‘Time flies when you’re having fun, don’t it?’
After her leading man runs away into the jungle, a film director kidnaps a young bloke from London to be her new star. When filming in a remote island paradise, the man becomes the target of the local inhabitants, who think he would be the perfect human sacrifice to their mysterious god…
Writer-Director Frank Agrama, the man behind dire gorefest ‘Dawn of the Mummy’ (1981)) created this supposedly satirical ‘feminist’ version of ‘King Kong’ in response to Italian uber-producer Dino Di Laurentiis’ big budget American remake. Headlining Agrama’s vision are ‘Confessions’ movie series sophisticate Robin Askwith as ‘Ray Fay’ (geddit?) and redhead Rula Lenska, two years before she found stardom in TV’s ‘Rock Follies’.
Fortunately, Di Laurentiis didn’t see the joke (he wasn’t the only one!) and brought a successful court case to ensure that the ‘Queen’ never made it to your local flea pit, and went unseen for many years. This was much appreciated by both Askwith and Lenska, at least according to his memoirs. Apparently, neither of the film’s stars could believe how bad it had turned out.
And bad it is. Very bad. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting a sharp, witty satire on gender politics but this is so infantile it makes ‘Carry On Up The Khyber’ (1965) look like it was scripted by Oscar Wilde. It’s the kind of take on feminism common to blokes in the 1970s who’d grown up watching the Benny Hill Show and thought women’s liberation was a good excuse to see birds taking off their bras. Fwoooarrr!
We also get primary school SFX (all papier-mâché and cardboard), dumb spoofs of ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘Jaws’ (featuring ‘Lady Jaws’) and a couple of the lamest song and dance numbers in history. It’s a seriously painful experience.
‘God in heaven will these terrors never leave?’ one of the hapless adventurers asks. Only after 76 minutes, dear. Then you can go and have a lie down and just pretend that the whole thing just never happened.
Mark David Welsh 