that is they look like the slinky rail-thin types that wander up and down runways in the fashion world which is where most of them hail from I suspect. As a guy who likes his chicks with some curves, the singular lack of even one set of hefty bosoms among scores of women is unsettling. Oh wait, Queen Kong herself does have a rack -- but she's not my type.

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