Tag: Infra-Man

The Mighty Peking Man (1977)

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977) ***

The Shaw Brothers (Runme 1901-85 and Run Run 1907-2014) have rarely ever let me down and they provided some of the greatest entertainments of all-time, like THE ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN, FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH, INFRA-MAN, THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, and CLAN OF THE WHITE LOTUS.

The Shaw Brothers did not (and still do not, in death) cheat us.

For example, in THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, their 1977 spin on King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, and Tarzan (not to mention Godzilla) that’s not quite peak but still good Shaw Brothers, we don’t have to wait very long whatsoever to see the title character. No, life is short, time is precious, so director Ho Meng-hua gives us our first monster encounter in the first minute of screen time. Okay, to be exact, it’s 1:45 into the movie, but that still beats most every other entry in this distinguished genre.

That establishes a tone for a very generous entertainment package. Find a copy and buy it for somebody, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN not only provides a sympathetic monster in the grand tradition, but also (in no particular order) a plucky explorer hero (Danny Lee) who’s been betrayed by his lover with his playboy brother so he’s drowning his sorrows in booze when he’s recruited for a jungle mission, a scantily-clad leading lady (Evelyne Kraft, a regular Swedish Fay Wray) who’s grown up with the animals in the jungle after her parents died in a plane crash (she’s been raised by the Mighty Peking Man, in fact), an earthquake, elephants, tigers and leopards (oh my!), a fight between a leopard and a snake, quicksand, vine swinging, flashbacks to key moments in both the hero’s and the leading lady’s life, callous and shady businessmen, heartless authority figures, mucho destruction of miniatures galore, and a grand finale that boggles the mind even after everything that came before.

My favorite scene, however, begins around the 33-minute mark.

It involves the Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude, a term made famous by the late Roger Ebert. Here’s the definition from Ebert: “Scene in which soft focus and slow motion are used while a would-be hit song is performed on the sound track and the lovers run through a pastoral setting. Common from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s; replaced in 1980s with the Semi-Obligatory Music Video.”

The Simon and Garfunkel songs in THE GRADUATE epitomize the Semi-OLI.

The one in THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN rates below Louis Armstrong singing “We Have All the Time in the World” over George Lazenby and Diane Rigg in ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE and the foreboding use of Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in Clint Eastwood’s PLAY MISTY FOR ME. Ebert himself said Eastwood filmed the first Semi-OLI that works.

In THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, our hero and leading lady embrace and lock lips for the first time (watch her eyes after this first kiss) and they unleash the awesomely banal love song “Could It Be I’m in Love, Maybe.”

This is one helluva old-fashioned love song and one helluva Semi-OLI.

I mean, I believe it’s the only Semi-OLI in the history of motion pictures to incorporate a leopard.

Not only that, but the leading lady seems more interested in the leopard than our poor, poor hero. You really sympathize for this guy even more after this scene.

Let’s get back to those lyrics for a second here.

“The love you gave me then showed me a thing or two / I guess I saw it in your eyes / And the look of love upon your face is too hard to disguise / Maybe just a smile will say [cannot make out, even after watching this scene 500 times] / Could it be I’m in love (Maybe? Baby?)” (To hell with it, I already chose “Maybe.” Why does life have to be so difficult?)

“I can’t begin to say what makes me feel like this / I never knew what love could do / But if this is love, it’s here to stay / [Don’t want to make this part out] / So all I have to hear is I’ll give it all to you.”

There’s more lyrics, but we all catch the drift and there’s not any need to drown in banality.

It all totals about 3:30 of pure junk food cinema bliss.

I definitely love it because it’s so utterly ridiculous.

Then again, utterly ridiculous describes THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN.

I should end this review with a consideration of the ending of THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN. Just imagine the ending of KING KONG times 10 times 10.

Message from Space (1978)

MESSAGE FROM SPACE

MESSAGE FROM SPACE (1978) *

It took two tries to make it all the way through Kinji Fukasaku’s MESSAGE FROM SPACE, one of the first of many STAR WARS rip-offs that only make you appreciate more what George Lucas and gang did in their movies.

How does MESSAGE FROM SPACE rip off STAR WARS? Let us count the ways. A soap, er, space opera, characters named Meia and Hans, a robot, interplanetary strife and destruction, aerial dogfights in space, laser beams, and a musical score by Kenichiro Morioka that should have been enough for grounds for a lawsuit from 20th Century Fox, John Williams, and the London Symphony Orchestra.

I struggled through MESSAGE FROM SPACE and it was a real cinematic endurance contest to get through its 105 minutes. I only made it through about 30 minutes the first try.

At one point in time, I thought about cutting MESSAGE FROM SPACE a little slack for its often lousy special effects, until I read that MESSAGE FROM SPACE cost $5-6 million. Okay, that’s about half of what 20th Century Fox spent on STAR WARS the previous year, but the budget for MESSAGE FROM SPACE apparently established a record (long since broken, of course) for largest budget for a Japanese movie. There went the slack, she be gone.

Vic Morrow (1929-82) sadly found himself at that stage in his career when he appeared in awful movies like HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, GREAT WHITE, and MESSAGE FROM SPACE. Work is work is work, right? In MESSAGE FROM SPACE, Morrow plays a character named General Garuda and receives top billing in the cast above Sonny Chiba. Garuda Indonesia is the airline of Indonesia. Morrow seems to be drinking in every scene and if you had to act with an imitation R2-D2 named Beba, you’d be a full-blown alcoholic too.

This is one of those films not exactly helped out by a bad dubbing job.

I am normally one equipped with more empathy and enthusiasm than the average cinematic pleasure seeker for movies like MESSAGE FROM SPACE. I mean, for crying out loud, I have given four stars to INFRA-MAN, DRUNKEN MASTER, and PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, three incredibly ridiculous movies that immediately came to mind.

I just found scant pleasure to be experienced from MESSAGE FROM SPACE.

Hard to believe, right, when MESSAGE FROM SPACE features eight Liabe seeds. They resemble walnuts, glowing, magical walnuts that are the unifying plot device; bet Nuts.com would do killer business with a MESSAGE FROM SPACE remake. Rather than The Force, MESSAGE FROM SPACE only manages doze nuts. Bad joke, I know right, but the bad movie made me do it. I promise, I promise, I would never write anything like that otherwise.