A*P*E
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

South Korea/USA, PG, 87 m, 1976
Directed by Paul Leder. Stars Rod Arrants, Joanna Kerns, Alex Nicol, et al. 

Distributed circa 1976 by the legendary Jack H. Harris (The Blob), A*P*E (which over the years has gone by such names as The Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla, Super Kong and God only knows how many others) was a joint effort between some American and Korean grade-Z movie makers to hurriedly cash in on the swell of publicity surrounding Dino De Laurentiis’ (unfairly derided) remake of King Kong. Naturally, the scheme teed off the brass at Paramount (Kong’s distributor), who sued the producers of A*P*E for copyright infringement. Indeed, A*P*E isn’t shy about borrowing from the granddaddy of all giant gorilla films, right down to its titular beast sharing Kong’s yen for blonde film actresses. But Korea wasn’t the only country trying to cash in on Kong-mania: England (in association with Italy, France and West Germany) came up with Queen Kong, while China’s Shaw Brothers responded with the riotous (and now Quentin Tarantino-endorsed) The Mighty Peking Man. Still, A*P*E was the quickest in seeing a release, slipping into theatres almost two months before King Kong. A*P*E also found a gimmick to help peddle its stolen goods: it was screened for some audiences (under the title of Hideous Mutant) in 3D. Though most folks over the years have watched the picture flat, they needn’t feel that they’ve missed out on anything—the 3D effects left a little something to be desired. But no matter which way you see it, A*P*E is a monumental mound of malodorous monkey S*H*I*T.   

The movie starts off with a commanding overture, the Seoul Symphony Orchestra giving it their all while bold white titles zoom into view over an undulating blue sea. Our expectations are aroused for just under a nanosecond before we notice something is amiss. The center justification for some of the stacked text is off (and, no, it can’t be defended artistically), which clues us into the filmmakers’ disregard and utter contempt for their audience. That these sumbitches couldn’t even bother with aligning the credits properly serves as a pretty ominous signal that the next ninety minutes will try the patience of even the most ardent schlock aficionado.  

And how! The first shot of the film proper is of an atrocious miniature tanker bobbing around in the moonlit waves of what is supposed to be the Pacific Ocean, but is probably just a plastic wading pool picked up at any number of five and dimes. The captain and his chief mate are standing on the deck, taking in the night air and discussing physical metallurgy. (Okay, I’m making that last part up, but the actors here emote so goddamned little that we unwittingly tune out whatever it is they’re blathering about. They could be disclosing where Jimmy Hoffa is buried for all we know.) The fellow who plays the first mate is a rotten actor; he’s so limp you’d think he was lobotomized. It’s annoying, really, seeing how there are countless struggling actors out there who’d kill for a part even in dreck like this, and here’s this turd carrying on like he doesn’t give two fucks for anything, let alone acting in a movie. Still, we somehow gather between drowsy nods that this boat is transporting a giant ape to Disneyland, the blissful realm of everlasting sunbeams where a freak of nature can live its life in a tiny barred enclosure while being taunted by prepubescent troublemakers wearing Mickey Mouse ears. But the two mariners find their mind-numbing rap session interrupted when an oversized monkey’s paw bursts through the deck. “Oh, shit,” the first mate says in his customarily zap-headed way. Mad as hell, the monster tears out of the ship, causing it to blow up. The thirty-five-foot simian comes to the surface of the water and then heads for the Korean coastline. Given the diminutive size of the wreckage next to the beast, even a Shriner would be at a loss to explain how he fit into the boat’s hold. And seeing how only the ape’s lower half is submerged as he slogs through the ocean, then the ship that was carrying him must have been floating in only 18 feet of water! I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the makers of this junk didn’t care enough to get a handle on the creature’s scale. 

Just witness the next scene in which a huge shark assaults A*P*E. (Here on out referred to as such since the writers never bothered giving him a name.) Bearing in mind A*P*E’s size, even a great white shouldn’t appear much bigger than a catfish when placed next to him. But if we were to measure this shark from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, we’d see that he’s just about the same length as A*P*E, which would make him even bigger than ol’ Bruce from Jaws. In the fight that ensues, we watch as the fuming primate thrashes the oddly limp leviathan about for what seems an eternity until he finally rips its mouth apart Kong-style. But this wasn’t much of a test of the hairy brute’s strength seeing how the blankety-blank fish never flexed so much as a fin during the entire mêlée. IMHO, this is the screen’s second-most pathetic tussle, placing it right before Buster Crabbe’s fight with an alligator dummy in Nabonga and just after Bela Lugosi’s bout with a conked out mechanical octopus in Bride of the Monster. (There seems to be some debate if A*P*E’s underwater adversary was a rubber mock-up or the carcass of the real McCoy, but knowing what cheap-asses the filmmakers were, I’m willing to bet it was the latter. If these guys couldn’t spring for a decent monkey suit, then they’d most likely opt for pulling a dead shark out of the water before paying someone to make one.) 

