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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Salesrank: 68909
Released: December 6, 2005 |
| Our Price: $2.03 |
| Used Price: $1.99 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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| Features:
Color DVD Full Screen Subtitled NTSC | |
Editorial Review:
Lost in the African jungles for over a year, Dr. Charles Decker (Michael Gough, Horror Hospital) has returned to England with Konga, a baby chimpanzee. Disappearing into his lab, the mad botanist begins work on what he believes will be his greatest achievement. Having witnessed a Baganda witchdoctor’s use of a rare carnivorous plant to produce accelerated animal growth, Decker injects Konga with the same serum. Using the gorilla-sized chimp to brutally murder his enemies, Decker himself soon becomes victim to Konga's uncontrollable rage. Grabbing the scientist, the berserk chimp – who's grown to monstrous size – breaks out of the lab and rampages through London, a city whose salvation rests with the military, who's been ordered to destroy Konga at all costs.
Description of Konga:
Horror producer Herman Cohen, the genius behind Trog, Berserk, and the immortal I Was a Teenage Werewolf, here brings the world giant-ape action with a British twist. Konga is, of course, a King Kong rip-off, but the filmmakers are so refreshingly brazen about it that it's hard to mind. Botanist Dr. Charles Decker returns from Africa with some brand-new plants and an adorable chimpanzee buddy named Konga. Decker has some revolutionary ideas about "finding the first link in modern evolution between plant and animal life," but don't think about them too much, they'll just give you a headache. The upshot is that Decker develops a serum that makes Konga grow really big. (Primatology fans will be interested to note that Decker's serum also mysteriously turns Konga from a chimpanzee into a gorilla. The wonders of science are myriad.) Alas, like so many of his horror-movie-scientist brethren, Decker is a cold-hearted, ruthless creep who soon has the superstrong Konga doing his evil bidding. In addition to its guy-in-a-gorilla-suit pleasures, Konga offers poorly scaled dolls of the lead characters, fetching giant Venus flytrap puppets, and a genuinely good performance by Michael Gough as the ever more evil Dr. Decker. --Ali Davis
Konga Reviews:
Two Movies In One. 
2009-11-06 - Leave it to B movie mogul Herman Cohen (I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF) to give us two movies for the price of one low budget effort and that's what KONGA is. The first hour of the film is remarkably well done with an intelligent script (under the circumstances) and a creative use of color for the background sets. The unique carnivorous plants are cleverly done and the movie is professionally shot by celebrated cameraman Desmond Dickinson (HORROR HOTEL/CITY OF THE DEAD). Add to that an increasingly demented performance by Michael Gough as the mad doctor and a study in feminine frustration from Margo Johns as his assistant and you had the makings of a true classic. However once the "gorilla" enters the picture it, as the Brits would say, "goes straight into the crapper".
I don't have any qualms about them using a guy in a gorilla suit but this is the worst gorilla suit I have ever seen. It was borrowed from celebrated "apeman" George Barrows who should have been hired because whoever they got had no idea how to act like a monkey. Once KONGA was introduced , it's as if the filmmakers knew the jig was up and they just threw in the towel. The special effects become increasingly substandard and there isn't even a pretense of disguising how bad they are. The last fifteen minutes of the film left the audience in hysterics according to people who saw it in 1961 and it's easy to see why. That's what makes KONGA such a guilty pleasure. Adding to the fun is the fact that the cast plays it with an incredibly straight face with no hint of camp. The final shot of the poor little chimp lying dead in the street has to be seen to be believed.
The remarkable thing about this DVD (as mentioned in an earlier review) is how good it looks. I had never seen KONGA in color before much less in widescreen. The color is very important as the first half of the film (as mentioned earlier) seems to have a psychological basis for its color scheme. The widescreen actually makes it looks more expensive than it is until it falls apart at the end. There's no way that they couldn't know how bad it looked and I think they deliberately made it that way. Either way KONGA is one of those movies that is so bad that it's good and they just don't make em like that anymore. Although this single DVD is out of print, there are plenty to go around and if you love old style bad movies than you can't afford to pass this one up especially at these prices.
