11/19/10 - King Kung Fu

King Kung Fu (1976, 95 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0228486/

Completely breaking the theme of foreign movies and most likely to halt my streak of quality movies I take a break to do a double feature with some friends. First up is King Kung Fu which will be followed by Tuff Turf. Neither look amazing but let's see if they're at least enjoyable.

The film stars John Ballee in a gorilla outfit (given the name Gorilla in the credits) as the titular King Kung Fu. Not surprisingly this is a gorilla that knows kung fu. He's touring the nation and on a stop in Kansas some local reporters accidentally let him loose and then try and turn the press coverage into a career opportunity. This blundering duo consists of Bo Burgess (Billy Schwartz) and Herman (Tim McGill) while Rae Jean Fey (Maxine Gray) also helps somewhat reluctantly.

Sometimes a movie comes along that's absolutely hilarious simply due to the horrendous production value. King Kung Fu approaches this level but not quite. Instead, it succeeds just enough to just be a failure of a movie. First, the acting is pathetic all around. Okay, I just saw Starship Troopers and the acting there was pretty bad but there was so much going for it that the movie still got a solid score. King Kung Fu has none of that "other stuff" going for it. The bumbling lead duo have no screen presence and the main female is pointless. Even Gorilla has a terrible costume and then there's some local police guy that's also terrible that I couldn't even find in the credits so he at least doesn't get called out by name. All in all there's so much bad filling this movie that it would take too long to really write about it all.

King Kung Fu does have some quality moments where the jokes actually work. These aren't that common but there's quite a few that work in all honesty. I think the main reason for this is that the movie jams as many jokes as it can into the 95 minute runtime and so there's bound to be a few here and there that work. The ones that never work are the ones when Gorilla actually speaks. Most often this is a pun and it usually just falls flat. Anyway, because of the nature of this film it's one that demands to be watched with a group of people since watching this not in a group would be terrifyingly boring. One contributing factor to this is that long runtime. With essentially no plot to be had, having a movie last over 90 minutes is begging for long periods of boredom and King Kung Fu doesn't fail to disappoint there. Even in a group, the boredom was setting in long before the credits were rolling.

One thing that did surprise me about the movie is how many name things it had. I mean a Pizza Hut featured prominently in the movie, there were posters up for King Kong and Dial M for Murder, a Holiday Inn replaced the Empire State Building, and one of the main characters names was almost Fay Wray. I don't know exactly how such a low quality movie was able to get away with this but it was just odd. In a dichotomy it somewhat grounded the movie in an odd reality since these are actual things that exist but then it contradicted it with this absurd gorilla that knows kung fu.

One final bit of "praise" I'll give King Kung Fu is in the stop motion work when King Kung Fu is on the Holiday Inn. There's a helicopter attack and King Kung Fu is jumping all around. This part of the movie is actually good from a technical perspective (obviously at the end of the movie I don't care about anything any more and just want it to end) which is again an odd contrast to the pathetic nature of everything that came before it.

Overall, I gave this film a 2/10. Nothing really works here except the occasional humor which is really just a byproduct of there being so many attempted jokes. The acting can barely even qualify as such and there's hardly any plot. It's funny every now and then but that's it. And honestly it's just too long to even be recommended to watch in a group setting.