Not since the dawn of man (around 2014) have I dedicated an entire month to ape cinema, but I’m back, and this time it’s personal! After listening to every album by Gorillaz and finishing Donkey Kong Bananza a few months ago, my body is ready. *Starts beating chest. This month I’m gonna live like an Apeman. Hey, you gonna eat that nanner over there?
Last time, I reviewed the OG Planet of the Apes films, but this time I’m tackling KILLER ape movies. “Oh sweet, like Shakma and Monkey Shines?” NO! WRONG! Those are monkeys. I’m talking about apes, which turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated if the goal was to watch GOOD movies.
If I were smart, I would have reviewed all the King Kong movies. That has to be the only reason this subgenre exists. I haven’t done my research (big surprise) to confirm this, but there were so many forgettable ape movies in the 1940s and ’50s, it has to be because of Kong.
Honestly, there were so many ape movies from this time period it was overwhelming deciding where to start. I could have watched; The Ape (1940), The Ape Man (1943), Captive Wild Woman (1943), Jungle Woman (1944) The Jungle Captive (1945), White Pongo (1945), Bride of the Gorilla (1951), or even Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), where Bela Lugosi faces off against cheap knockoffs of Martin & Lewis and also there must be a gorilla there too.
The problem is nobody likes these movies. They were cash grabs. I mean, most Hollywood productions are but these Apesploitation flicks were far more blatant. All they did was put a guy in a cheap costume and call it a day. Sometimes he’d be big, sometimes small, but rarely did the formula stray that far from; Ape runs amuck and kidnaps a beautiful lady.
So I skipped the 40s-50s. I also skipped the ‘60s even though I’m sure there are some passable gorilla kaiju flicks from this time. Why did I eventually land on a South Korean film from 1976? Because I love the poster. A giant gorilla? And he’s gonna fight a giant shark AND a giant snake at the same time? Sign me up!
If you’re wondering whether the scene depicted on the poster actually happens, the answer is: “Yeah, kind of.” The ape does casually rock a shark back and forth like it’s a bath toy, and it does fling a giant snake out of a tree, which I swear hits the camera, but these events do not occur at the same time. And I regret to inform you, they’re nowhere near as cool as the poster makes them look.
Of course we’re talking about the poster for the 1976 film A*P*E, apparently the asterisks are a spoof on the acronym for M*A*S*H. Oh god, cause this is also Korea? Though the only theorized abbreviation I could find for A*P*E* is, “Attacking Primate monstEr”. Wow, that’s messy if true.
But actually, the film has many titles. In South Korea, the film is known as King Kong’s Great Counterattack. On home video, it’s been called Hideous Mutant and Super King Kong, and during its 1982 grindhouse re-release, Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla. Horny? Really? I mean, the ape gives the finger, but not that kind of finger.
Where did this horny King Kong knockoff come from? Let’s begin with the film’s “auteur,” American exploitation writer/director Paul Leder. I want to talk about Leder because even a brief skim of Wikipedia paints a portrait of a pretty interesting guy.
Born in 1926, Leder started his career as a singer on The Goldbergs, a comedy-drama radio show starring radio legend Gertrude Berg that ran from 1929 to 1946. He served in World War II as an Army medic under George S. Patton, assisting survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp. That’s fuckin’ cool dude.
After the war, he sang and danced on Broadway opposite Phil Silvers in Top Banana (hmm, banana… foreshadowing?). He worked as an actor in the 1960s in films like The Grass Eater (1961), before finally making his directorial debut with the comedy The Marigold Man (1970), which Wikipedia simply describes as “dismal.”
The guy sounds like a real go-getter, despite more than a few whiffs and constant career reshuffling. But what struggling creative person hasn’t bounced between mediums in search of success? Regardless of how good Leder’s films were, he worked steadily for decades. He even made the cult splatter flick with one of the all-time great titles, I Dismember Mama (1972), a film I know best from grindhouse trailer compilations like Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell.
Outside of filmmaking, Leder was an activist for nuclear disarmament. But perhaps his greatest accomplishment, was as a father to filmmaker Mimi Leder, who went on to direct films like Deep Impact, The Peacemaker, Pay It Forward, and On the Basis of Sex, as well as numerous episodes of ER, which honored him at the end of the episode “Fire in the Belly” after his passing in 1996 at the age of 70.
So it was Paul Leder, ever the opportunist, who, in a post-Jaws world, looked at South Korea and saw exactly what he needed: a growing film industry, production-friendly policies, and dirt-cheap costs. The perfect place to bang out his big monkey movie *COUGH excuse me, “Ape movie”. My apologies. Or maybe Ape-pologies? That doin’ anything for ya?
A*P*E is a tale as old as time. At least as old as 1933, because the story bears more than a passing resemblance to King Kong. At the beginning of the film, a 36-foot gorilla (oddly specific height) is being transported via an oil tanker en route to South Korea. How did they capture him? I don’t know. What were they going to do with him? I don’t know either, but he gets loose and wastes no time chucking exploding barrels at innocent civilians on the South Korean shoreline. Kind of like Donkey Kong, but with more explosions.
Meanwhile, an American actress, Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns), arrives to much fanfare to shoot her next film in South Korea… or, as she calls it, “my first visit to the Orient.” Upon her arrival, she runs into her old flame, journalist Tom (Rod Arrants), who is there to cover Marilyn, and to cover his “first story in the Orient.” Did this many people still call it “the Orient” in 1976? You know what, Americans are dumb. They probably did. They probably still do.
Oh, and what kind of movie is Marilyn filming? I have no idea. All I know is there’s a scene in what appears to be a prison where a male actor shouts “You whore!” at her, calls her a slut, and then tries to assault her. Sounds like a hit!
Apart from Marilyn’s sure-to-be breakout picture and all the ape anarchy, we also cut back frequently to American Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol), who is being informed of the ape attacks and brushing them off. “If you bump into him, ask him if his name is King Kong!” How hard is it to convince someone there’s a 36-foot ape on the loose?
And on the loose he is, scaring schoolchildren, bouncing a paraglider on his palm, and fighting guys armed with ninja weapons and flaming arrows. This is all a blast. Cash grab or not (it was), you get the sense people were having fun making this movie. At the very least, there’s a vibe that none of this is being taken too seriously. I say that, but for all I know, Leder was a real taskmaster and shooting this movie was hell.
Again, if this movie were, I don’t know, an hour tops, it would go up half a star. Not all of the effects look good, but they are fun. It just gets old by the time the military shows up and we get that back-and-forth cutting between a man in a very obvious ape costume flailing his limbs and little toy tanks firing at him. Though it is around this time that the ape flips off the military, which has become the defining still frame of the film. I support it. #ApeStrong
If you recall, Paramount had a remake of King Kong that came out later that year, and it’s widely believed the production of A*P*E was expedited to capitalize on the hype for Dino De Laurentiis’s remake, which went on to be the third-highest-grossing movie of 1976. We call this phenomenon today a “Mockbuster”.
A*P*E did little to conquer the box office, and the film went over like a dead shark with critics. Paul Leder went on to direct another 19 films, though only two post-A*P*E have Wikipedia pages. So I’d wager they’re not great. BUT if the question is: “Is this a good killer ape movie?” Then the answer is resounding OOH, WAH-AH-AH-AH! Which in this case means yes.