ChanFamous
I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
Frances Chung
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
Cissy Évelyne
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
BA_Harrison
An unintentionally hilarious King Kong rip-off courtesy of Shaw Brothers studios, The Mighty Peking Man stars Danny Lee as adventurer Johnny Fang, who leads an unscrupulous show-biz promoter and his men into the jungles of India in search of the giant ape-man that is rumoured to reside there.When faced with the horrors of the wild—savage beasts and quicksand—all but Johnny flee for the safety of civilisation, after which our hero is attacked by The Mighty Peking Man (played by a man in a moth-eaten monkey suit), only to be rescued by sexy wild woman Samantha (stunning Swedish blonde bombshell Evelyne Kraft, in a barely there jungle bikini), who has a special rapport with the oversized simian, having been raised by the beast since the plane crash that claimed her parents' lives.Romancing Samantha, Johnny convinces the beautiful jungle babe to come with him to Hong Kong, taking the ape-man along for the ride. When the villainous showman who hired Johnny claps his eyes on The Mighty Peking Man, he wastes no time in exploiting the creature, leading to the inevitable climax in which the monster escapes to trash the city.Boasting laughable special effects (shonky back projection and unconvincing Tonka toy models), terrible dialogue, and dismal acting, The Mighty Peking Man is hugely enjoyable trash from start to finish, the film made all the more watchable by the presence of the almost naked Kraft, who might not be much of an actress, but who cares?7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for the part where a man has his leg torn off by a jungle cat, Kraft's gratuitous shimmying up a tree and a lamp-post (the camera giving us a long good look at her ass), and for the surprisingly downbeat ending, in which Danny is left cradling Samantha's lifeless body.
Scott LeBrun
Wacky, if obvious, Hong Kong made update of the classic King Kong story. The title character is an enormous ape, discovered by an expedition into the Himalayas. Naturally, Mighty Peking Man is soon brought back to civilization where he goes on the expected rampage. Evelyne Kraft plays Samantha, an incredibly sexy blonde jungle woman who's fond of the big guy.While the tone is sometimes more serious than expected, this is still quite the agreeable diversion, with enough things in it to make its audience laugh. It even gets reasonably energetic and exciting, with MPM doing an amount of damage to HK that easily rivals anything Godzilla ever did to Tokyo. A production of those reliable folk at Shaw Brothers, this is very nicely shot in widescreen, and its special effects are quite amusing and entertaining overall (with much use of miniatures). The music, credited to Yung-Yu Chen and "DeWolfe", is suitably rousing.The acting is of the "not so hot, but admirably sincere" variety. Kraft is extremely appealing, both as a performer and a scenery attraction. Danny Lee is likewise ingratiating as Johnnie Fang, the adventurer hired to lead the expedition. We have an appropriately disgusting human villain, as well as an enjoyable title antagonist. Sometimes MPM has some pretty priceless expressions on his face.Director Meng Hua Ho gets right down to business, with MPM terrorizing village residents in an uproarious opening action set piece, and delivers brainless thrills for a well paced 91 minutes.Seven out of 10.
