King Kong Escapes

A criminal scientist builds a mechanical version of King Kong and sends it to the Arctic to recover a highly radioactive substance known as Element X. When the robot breaks down near the deposit, he has the real Kong captured and forced to do the digging instead. The ape escapes and heads for Japan, and the scientist follows with his machine. The two creatures finally meet in a confrontation above Tokyo.

The film is a Japanese-American coproduction from 1967, made by Toho with Universal Pictures and Rankin/Bass, and it draws on the animated King Kong series those companies had produced. Ishirō Honda directed from a script by Takeshi Kimura. It was the twentieth of the twenty-five features Honda directed, arriving between The War of the Gargantuas and Destroy All Monsters. The cast includes Akira Takarada, Mie Hama, Rhodes Reason, Linda Miller and Hideyo Amamoto, with twenty-three credited performers.

The movie had a modest commercial run, taking about 3 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.5 from roughly 3,500 votes, while on TMDB it scores 6.1 from a much smaller group of 116. It mixes action and science fiction with fantasy and horror elements across its 104-minute running time.