Going slightly out of order, we present to you two films about people who venture into the jungle to find a missing person -- but end up bumping into quite a (all together now) savage girl along the way.
Grade: D
Where shall we seek the headquarters of the titular Queen of the Amazons? Certainly not Brazil, or else she'd be queen of the Amazon singular, right?
And, it seems, not Detroit either. (No word on whether the Hartz Mountains are still in contention.)
No, it seems that when you're on an expedition that will ultimately lead you to the Queen, your first stop is...
...India? OK, that makes sense in a chaturaṅga kind of way, I suppose.
In any event, it's here that our protagonist, Jean Preston (Patricia Morison), begins the search for her missing fiancé, Greg. She's accompanied by Greg's father Colonel Jones (John Miljan), an absent-minded entomologist (Wilson Benge), and a petulant rando who practically has FRIENDZONED tattooed on his forehead ("Keith Richards (I)", as IMDb calls him).
Cue about five minutes' worth of meaningful glances, shady characters, and menacing silhouettes.
Meanwhile the situation in Akbar is tense, and getting tenser. As voiceover narration from Miljan solemnly intones, "There's an undercurrent of hatred for their present ruler, in spite of the fact that they've done everything to quiet them...there's a revolution in the offing."
Heck, they're not even appeased by the spectacle of an elephant tug-of-war -- "like baseball or football in our country", claims the narration, made retroactively prescient by PED scandals of recent decades (don't tell us those mahouts didn't slip a little extra something to Jumbo before the big match).
Ultimately a hot tip from an Indian woman and her husband reveals the truth: Greg has departed for Africa. Now, some sources claim the real-life Amazons were from modern-day Libya, so that makes sense, right? We're on our way to the Queen!
And since the natives are getting, uh, restlesser, it's a good time to get out of Akbar. (Which apparently isn't in India but, eh, whatever.)
If you're expecting camels, kufiyas, and caravanserais, though...
It's never really clear where Queen of the Amazons would have us think we are, beyond "Africa" -- which is what they keep calling their destination, as though one needs no more precision than to name the second-largest continent in the world. The village where they arrive is called Kybo, but contrary to IMDb's "goofs" page, we don't think the filmmakers had an obscure Australian outpost in mind: it's probably just a made-up name, meant to stand in for some place in East Africa.
And the natives are "upset" here too!
Anyway, there's a guy who "hates women" (Robert Lowery), and a "white goddess" dreaded by the natives (Amira Moustafa), and an ivory-smuggling plot and a mysterious saboteur and a bit of cleverness involving feet and footwear --
-- and there's sexism addressed via markmanship (markswomanship?), and racism, and target practice, and monkeys --
-- and obvious stock footage, and silly fight scenes, and Queen of the Amazons is a silly movie. The end.
(aka King of Kong Island)
Grade: D-
...though on the other hand, things can get a lot sillier. And, speaking of East Africa:
Kong Island opens with a clever gambit, as a holdup job turns deadly when one of the three robbers decides it'd be easier to just shoot everyone -- including his co-conspirators. As the only robber who objected to the massacre (before getting gunned down himself) lies in the sun, gravely wounded, the opening credits roll...
...and we abruptly cut to a four-minute scene of a microchip being implanted into a gorilla.
For this we get no explanation before cutting away again to a humid-looking villa in Nairobi, where we discover that the "good" robber Burt (Brad Harris) has indeed survived what Theodore (Aldo Cicconi) calls "that little accident of yours".
Turns out he's a gun-for-hire who just can't seem to stay away from Africa -- once again, invoking the whole continent! -- because "There's no work for us mercenaries right now." At least we know we're in Kenya, and soon enough we hear about "your mad doctor friend" Albert (Marc Lawrence), who Burt is aiming to find.
So some major plot threads seem to be coming together: Burt's revenge, plus Theodore's jealousy about the relationship Burt once had with his wife Ursula (Adriana Alben), and whatever this business is with the gorillas.
Like Queen of the Amazons, we get early gunplay from a female lead -- in this case Theodore's daughter Diana (Ursula Davis). She's all growed up now and would clearly like to boink the buff Burt, though her brother Robert (Mark Farran) isn't so thrilled about the idea.
And once again like Queen of the Amazons, our manly mercenary ends up getting drafted into leading an expedition. In fact Kong Island feels in many ways like a throwback to the "darkest Africa" movies of the 1930s and '40s. Sure, there are nightclub scenes with 1960s go-go/lounge music, and some comically awkward dancing from Harris --
-- who also gets off a good one-liner that'd never have made it past the Hays Code censors:
Ursula: "There's a guy who's been eyeing you. He's been watching you for a long time."
Burt: "Thanks, Ursula. Too bad -- he's not my type."
Once the gang goes on their expedition, though, we're soon thrust straight into the same sort of complicated-rescue plot we saw in Queen of the Amazons. At least the makers of Kong Island seem to have filmed some of their own nature shots, since it's impossible to imagine anyone paying for stock footage as ridiculously jittery and bumpy as this.
Soon comes a parade of corny tropes from a long-past era: the skittish natives afraid of a "taboo" area of the jungle; the beast on the loose -- which, given that surgery sequence, gets you no points for guessing what it is.
And then there's this:
Yes, once again we have that character beloved of schlockmeisters past: the wild white woman (Esmeralda Barros) who can communicate with jungle animals, yet has a mysterious aptitude for tasteful makeup and dental hygiene. She also, inevitably, has a certain affinity for our protagonist.
It's about at this point that we realized Kong Island was completely bananas -- an incoherently meandering, weirdly anachronistic product of filmmakers who seem to take trash films like Jungle Man, The White Gorilla, and The Savage Girl as their point of departure. It's as if you took a couple of Italian kids whose exclusive cinematic diet was watching B-movies set in sub-Saharan Africa on UHF stations, and then gave them carte blanche to script and direct a film.
The problem is that Kong Island's ambitions -- and its stylistic decisions -- get in the way of what little fun is to be had. There are too many subplots and peripeteias, too many minor characters not worth caring about, and the movie has a nasty, gritty edge (including an implied marital rape scene) that keeps it from earning that term beloved of lazy reviewers, the "enjoyable romp".
Add to that the clumsy, stupid denouement, and the verdict's in: Kong Island may be bananas, but by the end it's an overripe Cavendish -- and who wants that?
Well, some people do, apparently.
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