Dino De Laurentiis gave the world a $25 million remake of King Kong. A year later, Runme Shaw looked at that poster and said, “Hold my tiger bone wine.”

If there is one thing Shaw Brothers knows how to do, it’s take a Western trend, give you some cinematic LSD and feed it through a meat grinder until it comes out as something ten times more insane than the original. 

But don’t let the title—or the alternative name, Goliathon—fool you. This isn’t some dry anthropological study. This is a sweaty, neon-drenched, nihilistic masterpiece of Hong Kong exploitation that asks: What if King Kong were a giant, flammable suit actor living in India and had a crush on a blonde girl in a buckskin bikini?

After an earthquake in the Himalayas (which apparently moved the mountains to the middle of the Indian jungle), a giant ape emerges. Enter Lu Tien, an entertainment mogul who is basically what would happen if Carl Denham were an even bigger scumbag. He wants the ape for a world tour or to turn it into a very large rug. Why do these dudes always want to put these giant monkeys on stage? Anyway, he hires Chen Zhengfeng (Danny Lee, long before he was a John Woo regular), a guy with a broken heart because his girlfriend, a diva named Wang Cuihua, slept with his songwriter brother just to get a hit record. Fame is a fickle mistress.

Chen leads the expedition into the jungle, which is a gauntlet of stock footage, rubber snakes and elephants that look annoyed to be in this movie. Maybe they were warned by monkeys, snakes and alligators about the excesses of Italian film crews. Regardless, just as Chen is about to be monkey meat, he’s saved by Ah-wei (Evelyne Kraft, The French Sex Murders), a wild girl who was raised by the ape, whom she calls Utam, after her parents died in a plane crash. She’s like Jane from Tarzan, but her outfit is held together by hope and cinematic glue.

Naturally, Chen and the wild girl fall in love, because nothing says romance like hiding from an enormous primate. He convinces her to bring Utam back to Hong Kong. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Once they hit the city, the movie shifts to pure kaiju carnage. Lu Tien attempts to assault Ah-wei, triggering Utam’s protective instincts. The ape goes on a rampage through Hong Kong that makes the 1933 Kong look like a disciplined Boy Scout. He’s smashing buses, stomping on extras and eventually climbing the Connaught Centre (the one with all the circular windows that looks like a giant cheese grater; it was the largest building in Hong Kong at the time).

The finale is a pyrotechnic nightmare. While the 1976 Kong died with a whimper on the pavement, Utam goes out in a literal blaze of glory, being blasted by tanks and helicopters while the world burns around him. It’s bleak, it’s loud, and it’s glorious. You will believe that a monstrous monkey can get set on fire.

It’s a Shaw Brothers movie, so the production value is weirdly high while the logic is delightfully low. The special effects were handled by Sadamasa Arikawa, who worked on the original Godzilla films, so you get that authentic man-in-a-suit, miniature-city vibe that warms my cynical heart. It makes me even happier to know the lengths that special effects artist Keizô Murase went to. When the original stuntman refused to be set on fire at the end of the movie, Murase personally doused himself with oil, was set ablaze and jumped off a miniature building three different times, sustaining several injuries from the wood, cement and glass used to make the set. Good news: He was given a gold watch from the film’s producer as payment.

Danny Lee emotes like his life depends on it, Evelyne Kraft spends the entire movie looking like she’s in a shampoo commercial* while holding a baby leopard in a way that says that she’s never seen Roar and the Peking Man himself looks like he’s having a permanent bad hair day (the suit was made from actual human hair, donated by 300 Hong Kong citizens). It’s a movie about the cruelty of civilization, the fickleness of show business and the fact that if you’re a giant ape, you should never, ever fall in love with a white blonde or leave your homeland.

According to Kraft, unlike King Kong vs. Godzilla, this had two endings. In the Indian cut, where it is considered bad luck to fake a death, her character lives. But her character dies at the end of all the other versions of the film. I have seen many Indian movies where someone dies, so this feels like IMDbs.

Only in Hong Kong would the heroine die a bloody death at the end of a film.

Beyond Quentin Tarantino, who re-released this movie in 1999, Roger Ebert was also a fan, saying, “Mighty Peking Man is very funny, although a shade off the high mark of Infra-Man, which was made a year earlier, and is my favorite Hong Kong monster film. Both were produced by the legendary Runme Shaw, who, having tasted greatness, obviously hoped to repeat. I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. I am awarding Mighty Peking Man three stars, for general goofiness and a certain level of insane genius, but I cannot in good conscience rate it higher than Infra-Man. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

*Speaking of IMDbs, I learned from that site that The Peking Man wasn’t the only thing turning heads in India. Kraft’s fur bikini proved so distracting that male extras were repeatedly slapped by their wives mid-scene. This battle of the gazes forced the frustrated crew to reshoot the sequence until the cast finally focused on the monster instead of the star.

Kraft claimed that her fur bikini in the film was so skimpy that her top kept popping off while filming, especially during the action scenes. Everything would then stop while she fixed the wardrobe malfunction, but after it kept happening, she just ignored all the male actors and the film crew staring at her breasts. She suspected, but could not prove, that Shaw Brothers had the wardrobe department deliberately make her top that way so that everyone could see her topless and possibly even have footage of it to use in the film.