Page 49 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

audience remind one of the plays that Ernie wrote for the Morecambe and Wise Show - a similarity
clinched by a crocodile declaring, as Eric frequently did in the show, that we are watching 'rubbish'.
Closer still is the film's resemblance to a pantomime, that peculiarly English theatrical form with its
fairytale settings, excruciating puns, gender reversals, shabby special effects, topical ad libs and musical
interludes - elements all presenr in Queen Kong, but not obviously conducive to box-office success.
There is a case for describing the film as postmodern on account of its generic fluidity and tactic of
pre-emptive self-contempt - 'We came to make a movie, we created a farce!' This anticipates what is
now a standatd tactic of ingratiation in deliberate trash films by the likes of Troma, Fred Olen Ray
and Seduction Cinema. But such playful reflexivity is also a comic intensification of the auto-critique,
in the original Kong, of film as sadistic spectacle and voyeuristic exploitation. Sticking with this theme,
one can also read Queen Kong ss a commentary on the state of British cinema itself in the doldrums of
the 1970s - 85 humiliating minutes of what British film has been reduced to. Appropriately enough,
Queen Kong is a self-parodying combination of the two kinds of film into which British production
was largely divided: the international co-production and tacky exploitation. The scattered references
to Jaws (1975), The Exorcist (1973) and Last Konga in Lazanga measure the unbridgeable distance
between the blockbusters of the new American cinema and the desperate end of the pier stuff on
screen before us (between, indeed, the remake of King Kong — rubbish, but a proper film - and Queen
Kongs cheap imitation). What is intriguing about Queen Kong is that it relates its own shabbiness
and creative poverty not only to the British film industry but also to Britain itself in the 1970s on
the cusp of punk and the Jubilee. Like The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and Terror (1978), Queen
Kong is exploitation as state-of-the-nation film. On the one hand, it is 'about' British weakness, male
insecurity, racial insecurity and female liberation, and thus belongs with more obviously intentional
and legible allegories of post-war national decline as Juggernaut (1974), House of Whipcord (1974)
and Britannia Hospital (1981). On the other, it is a mad Freudian dreamscape, a compendium of
outlandish sexual fantasies and an irresistible excuse for filthy-minded over-interpretation.

THE SYMBOLIC GORILLA: RACE AND GENDER

This brings us to the matter of Queen Konga, political allegory and in particular the symbolic meaning
of the gorilla herself. As an index of social fears, a giant black liberated female Other might seem
so wildly over-determined as scarcely to require detailed explication. Feminism, immigration, post-
Imperial decline - all are evoked as 'the monkey knocked hell out of 1000 years of English history
and wiped out a year's supply of North Sea oil'. In Konga the rioting gorilla could, with equally
minimal imagination, be read as a symbolic panic response to the post-Windrush influx of black
immigrants into Britain - something completely new and mind-boggling among the familiar London
landmarks.6 Still, caution is required even with so obvious, glib and workable interpretation of a film.
The imagery of apes and black people can be linked in a supple and persuasive manner, as Erb does in
her readings of King Kong, but it is still potentially a racist reflex. So it is tentatively that in the matter
of Queen Kongs entanglement with racial fantasy one concludes that the gorilla represents the revenge
of colonial repression. Her private race riot across London is payback for the havoc Britain wrought
across Imperial Africa.

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