This is just one more reason why, if Jess Nevins didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

I know there are worse blows to cineastes than this: the full, ten hour-long version of Greed, say, or the German version of Metropolis, not to mention the films of Theda Bara.

And yet I mourn, more than those, the loss of Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu, a.k.a. King Kong Appears in Edo. Made in either 1934 or 1938--there are contradictory references on this--it was released in 1938 and was arguably Japan's first kaiju movie.

What did it have, besides Kong? A hunchback, expressionistic architecture, a hunchback, Kong fighting a giant bumblebee, and Kong fighting an enormous ant lion.

This wasn't the only pre-WW2 Japanese King Kong movie; there was also Wasei Kingu Kongu (1933) and Kingu Kongu Zenkouhen (1938), the latter featuring a Kong-versus-samurai throwdown. But neither of those had Kong fighting giant monsters or the surreality of Kong climbing on Dr. Caligari-style architecture.

Having been the one to find it, Jess obviously had dibs on this one. But I'll admit that it's cross-polinating interestingly with a half-idea I hae about sixteenth-century explorer Filippo Pigafetta's Relatione del reame di Congo, better known by its Latin title, Regnum Congo (which is cited in Huxley's "On the Natural History of Man-like Apes", and from there ends up referenced in Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House"). Or else the story about how the volcanic island Helekea from Set the Seas on Fire--after nearby US atom bomb tests in the post-war years widen the existing fissures between our world and other continua--ends up home to a host of extradimensional creatures.

But come on! King Kong in feudal Japan?! How awesome is that?