Ape

This movie is so terrible, yet so funny. There are so many flaws with this movie. Many parts of the movie have nothing to do with the plot. The ape one time wears shoes, flicks the camera(and its no accident, he holds it for 4 seconds), and seems to be different sized throughout the movie. You cannot make a worse movie. Period. This movie must be seen, it is too funny to explain.

This is a great bad movie and many of the scenes are hilarious. If you'd enjoy watching a 60-sec slow-motion scene where a guy in a gorilla costume wrestles an obviously dead shark, thrashing it around and pretending to be in the throes of death, look no further. This whole movie is full of great scenes like that, and if it weren't for an overly drawn out love story subplot, "A.P.E." would be a 5-star unintentional comedy. You get a little bit of everything in this South Korean flick: "Godzilla"-style miniature sets, toy model animals and people, remote control helicopters, firework explosions, and of course, a guy in a gorilla suit. The plot is not important, really, and the film gets right down to brass tacks after about 2-min of backstory. Just know that there is a 35-ft tall ape, and he is going to rampage Korea. Throw in an American actress (Joanna Kerns, of "Growing Pains" fame), her reporter boyfriend, and a pair of Army officers bent on killing the beast, and you have "A.P.E." The direction and editing are sometimes stunningly inept, resulting in several great "WTF moments," including my favorite when a character is hanging off the outside door of a moving jeep, for seemingly no reason. Anyhow, I could go on forever with this one. As far as bad movies go, "A.P.E." is a definite keeper. You are going to get laughs out of this one.

This movie hates you. No two ways about it. It wants to hurt you for seeing it.

Characters in this movie speak in a stream of continual profanities, fire flaming arrows and guns at the audience (while smiling), and the gorilla throws rocks at you and flips you the bird.

The acting is mostly abominable. The effects are worse. Nothing makes much sense. The editing is choppy. The shots are poorly composed. The locations are grey, barren, and aggressively ugly. Stock footage is piled on and looped.

Boring filler is shoved in wherever it will fit to pad out the slight story to 90 minutes. Then, it takes forever to finally end. (More punishment for you, the viewer.) Oh, and it's nominally in 3-D too.

A hateful, hateful movie.

Truly awful King Kong rip-off that is so bad you have to see it to believe it. The ape, said to be thirty-six feet tall, is just some guy in a cheap gorilla suit that the filmmakers got at a costume shop or a yard sale. This isn't even a full body ape suit. It's got sleeves with gloves. There are several instances where you can see the skin of the guy's wrists as he moves his arms about. That's the level of quality we're talking here. That's how few *beeps* this movie gives. He's filmed mostly from the chest up. When they do try to show you some scale for the ape's size, they do it with cheap stuff like toy boats and crummy miniature buildings. The ape also moves in slow motion throughout the movie. Let me be clear: they didn't slow down the film. The "actor" in the ape suit just moved really slowly to emulate slow motion! Like a kid playing make believe.

The cast is especially bad. This is the film debut of Joanna Kerns, the mom from "Growing Pains." Her screams will haunt me for weeks. So unbelievably shrill. Be prepared to turn your volume down. Laughably, at one point while in the palm of the ape's hand, Kerns stops screaming and says "Be gentle with me, big guy." She returns to screaming almost immediately. Bizarre! Kerns has a romantic subplot with a very '70s-looking guy named Rod Arrants. They kiss a lot. Pretty much every time they are in the same scene, Arrants is all over her. Long-time character actor Alex Nicol plays a foul-mouthed Army Colonel here. I have to believe his performance is intended to be funny. It makes no sense any other way. Bruce MacRae is listed as responsible for the music. He should have been arrested and charged with assault. The score is relentless and will make your ears bleed.

As the helicopters approach the ape, he stands there and makes these wild gestures with his arms. For the life of me, it looks a lot like he's dancing. Was the guy in the ape suit inebriated? Very likely. Further evidence of this is the scene where the ape flips off the Army. Yeah. The guy in the ape suit was loaded for sure. It's so terrible. There are lots of pointless scenes. Such as when the ape pulls a snake off of a tree and throws it -- hitting the camera! This goes nowhere. It just cuts away to another scene and when it returns to the ape he's moved on to something else. The only reason I'm giving this a 2 instead of a 1 is because of the unintended comedy. It's one of the worst movies ever made.

APE is a truly strange hybrid: my best guess is that it was an Korean Monster Film that got bought by an American Filming Crew who spent a weekend getting background shots and shot all the giant ape footage in their backyard.

From the first great line in the film in which a mildly depressed actor utters the most deadpan expression of shock to stock footage of a cow that becomes an obviously fake battery-operated toy in faraway shots this film is a laugh riot. The cherry on top of this cake is that 'Joanna Von Savant' of the title is really Joanna Kerns from TV's Growing Pains. Apparently the 1980s weren't a good time for her, between being fondled by a fake ape in a ripoff of a Dino Laurentis film or a TV mom to a bunch of stupid kids that go to a school that calls their sports team "Hooters."

In short, don't watch APE. Experience it and hope to God someone's future film career depended on this.