Mighty Peking Man
What makesMighty Peking Mansuch a trashy delight? It's not just the absurdly obvious special effects and atrocious dubbing--those are the easy laughs--it's the over-the-top romantic and dramatic moments that really push this movie into camp heaven. When a gigantic ape-man destroys a village in a remote jungle, a fiendish promoter decides to capture this prehistoric creature and put him on display. He hires Johnny (Danny Lee, who resembles current Canto-pop superstar Andy Lau), a heartbroken adventurer, to hunt Peking Man down. Hardly five minutes go by without some life-threatening danger; in just the first half-hour there's an earthquake, a tiger attack, and a fatal mountain-climbing accident, and that's in addition to the rampaging man-ape and bottle-blond jungle queen Samantha (the lovely Evelyne Kraft), who occasionally falls out of her already skimpy jungle attire. It seems that Samantha survived a plane crash that killed her parents and was kept alive by Peking Man--though where she finds her mascara is never explained. After falling in love with Johnny, she helps him bring Peking Man back to civilization. By the time Peking Man is unleashing devastation on downtown Hong Kong, the movie has reached a giddy delirium that defies all logic. Part soap opera, part monster madness,Mighty Peking Manis completely entertaining.--Bret Fetzer