Page 48 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

glimpse of a full-size animatronic Kong, but otherwise resorts to the same cheap effects as Queen Kong
and other Kongsploitation: a man in a gorilla suit, miniature buildings and back projection).
QUEEN KONG AS BRITISH CINEMA: CAMP AND WORLD WAR II

Although a comic romp, the most popular mode of British exploitation, Queen Kong is otherwise
out of sync with other low-budget British films of the mid-1970s. It lurches through a number of
genres - musical, science fiction, disaster film, television sitcom - but not the one most obviously
hospitable to its resources and ambitions: the sex comedy. Although Queen Kong plays like it should
be a sexploitation film, it contains not one frame of nudity. Askwith's bottom is never bared, and
none of the 'Page 3' and Benny Hill girls in the cast strips further than her bikini. Nor is Queen Kong
for kids, like other British 'monster on the loose' films such as Gorgo (1961), Digby - The Biggest Dog
in the World (1973) and, on television, The Goodies' 'Kitten Kong' sketch. There are too many drug
references, for one thing. Queen Kong seems genuinely interstitial, poised between several potential
audiences but efficiently tuned into none of them. As an item of weird 'paracinema' Queen Kong
makes sense nowadays, when niche markets flourish for camp trash with the production values of a
home movie. Indeed it is a far more likely candidate for enthusiastic cult reappraisal than the 1976
Kong, whose reputation has not improved at all. But in the 1970s no market as such existed for camp
British trash, unless it was in the waning genres of sexploitation and horror (Horror Hospital, 1973;
Dr Phibes Rises Again, 1972; The Sexplorer, 1975).
There is one genre in British cinema, apart from comic farce, to which Queen Kong bears an
interesting thematic relation: the science fiction film. Like many British science fiction movies, it
refers back to the discourses of World War Two. While American science fiction of the 1950s and
1960s reverberated with fears of Communism, British science fiction was fixated on the imagery of
war and the theme of national decline. Invasion narratives such as The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)
and Daleks — Invasion Earth 2050 AD (1966) centre on occupation by Nazi-like aliens, while the
Blitz is re-visualised in the 'trashing London' films at the turn of the 1960s: Gorgo, Behemoth the Sea
Monster (1959) and Konga (1960) (an earlier 'giant gorilla on the loose' film).5 These films were both
a nostalgic recall of British greatness in resisting external danger, and fretful admissions that, after
Suez and the end of consensus, Britain might never again muster the same resources of Blitz and
Dunkirk spirit. Queen Kong resurrects the discourses of wartime to complement footage of London
under simian siege: a radio broadcast declares that defeating the gorilla will be 'England's finest hour',
while an ineffectual policeman (all the men in this film are weak and unheroic) phones his mother for
advice, asking the crucial question: 'What would Churchill do now?'
If Queen Kong seems surreally misjudged, the reason may be that it is not 'British' at all. One must
beware of describing it too eagerly as archetypal British trash or some such misleading idealisr epithet.
More accurately, it is a botched pastiche, by an Egyptian director and American screenwriter, of the
cliches of low-brow English humour, a homage to Carry On precisely mistimed to coincide with the
eclipse of Carry On by sexploitation. Eschewing cinema's superior possibilities for nudity and sexual
explicitness, Queen Kong is reminiscent of other, more innocent continuations of traditional English
low humour. The deliberate bad jokes, numerous film references and self-mocking address to the

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