Rubbish 
2009-04-03 - You can always tell a bomb by the picture of a scantily dressed blonde on the advertising. In KONGA, Claire Gordon is the blonde whose only function in both advertising and the film is to be the simpering yet luscious ditz that director Herman Cohen portrays her. The plot is a weird blending of numerous Big Monster films. There is KING KONG whose only serious connection to this stinker is the vaguely reminiscent name. There is GODZILLA who at least had the good sense to fight back against the soldiers ordered to bring him down. And there is MIGHTY JOE YOUNG who showed some basic need to connect with his human caretakers. KONGA, by contrast, is just plain silly. Michael Gough is the real star who steals scene after scene with his smooth hamminess. Gough is Doctor Decker, a botany professor who has lived in Uganda for a year after a plane crash during which time he learns from a shaman the secret of uncontrolled cellular growth. Decker returns to London with a cute chimp who becomes the unwilling subject of that growth. When Decker injects him with that secret substance, he immediately and against scientific law not only assumes huge proportions but also changes species from a chimpanzee to a gorilla. What follows is an illogical sequence of acts from a man who prides himself on his acumen. Gough has great fun in all this as he portrays Decker as the Mad Scientist who is as least as much interested in the charms of Miss Gordon as he is the DNA of Konga. Decker's college class is composed exclusively of teenagers who at the drop of a hat whip out their radios and rock and roll boogaloo just like Steve McQueen and his friends from THE BLOB. Special effects range from the grotesque to the penurious. As Konga placed Decker is his hairy paw it was difficult to resist laughing as Decker kept twisting and yelling for Konga to release him. Konga is played by movie stuntman George Barrows who wore the same gorilla suit plus a diving helmet in the earlier ROBOT MONSTER but with greater believability there. At least as Ro-Man in ROBOT MONSTER Barrows tried to inject some needed vitality by swinging his arms incessantly. As Konga, Barrows does no more than lumber aimlessly as if trying to decide what to do with Decker in tow. The ending with a platoon of British soldiers is a carbon copy of innumerable movies with the army versus the Big Monster. What emerges by the last reel is a vague yet distastful feeling that we had seen this movie before in myriad manifestations--as indeed we had.
fun "King Kong" rip-off!
2008-06-20 - The UK's answer to "King Kong", KONGA! (1961) stars Michael Gough as Dr. Charles Decker, an eccentric professor who injects a baby chimp with powerful growth hormones and later uses it as a trained assassin to kill his enemies.
Margo Johns enlivens the proceedings and adds glamour, playing Decker's frustrated assistant/housekeeper Margaret. Michael Gough, a serial scene-stealer, lives up to his reputation here. On the down-side, blonde starlet Claire Gordon is a very bland ingenue; the audience doesn't really care about her character by the time she gets her arm caught in a Venus Flytrap.
The special effects (filmed in the 35mm "Specta-Mation" process) are well done for the most part, with lots of cool miniature work. While I don't believe the filmmakers intentionally set out to create a "King Kong" rip-off (excluding the obvious title homage), the similarities are far from subtle. Konga's final stand-off at the site of Big Ben will evoke memories of King Kong's classic Empire State Building demise.
Co-starring Jess Conrad, George Pastell, and Austin Trevor. MGM's DVD has a clean print, with nice colour (though it sadly isn't enhanced for 16:9 displays). Worth getting for killer ape fans or those fond of solid British horror movies.
NOT KING KONG
2008-01-21 - ENGLAND'S ANSWER TO THE GREAT APES MOVIES. FINE FOR WHAT IT IS. BUT HOW DOES A CHIMP BECOME A GORILLA?
King Kong meets Tarantula in a terrible B Movie rip off of Kong 
2007-05-27 - One of the worst movies I've ever seen, It's been said "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is the worst movie ever made, that is not a bad movie, for 50s audience yes it was, but it had a cult following. Konga has not and probably won't, it's just awful, it's not even an entertaining B movie, it was a terrible B Movie.
