12 WTF Horror Films You Need To See Before You Die

Laughable in every respect apart from when it attempts to be funny, this knock-off of Dino de Laurentiis’s King Kong (which itself was trying to capitalize on the success of Jaws) is so lame-brained and amateurish you can’t imagine anyone queuing up to see it. In fact, viewers never had the chance – “legal difficulties” meant it was never released theatrically and remained unseen until its DVD debut twenty-five years later.

Rula Lenska is looking for a “real man” to star in her jungle adventure film, but in 70s England the best she can find is Robin Askwith, who also played Timothy Lea in the Confessions movies. Venturing to “Lazanga, where they do the konga”, Askwith is kidnapped by the bikinied natives (led by Valerie Leon’s “Queen of the Nabongas”) who want him as a mate for their goddess, Queen Kong.

Portrayed by a female dancer in the World’s worst monkey suit, and looking even lamer than the creature in King Kong Escapes (1967), Queenie fights a plastic pterodactyl and, in a scene so bad it looks like a Saturday Night Live parody, a T-Rex that knocks over the “scenery”. Incredibly, the movie manages to get worse: witness the end credits song that includes the couplet, “You would stop yelling ‘rape’/ If I was just an ordinary household ape.”