Konga (In Print)

As anyone foolish enough to read this blog regularly will recall, I have an irrational fondness for the awful Herman Cohen produced giant ape movie Konga (1961).  A shoestring King Kong knock off filmed at Merton Park studios, it features a fine performance of ripe ham from Michael Gough as the mad scientist responsible for the title monster, a very bad gorilla suit and some gloriously ludicrous dialogue.  In common with most pictures of the time, regardless of budget, it had a paperback novelisation that actually preceded the film's release in order to drum up publicity.  This is the cover of the US edition featuring, rather than a production still or publicity shot, some artwork that in no way reflects the the film itself.  Maybe, the artist wasn't provided with a still, so had to work from the text or, more likely, had seen a still and realised that the film, especially the gorilla, was just too crap to use as a basis for his painting.  Whatever the reason, there is no corresponding scene in the finished film and the two human characters depicted look nothing like the actors who played them.  Moreover, that ape looks vaguely convincing.

The credited author, Dean Owen seems to have been a prolific author of paperback westerns in the fifties and sixties, often turning them out under pseudonyms, including Owen Dudley, Dudley Dean and Hodge Evans.  In addition to the westerns, there were also a number of crime novels with raunchy titles and cover art, often attributed to the Hodge Evans name.  Dean Owen does, however, have at least three science fiction/horror film tie in titles to his credit.  In addition to Konga, he also authored the adaptation of the Danish monster movie Reptilicus (a film even worse than Konga) and the Ray Milland starring and directed post apocalyptic movie Panic in the Year Zero.  The only edition of the latter tie-in novel I've seen a picture of was titled End of the World (the film's re-issue title, implying that the book might be a second edition) and featured a photo of Ray Milland from the film as cover art.  Owens wasn't entirely done with film and TV ties ins, returning to them in the early seventies with an adaptation of the McMasters and the first entry in a series of original novels based on the Men From Shiloh TV series (as the last season of The Virginian was retitled), plus novelisations of TV series Gunsmoke and Hec Ramsey.  He seems to have continued turning out paperback westerns into the eighties and nineties, with the last title attributed to any of his pen names coming in 2000.