The King of Kong Island (1968)

In the late 1960s there was something in the air, namely loin cloth clad women, for this was a period that saw an influx of female Tarzan movies. Harry Alan Towers is seemingly entitled to some of the credit for initiating this trend with 1968’s Eve aka The Face of Eve, but Italy soon answered the call with Tarzana- the Wild Woman, Samoa- Queen of the Jungle and Gungala- Virgin of the Jungle. 

Never one to miss a trend, or capitalise on it, unstoppable exploitation film producer Dick Randall jumped on the female Tarzan bandwagon with a film that was initially known as Eva, la Venere selvaggia (Eva, the Savage Venus), but over time has become more commonly known as The King of Kong Island.

Chances are that if a film opens with the legend ‘Dick Randall presents’ you can be assured of a B-Movie good time. In a career lasting from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, Dick Randall left a legacy of wild, wild movies. Their main aim may always have been to empty a punter’s wallet, but the showman in Randall dictated that the films rarely left people feeling like they hadn’t got their monies worth. True to form, King of Kong Island tries to pack in a bit of everything, as well as being a female Tarzan movie, it is also a two-fisted adventure yarn, a mad scientist movie, a national geographic type travelogue ...and the film partly justifies its most famous title by also throwing in some rampaging gorillas.



Randall was one of many Americans who beat a path to Rome in the late 1960s. Now, when I first ventured onto the internet in the late 1990s, Dick Randall was high on the list of people I wanted to know more about. One of the first people I reached out to about him was Mel Welles, who is probably best remembered for Little Shop of Horrors and other early Corman flicks, but who also had his time in Rome in the 1960s. So this is what Mel had to say about Dick Randall “we were friends living in Rome and part of a colony of Americans and Brits living there and working in the European film industry. Dick was an astute film broker, a sharp businessman with a great sense of humour. Chubby, moustachioed with a thin Gilbert Roland one, and of shortish-but-not-too-stature. Dick was the embodiment of the exploitation film producer of the era”.

So, the impression you get is that all the English speaking Brits and Americans who were working in Italy at the time all knew each other and socialised. No surprise then,that the cast of King of Kong Island includes a couple of American actors who were attempting to start, or restart, their careers in Italy. King of Kong Island’s leading man, bodybuilder turned actor Brad Harris, certainly fit that bill. Having first appeared on Italian shores as a stuntman on Kubrick’s Spartacus, Harris carved out a career as a muscle-bound, square jawed all American tough guy in Italian Westerns, Eurospy thrillers and Sword and Sandal movies like The Fury of Hercules. Randall’s partners on this film, Ralph Zucker and Walter Brandi were no strangers to films featuring shirtless, muscular Americans, having previously made Bloody Pit of Horror (1965) starring Mickey Hargitay. A film dubbed by the book High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films “perhaps the supreme jerk off film of all time”. So, if you’re the kind of fella who likes their movies the Italian way, and everything else the Greek way...it sounds like that one should be added to your watchlist.

In King of Kong Island, Harris plays Bert Dawson, a mercenary who in the opening scene of the film is shot in the back and left for dead by his friend Albert Muller, played by American character actor Marc Lawrence, who like Harris also went through a period in Italy in the 1960s. When not leading the life of a double crossing mercenary, Albert also doubles as a mad doctor, who performs brain operations on gorillas, which turns them into his robot like slaves. Who says men are no good at multi-tasking?



Having survived the shooting, Bert gets a chance at revenge when Diana, the thrill seeking daughter of Bert’s friend Theodore, is kidnapped by Albert’s gorillas while on safari in Nairobi. Bert wastes no time in venturing into darkest Africa in order to put an end to Albert’s monkey business. A task he is aided in by the film’s female Tarzan character, played by Brazilian actress Esmeralda Barros, who acquires the name Eva during the course of the film, but is known and loved by the natives as ‘sacred monkey’.



Despite the film’s original title being Eva, the Savage Venus, this is definitely a Brad Harris vehicle with Harris displaying the kind of values that made him an icon to male Italian audiences of the time. Hard living Bert drinks, smokes, womanises, brawls and drives the ladies crazy whenever he takes off his shirt. Harris really had that ‘men want to be him, women want him’ shtick down to a tee by this point. There are enough betrayals, extra marital affairs and heated passions here to fill a soap opera. Theodore’s wife had previously had an affair with Bert, Theodore’s daughter has a schoolgirl crush on Bert, the sacred monkey takes a shine to him, Albert wants Bert’s body so he can perform experiments on him and make him his male slave. Even the sacred monkey’s cheetah like sidekick goes wild when Bert takes his top off.

On the downside there is an awful lot of scenes of people on safari and reacting to stock footage of animals in this film...which do ermm go on a bit, however some concessions have to be made to this film’s age. In the late 1960s, the world was a far less well travelled place, and the exotic sights and wildlife of Nairobi, projected onto the big screen in full colour was probably a far greater, and unfamiliar, spectacle to audiences then, than it is now. Still, if the nature footage does occasionally bore you there is always Roberto Pregadio’s fabulously groovy lounge music soundtrack, with tracks like ‘Jungle Shake’ being the perfect accompaniment for an alpha male who is trying to impress the ladies on the dance floor.