ferbs54
Well, I suppose I didn't do adequate homework before venturing into Meng Hua Ho's 1977 camp classic "The Mighty Peking Man." For some reason, I had thought the titular protagonist was a man-sized survivor of the Paleolithic Age; a caveman type; a troglodyte displaced in time. But as most psychotronic-film fans have long since discovered, this is hardly the case at all, and the film in question turns out to be nothing more than a cheesy Hong Kong rip-off of 1933's "King Kong"...or, perhaps, more specifically, a cash-in "homage" to the Dino De Laurentiis travesty of the preceding year. A production of the Shaw Brothers, whose "Infra-Man" of 1975 had proved to be so memorably jaw dropping, the film is a goofy, fast-moving and wholly enjoyable experience, with better production values than you might be expecting, and lovably ersatz special FX.The picture opens with a tremendous initial 20 minutes, which not only shows us the awakening of the P.M. amidst a Himalayan earthquake around 90 seconds in (I would've loved this as a kid; back then, I always grew impatient with films that withheld a glimpse of the monster for too long), but also the subsequent destruction of the nearby native village, the P.M. running amok, the outfitting of an H.K. expedition to track down the beast, the hiring of lovelorn hunter Johnnie Fang (played by "Infra-Man" star Danny Lee), an elephant stampede, a quicksand scene, a tiger attack and a deadly cliff ascent. Whew! The film pauses for breath when Johnnie is abandoned in the wild by his fellow adventurers, only to fall into the grips of the P.M. himself, in all his 100-foot-tall, hirsute glory. Johnnie also meets the big hairy galoot's only friend: Samantha, a beautiful blonde Tarzan type who had been living in the jungle since surviving an otherwise fatal plane crash with her parents many years before. Samantha is played here by Evelyne Kraft, a Swiss actress who I had previously encountered in the 1972 giallo "The French Sex Murders"; an actress so remarkably beautiful that she easily held her own in that film alongside such stunning Eurobabes as Barbara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri and Anita Ekberg. Despite living in paradise with Samantha, Johnnie stupidly forsakes his jungle idyll in favor of bringing the girl and the P.M. (who Samantha, for some reason, calls "Utam") back to civilization; predictably, his money-making scheme goes horribly wrong, as Utam eventually goes wild with an unusual case of P.M.S. (Peking Man Syndrome) and lays half of Hong Kong to waste, before a doubly tragic conclusion....In a film with so many memorably campy moments, two stand out especially for this viewer. In the first, Johnnie and Samantha romp through the jungle in a slow-mo montage, while a supermellow pop song that is most likely entitled "Could It Be I'm In Love, Maybe" is heard in accompaniment. This kind of love scene can work marvelously if done right (for example, witness the use of Roberta Flack's "The Last Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in Clint Eastwood's "Play Misty For Me" montage), but here, the result is pure hilarity. And my other favorite camp moment? During Utam's H.K. rampage, one citizen declares, "There's a giant gorilla!" To which his friend replies, "My wife is a gorilla, too!" (Granted, something may have been lost in translation here; the dubbing on this fine-looking Miramax DVD IS fairly horrendous.) And in a film filled with so many half-baked performances, perhaps the most convincing bit of thesping turned in is by Samantha's pet leopard, who really does look to be almost crying as his mistress leaves their jungle home. The film, to be fair, does seem to bust a gut to guarantee a good time for the viewer, and manages to also incorporate a high-seas typhoon, an eye-popping finale (I love it when Utam, standing atop H.K.'s highest building, grabs an attacking helicopter and sends it ablaze down into the streets) and even some surprising gross-out sequences (a safari member has his leg torn off by a tiger; a yucky close-up of Samantha's snakebite wound on her otherwise yummy thigh). Genially zany throughout, its twofold bummer of an ending does come as a real surprise, and one that surely serves Johnnie right. Viewers who are expecting a "happily ever after" windup here, a la 1949's "Mighty Joe Young," may be in for an unpleasant surprise at how things unreel. Perhaps, to prepare themselves and cushion the blows, they might use "The Mighty Peking Man" as a sort of drinking game, imbibing a snort every time Samantha cries out "Utam!" Even Ann Darrow didn't have to go through the punishment that this jungle nymph does!
ligeynuts
This movie is hilarious and keeps dishing up the laughs where you least expect them.I'm watching the subtitled version and the best line delivered so far was after a native chap had his leg nipped off by a stuffed Tiger and some bloke then yells, "Quick! Get the first aid kit!" The sets are nasty as are the fake animals and "specal effects" but this is a genuine so bad it's funny film. Look out for the Garth Marenghiesque slow motion frolicking scene to pad out the time of the film.A very entertaining film that confirms my theory that everyone in China is called Wang. The giant ape of the film has been named thusly.My only concern is the treatment of the poor animals involved.
