BY HANK REINEKE
The best moments of John Lemont’s giant-ape movie Konga (1961) come courtesy via the manic
performance of the great Michael Gough. As the maddest of all crazed botanists, Gough’s deranged Charles Decker
is exactly what we B-movie enthusiasts want in our mad scientist – he’s nothing
if not completely batty and bonkers. The
actor was presumably a favorite of producer Herman Cohen, the Yank film executive
utilizing Gough’s services in such British thrillers as Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), Konga, and The Black Zoo
(1963). The aforementioned trio of
shockers are not, for all of their intermittent charms, representative of
Cohen’s best (read “schlockiestâ€) work. But they’re OK.
In association with A.I.P. in the U.S., Cohen had already
given us a number of iconic Silver-Age horror and sci-fi B-movie classics with I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (both
1957). While Konga is not among Cohen’s better efforts, the film certainly never
falls short of being dependably wacky and memorable in its unspooling. If you are the forgiving type who enjoys this
sort of entertainment, there’s still a lot of fun to be had. That is as long as you’re willing to
compromise your personal integrities and to shut down both your critical and
mental faculties for ninety-minutes or so.
In Konga, Michael
Gough plays Charles Decker, a preeminent British botanist and lecturer at
London’s prestigious Essex College. While on expedition in Africa, Decker’s biplane goes missing somewhere over
Uganda, the aerial crash killing the pilot upon impact. Decker somehow has managed to bail out of the
plane in the seconds preceding the crash. He even – quite improbably - has the wits about him to parachute to safety
while cradling a cumbersome 16mm film camera. The scientist is found broken and dazed in the jungle brush by a
chimpanzee named Konga. The simian kindly leads him to the
guardianship and protection of the Baganda’s, described here as a primitive,
mystical tribe distantly related to the Bantu. While this preamble sounds very much like an exciting jump start to the
film, we’re – disappointingly - not privy to witnessing any of it as it unfolds. The
preceding action is all explained to us second-hand during a cost-saving recount
delivered during one of Decker’s classroom sessions.
Though the scientific community presumed Decker had perished
in the Ugandan crash, the scientist actually used his time in the jungle studiously. Over the course of a year, he carefully absorbed
the methodologies of the tribal witchdoctor who mastered the mysteries of both serum-induced
hypnotism and of the insectivorous plant life that grew abundantly in the
region. When Decker finally returns with
great fanfare to London, he’s consumed by the belief that there’s an
as-of-yet-unexplored evolutionary link between plant and human life. The more sober Dean of Essex College
disagrees and demands that Decker stop embarrassing the institution with such witchdoctor-inspired
nonsense.
With a grudge, Decker is about to prove his skeptics
wrong. He converts his backyard
greenhouse into a monstrous habitat for flesh-eating plants. (There’s actually more of Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) than King Kong on display here in Konga). The botanist is assisted by his amorous if sexually frustrated assistant
Margaret (Margo Johns). She is tasked to
see that the environment of the glass-enclosed building is kept at exactly
ninety-degrees with the appropriate amount of humidity and moisture maintained. This is to best replicate the steamy Ugandan climate
so that his carnivorous plants can bloom healthfully.
Though Margaret has been a faithful “secretary, lab
assistant, and housekeeper†to Dr. Decker – even having kept up his basement
laboratory in the year-long absence when he was presumed dead – he seems little
interested in having her as a paramour or wife. “There’s very little room for sentiment in the life of a scientist,†he
tells her with a cold sniff. While we have
already been clued that Decker is a driven, uncompromising and humorless loner,
he nonetheless demonstrates little reserve in his creepy pursuit of Sandra (Claire
Gordon), one of his comely teenage students at Essex. This romance goes unrequited as well. Then again, it really had no chance to
blossom… especially following Decker’s clumsy attempt to sexually assault the
girl amidst his monstrous garden of flesh-eating plants. It would be fair to presume Decker’s teaching
career would surely not have survived the scrutiny and retribution of the
present #metoo movement.
But this is now and that was then. While this is a fun popcorn-munching movie
and a personal guilty pleasure to many, few would argue it’s a work of
cinematic art. Even among devotees of
this already odd “Giant Ape†genre, Konga
is often the subject of winking, good-natured ridicule. Attending a matinee double-bill of Konga and Master of the World upon its release in 1962, New York Times critic Eugene Archer noted the assembled audience of
ten-year-olds, “greeted Konga with
misplaced guffaws,†while according the Vincent Price film “a smattering of
applause.â€