I first encountered King of Kong Island under the kind of circumstances that will never come round again. Back in the days of VHS bootlegs you’d occasionally find bits of another film at the end of a bootleg tape. That was how I first came into contact with the opening half hour of King of Kong Island. The Dick Randall connection and the early scene of gorilla brain surgery certainly got my attention, and by the time the film reached the scene where the gorillas ogle the girl who is undressing in her tent and then abduct her, I knew that there was no way I could go through life without seeing the rest of this film.



It feels a long time ago when this film was considered rare and hard to find, since its visibility has increased ten fold these days. Due in no small part, to the fact that the film is now considered ‘public domain’. Whether King of Kong Island actually is in the public domain in debatable, but it is definitely one of those films that everyone and their barber seems to have released on DVD or uploaded to Youtube. I was on holiday a few years ago at a rental home, got up early one morning, turned on the TV and there showing on some crappy, fly by night public domain TV channel was King of Kong Island. So it has gone from being a film I once had to track down to a film that seems to follow me around everywhere.



Prior to the film becoming quite so common place I did pick up a 2002 DVD release of it from Fred Olen Ray’s Retromedia company, which includes two different cuts of the film. A heavily censored US release version under the title Kong Island, and an uncut European version, under the title King of Kong Island, which is derived from a Greek VHS release. You can’t help but admire the meticulousness that went into censoring Kong Island for its US release. Basically the contentious material mostly relates to Esmeralda Barros’s female Tarzan character, who is topless throughout the movie, albeit with her long hair obscuring her breasts. Trouble is that whenever there is movement, Barros’ hair shifts about and you get unobstructed views of her breasts. So, someone has gone through this film at some point with a fine tooth comb and chopped out every single exposed breast and/or nipple shot. An arduous, but one images not entirely unenjoyable task. As I mentioned there is an uncensored version on the disc, but it is from VHS and with large, intrusive Greek subtitles. So it seems the pre-cert British VHS release is still the only way to see the film uncut, in English and without subtitles.

As far as I can tell this film didn’t acquire its best known title till several years after it was made. Following the film’s initial release it was floated around under the titles ‘Kong and the Savage Venus’, ‘Naked Among Monkeys’ and the futuristic sounding ‘Jungle 2000’. The title King of Kong Island, or sometimes simply Kong Island, seems to have become associated with the film around the time of the Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong. A ballsy move on Randall’s part, given how litigious the King Kong people were, having taken legal action against several rip-offs and parodies, including Queen Kong and Paul Leder’s A.P.E. This though was the title Randall was selling the film under at the 1977 Cannes film festival, alongside such Randall delights as The Young Bruce Lee- one of those Bruceploitation films which mixed in scenes of a Lee lookalike with footage taken from an old b/w film featuring the real Lee from his child actor days- and an Emmanuelle rip-off called The Daughter of Emanuelle. Incidentally the name of Emanuelle’s daughter in that film is ‘Pussy’....yes, who else but Emanuelle would call her daughter Pussy...and given the nature of that film you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Pussy not only lives up to her name but proves to be a chip off the old block too.



According to the original Italian credits of King of Kong Island, this film was a co-production between Italy, Spain and Dick Randall’s Spectacular Trading company, which was still based in New York at the time. Soon after though Randall would decamp to Italy, having supposedly left the US under a dark cloud, with rumours that he was being investigated for counterfeiting crimes by the US government. After his period in Italy, Randall began making movies in London, although appears to have only lived in London for half the year, spending the other half in Hong Kong. A situation that apparently allowed Randall to claim his British films like Don’t Open Till Christmas, Slaughter High and Attack of the Killer Computer as being UK/Hong Kong co-productions on the paperwork. Even though there is nothing remotely Chinese about those films, apart from maybe the odd Chinese take-away being served up by the catering department. I’m sure if you did a deep enough dive into the Dick Randall story you’d find stories of tax evasion, people being scammed, actresses being slobbered over and Randall cavorting with high class prostitutes. It’s an image that Randall didn’t exactly downplay in the cameos he made in his own movies, as Mel Welles accurately pointed out all those years ago...Randall was the embodiment of the exploitation film producer of that era.

In recent years King of Kong Island’s commercial value has increased somewhat, due to the fact that it has a pre-existing, but very similar title to the Hollywood blockbuster Kong Skull Island. Something capitalised on by various DVD releases and uploads of King of Kong Island, which throw around Kong Skull Island type imagery in an attempt to fool viewers into thinking they are getting a new, big budget Hollywood movie, rather than a fifty odd year old Italian B-Movie. I’m sure there are many out there that curse the name of this film because of that, but I can’t help feeling that such dishonest, morally bankrupt deception of the public would have met with the Dick Randall seal of approval.