Director – David L. Hewitt, Screenplay – Jean Hewitt & David Prentiss, Producers – David L. Hewitt & Robert H. O’Neil, Photography – Gary Graver, Music – Charles Walden. Production Company – American General Pictures.
Anthony Eisley (Mark Remington), Megan Timothy (April Adams), Scott Brady (Dan Morgan), Kent Taylor (Tonga Jack Adams), Lee Parrish (George), Sheldon Lee (Kabula), Gary Kent (Arnold Shye), Greydon Clark (Dan Remington)
Circus owner Mark Remington is owing money and facing having his circus bought out by a rival. In desperation he flies to Africa in search of Tonga Jack Adams, who has spoken of the whereabouts of a giant ape in the hopes capturing it will revitalise his zoo. He arrives at a zoo run by Tonga Jack’s daughter April, who is also facing repossession. Her father is missing and so the two of them mount an expedition into the Congo. This takes them onto a prehistoric plateau inhabited by dinosaurs where the giant ape Gorga is worshipped by natives.
The name of David L. Hewitt belongs down there with some of other ultra low-budget directors of the 1960s and 70s such as Edward D. Wood Jr, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Al Adamson. Hewitt was responsible for some of the most miserable and cheap films of this era, including The Wizard of Mars (1965), Journey to the Center of Time (1967), Dr Terror’s Gallery of Horrors (1967) and The Lucifer Complex (1978). In later years, he retired and worked in special effects.
The Mighty Gorga is a blatant copy of King Kong (1933). At that point this was made, there was only a single version of King Kong – we had had one sequel The Son of Kong (1933) and the two Japanese revivals King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and King Kong Escapes (1967) – but that was it, none of the remakes. Certainly, there had been a number of cheap copies with the likes of The White Gorilla (1945), White Pongo (1946) and Killer Ape (1953).
This reuses the basic plot elements of King Kong – the white showman/zookeeper in search of the giant ape as an attraction back in the US; the Lost World of prehistoric wildlife inhabited by a giant ape and dinosaurs; the natives who are in the habit of sacrificing women to the giant ape. About the only plot device that we don’t get here is having heroine Megan Timothy abducted by the ape and it developing an affection for her (presumably as that would have required more than the film’s effects budget of $1.98 could have afforded). The one addition we get is a rival hunter pursuing the explorers, although he never turns up until the very end.
The Mighty Gorga has been filmed as cheaply as possible. The African locations never go beyond African theme parks in California and Florida. The film is also padded out by a reasonable amount of zoo footage – there is also a weird plot where Anthony Eisley goes to Africa because his zoo is about to the foreclosed, then meets Megan Timothy whose zoo is also about to be foreclosed but seems to have enough money to write a cheque and bail her out. The film also ends with Eisley not having captured the Gorga, leaving you wondering what the fate of his zoo was. Not that Eisley ever had much of a chance of capturing the Gorga – he appears to go into the wilderness with no hunting equipment or supplies and you wonder just how he was planning to drag a 40-foot ape back to civilisation bare-handed.
Everything about the film is poorly made. David L. Hewitt has some of his regulars – Anthony Eisley, Scott Brady, Kent Taylor – present so most of the performances are up to a level of serviceable professionalism. On the other hand, the unknown Megan Timothy is not a very good actress. The worst performance though comes from the African witch doctor who is played by the entirely Caucasian Sheldon Lee and speaks in all the racist cliché phrases without articles that American Indians used to be written with on screen.
The worst part about The Mighty Gorga is the effects. The Gorga is played by an actor in an ape suit who stands about and roars with the camera in low angle looking upwards. The ape suit has an immobile mask that never moves or makes any expression. What becomes even worse is when Anthony Eisley and Megan Timothy arrive at the lost plateau. The film tries to give us an ultra-cheap version of the scene with Kong wrestling with a dinosaur but when the dinosaur is represented by what looks like a toy model, the results are pitiful. The lost world itself seems represented by about one scene where Eisley and Timothy land in a gulley filled with half-a-dozen oversized plant blooms.
Full film available here