Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 2, 2003, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Fellow Fango DVD reviewer Matthew Kiernan and I have both noted in the past that when long-lost and/or much-coveted obscurities finally arrive on disc, they sometimes prove to be worth neither the wait nor the advance hype. Queen Kong may be my personal ne plus ultra of this syndrome; as a lifelong giant-monster fan, I had been anxious to see this big-ape spoof ever since I first heard about it (I even own the novelization!). Legal troubles had kept the movie submerged for decades since its mid-’70s production, and thus the news that Fred Olen Ray’s Retromedia company was finally granting it a U.S. DVD release (via Ventura Distribution) was both a surprise and cause for a certain amount of joy.
My enthusiasm, sad to say, lasted only about as long as it took to view the first 20 minutes or so. The disc’s good-looking transfer aside, Queen Kong is close to unwatchable, a would-be comedy that lands with a thud louder than that of King Kong at the base of the Empire State Building. There are a couple of chuckles to be had at the ridiculous theme song (“She’s a genie who ain’t teeny/She’s the queenie queenie for my weenie”), and it’s all downhill from there, a collection of sub-Airplane! sight gags, some quarter-hearted stabs at feminist humor and musical numbers that are apparently supposed to be amusing for their sheer incongruousness. On the audio commentary he shares with director Frank Agrama, Ray compares the film’s anything-goes approach to humor to that of Monty Python, but Queen Kong is more reminiscent of the gang’s lamentable Contractual Obligation Album than anything else.
Ray deserves an A for effort, though, for putting this disc together and giving the movie a better showcase than it probably deserves. The 1.85:1 transfer, which Ray says was struck from a negative, has a bit of damage here and there but is largely clean and accurately colorful, and overall as fine as one could ask. Any flaws on view derive from the original photography; there’s an overuse of diffusion that Agrama blames on an “artsy-fartsy” cinematographer who was fired midway through production, and the sceney sceney looks too greeny in a few places.
Beyond the trailer, which (for better or worse) gives a good idea of what to expect from the feature, the main supplement is the Agrama/Ray commentary. “My God, I can remember all this!” marvels the director as the commentary starts, though he seems a bit (intentionally?) shaky on when the movie was filmed; at one point he claims it was 1970-72, though as Ray later points out, that’s belied by a brief parody of Jaws. Otherwise, Agrama comes across as pretty sharp, entertainingly discussing the film’s legal hassles and off-the-cuff filming, while Ray once again proves himself the right, knowledgeable man for the interviewing job. Under the circumstances, it’s not really their fault that they run out of interesting topics at about the half-hour mark, lapsing thereafter into numerous stretches of silence. On balance, though, it’s infinitely more entertaining to watch Queen Kong with the commentary than without it.
