#mighty gorga

[movieposters1]

[neocurio]

mIGHTY gORGA vAMPIRE kILLERS kILL oR bE kILLED @ tHE dRIVE-iN

[ety3rd]

My son and I are making our way down this list of monstrous ape movies ahead of the March release of Kong: Skull Island.

Today’s is The Mighty Gorga (1969).

I’ll go first:

We appear to have crossed some sort of line of demarcation. Before the 1960s, nearly all of these “monstrous ape” movies were about explorers in Africa looking for treasure, etc., and encountering normal gorillas in their midst.  Now, looking ahead, we seem to be solely in the realm of giant ape monsters.  I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Another note: we’re also in the middle of a slew of sexploitation/goresploitation films involving apes.  I thought I had managed to weed them out of our list (since I’m watching it with my son, you know), but there are a couple that I missed and had to cross off, almost as I was about to insert the DVDs.

At first glance, I thought Gorga was another of these -sploitation films, but, as it turns out, it’s just plain bad.

It combines the African explorer aspect of most of the films on our list thus far with the mainstay of a guy in a laughably bad gorilla suit.  Like ... really bad.  

At least we get a glimpse of how bad before the main titles.  Then we’re “treated” to a half-hour or so of circus business politics, followed by African exploration for another twenty or so.  Maybe another hour.  Felt like an hour.  Anyways, it’s damned dull.  (Gorga shows up once or twice for a sec.)

The quality of the film is on the runny side of “shitty.”  Sure, the monsters suck, but there are visible boom mics, bad acting, flubbed lines, and ... bizarrely ... white people playing African tribesmen (”bizarre” because they’re constantly talking about the “evil white men”).

The best part of the film, however, comes when the two leads find themselves in a nest with giant eggs ... and then mother shows up.  It gets even better when Gorga turns up, too, and fights the dinosaur.

Awesome.

There’s about fifteen minutes more movie after that, but who cares?  You’ve seen the gold.

The Mighty Gorga ... some might say “so bad it’s good,” but that’s too generous.  1.75 out of five chest thumps of excellence.

My son’s turn:

Well, today we have Mighty Gorga. It’s about a circus owner who goes to Africa to find a big attraction to keep himself in business. He meets a girl who’s missing her father but thinks she knows where a lost treasure is. The tribe near the treasure sacrifices girls to the big ape, Gorga. Gorga is a guy in a really bad gorilla suit. Like, it’s REALLY bad. What’s worse that the suit is the plastic toy dinosaur they used in one scene. And there’s a scene with a stop-motion dragon and my dad said, “That looks too good to be in this film.” He researched it and sure enough they stole it from another movie called Goliath and the Dragon. At the end of the movie, Gorga shows up again and kills the bad guy even though I can’t remember why he was the bad guy.

So, rating-wise, I’ll say 2.222222222 out of 5 chest thumps of “awesome badness”!!!!!!

Trailer: 

Next, King Kong (1976).