Soon, A*P*E makes it to Korea and starts busting up some cardboard houses. Hordes of extras (some smiling) flee in terror, but since they never figure into the same shot as A*P*E, the illusion of widespread panic doesn’t take. But how can anyone be afraid of a monster that looks like his costume was stitched together by a blind man? A patchwork of old bath rugs and faux fur coats from the Goodwill, this is the most wretched gorilla suit I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s worse than what our Japanese friends came up with for King Kong vs. Godzilla and King Kong Escapes. And, yes, it’s worse than that moth-eaten mess the moviemakers gave Dan Schwab to wear as the titular perverted primate in Kinky Kong. And, yes, it’s much, much worse than the $2.95 Ben Cooper monkey costume I showed off at the Halloween doings in the second grade.  

Anyway, while our big monkey is off spanking his little monkey or whatever, American actress Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns, whom you might recall from the TV sitcom “Growing Pains”), has arrived in the Orient to shoot a picture. Her boyfriend, American reporter Tom Rose (Rod Arrants), meets her at the airport, and after some perfunctory coochy-cooing, they taxi off to her hotel. As they motor through the grimy, bustling streets of downtown Seoul, Marilyn takes in the sights. “Hey, what’s that building,” she asks. “Why, that’s where the president lives,” Tom responds. “Mighty impressive with that mountain behind it,” she observes… Well, I must say that I’m awfully grateful to the screenwriters for their descriptive dialogue; the film is such a low budget affair that Leder and the gang apparently couldn’t even come up with the scratch for a few insert shots of what the actors are looking at. And I’m not sure if the to-do over the president’s crib figures later into the proceedings or not. I mean, the picture is such a bloody mess that I often gave up on trying to figure out what was going on and instead started thinking about more pleasant things, like cleaning out the gutters on my house. 

Elsewhere, a group of screeching school kids burst into a decaying fun park called “Familyland” and go ape on its wobbly merry-go-round and creaky teeter-totters. The idyllic scene turns sour, though, when we learn A*P*E is watching the kids from afar. (At least I think it was afar; you can never really tell where he is in relation to his tiny, furless descendants.) But when MacRae’s musical score takes a whimsical turn, we’re assured that A*P*E doesn’t mean the children any harm. You see, he’s just a big kid himself, and he’d give anything to be free of his freakish height so he could frolic on the jungle gym below. But A*P*E’s blissful frame of mind is reduced to rubble when the kids finally spot him and scamper away in terror. 

Stationed nearby at a US Army base is Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol in his second to last film performance), and he’s convinced that all the reports he’s receiving about a giant ape on the loose are just part of a publicity stunt for the movie in which Mrs. Seaver, er, Marilyn is starring. The frustratingly bullheaded colonel responds to an eyewitness on the phone with sardonic quips like, “If you bump into him, ask him if his name is King Kong.” Well, that might as well be A*P*E’s name for nobody in this dog has enough imagination to assign the big galoot a moniker of his own. He’s actually referred to in a couple of later scenes as “King Kong.” But there’s a good reason why the producers kept A*P*E’s identity ambiguous and why they played the references to Kong with just the slightest of winks: American audiences would take it as parody while some foreign markets (where the humor is lost in translation) would accept the movie’s simian star as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” himself. In fact, A*P*E was released as King Kongui daeyeokseub in South Korea, and in some other countries as The New King Kong. For the video release in France, the film was re-titled La Révolte de Kong. So it is really any mystery why Paramount was up in arms over this thing?  

But nobody in their right mind could ever confuse A*P*E with King Kong. Kong had his Joseph Cinqué thing going on, while A*P*E has all the grace of a near-sighted, slew-footed schoolboy on the lip of puberty. Worse, he has no sense of purpose; he just lollygags about, acting stupid. (In one scene, he inexplicably breaks into a disco dance.) While A*P*E’s roving (and stinking up) the Korean countryside, he comes upon a (real) snake chillin’ in a tree. (Given its size in relation to A*P*E, the slithery thing must be as big as that anaconda that gobbled down Ice Cube.) Our furry protagonist grabs the serpent and hurls it at the camera, which might be retribution for the snake’s great-great-great-great-great-grand pappy having conned Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A*P*E proves with every breath he takes and every move he makes that he’s no Yoda, and therefore contemptuous of anything that has more than two brain cells to rub together. In fact, A*P*E is so dopey you might mistake him for being retarded.  

Later, after disrupting the shooting of a kung fu picture (the players in which respond to such insolence by hurling burning spears), A*P*E comes upon some folks hang gliding over a cow field. He makes his way up a hill, carefully stepping over the pasture’s lone plastic bovine, and playfully swats at one of the kites. Not surprisingly, this causes the pilot to soil his pants, but he manages to veer off, leaving A*P*E to jump up and down, clapping his hairy meat hooks in joy. The shot of A*P*E doing his merry jig goes on probably ten times longer than it needs to, which is something you’ll see Leder and company do time and time again in this dung heap. In order to fill out the bony plot and reach the length of an average feature, shots are either repeated several times or held until the audience has grown long, white beards. 

There comes a time in every giant ape movie when the beast must find his beauty, and A*P*E does follow that formula, however insipidly. While continuing his countryside stroll, A*P*E comes upon another movie set where some oily hack named Dino (insert knowing chuckle here) is shooting a rape scene for an exploitation picture. The victim in the piece is being played by none other than our dear Marilyn, and A*P*E takes an immediate shine to her. (Though I have no idea what makes her so special; the big dope has limitless Korean cuties to choose from.) In one of this film’s most perplexing gags, Dino (A*P*E director Paul Leder in pitch-perfect casting), advises the film’s resident Method actor to go about raping the leading lady with a little less fervor. Now, correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t rape an act of violence?  Isn’t the dude playing the sexual deviant doing right by his role by cranking up the testosterone? No matter, it turns out that he should’ve tempered his act after all: A*P*E is so worried that Marilyn is going to be violated that he scoops her up and heads for the hills.   

When Colonel Whatshisnuts finally gets around to acknowledging A*P*E’s existence, he teams up the US Army with the Korean police to put an end to the monster’s destructive tomfoolery. The rural areas are evacuated, and a team of military choppers are flown in to take A*P*E down. The crafts distribute some sort of noxious gas, which A*P*E tries to fan away for what seems like forever and a day. With A*P*E occupied, Tom moves in to rescue Marilyn, who has holed up in a nearby cave. Despite having all the coordination of an old drunk, A*P*E manages to spike one of the choppers, and it crashes into the ground. As it blows up, A*P*E (and I’m not making this up) flips it the bird. Okay, it’s a funny bit. But this was also the only time I was laughing with the film; the rest of the time I was laughing at it.  

Since the fighting men here are a bunch of incompetent twits, A*P*E wins the skirmish and follows the scent of his blonde-haired prize back to Seoul. After knocking down umpteen buildings, he locates Marilyn while she’s entertaining some kids with a puppet show. A*P*E carries her back to the country, leaving the city in a flaming ruin. Some quirky M*A*S*H-style music is then cued up as the military rolls in to take down the damned dirty ape once and for all. (Oy vey! This movie just goes on and on and on. I was sooo tempted to turn the blasted thing off, but I held in there just for you, gentle reader. So, please, don’t deny me my props.) The film’s final battle is padded beyond belief with shots that are repeated ad nauseam. At one point during his last stand, A*P*E destroys the same tank a half-dozen times! But that same tank winds up getting the better of A*P*E as it blasts him in his vital organs, causing gallons of bright red blood to spray out of his mouth. (Our colonel gets the best line: “Let’s see him dance for his organ grinder now!”) Eventually the flea-bitten lug goes down, but you don’t feel one iota of sympathy of him. Our hearts went out to Kong when he fell from the top of the Empire State Building, but A*P*E is such an annoying jerk that you take pleasure in watching him buy the farm. When the dust has settled, Tom comes forward and solemnly philosophizes, “He was just too big for a small world like ours.” Oh, good grief! 

But as thoroughly putrid as A*P*E is, Bruce MacRae’s score (aside from that aggravating M*A*S*H homage) keeps us engaged. The overture sounds a lot like the one David Mansfield composed for the Michael Cimino remake of Desperate Hours, though that film was made a good twenty years after A*P*E. Was Mansfield somehow stirred by this unspeakable bore? I guess it’s possible. Sometimes you’ll find inspiration in the queerest places.  

NOTE: So what are the asterisks in the film’s title all about? Is A*P*E an acronym? Actually, the asterisks are a nod to M*A*S*H as the action in A*P*E takes place largely in Seoul, Korea. I swear to God, that’s the reason behind it.  

November 6, 2007

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.