A*P*E (1976)

Imagine a movie so inept, it makes every Ed Wood film look like The Deer Hunter. That would be A*P*E, a joint American/South Korean attempt to cash in on Dino DiLaurentiis' remake of King Kong.

How big a rip-off is it? Characters make repeated references to King Kong; the female lead (Joanna daVarona) is a Hollywood actress working with a director named Dino (Paul Leder, co-writer, producer and director of A*P*E); the monkey grabs the woman and takes off with her; and due to threats of legal action by Paramount, the trailer reads, “Not to be confused with King Kong.”

Produced at about the same cost as a Happy Meal, A*P*E tells of a 36-foot gorilla who is captured in Harlem. What was he doing in Harlem? How the hell should I know? Anyway, the ape is now being transported to Disneyland aboard a cargo ship. (That's right: New York to L.A. by boat.) For unexplained reasons, the bathtub toy—er, ship—is presently off the Korean coast. When the boat explodes (also for unexplained reasons), our simian pal escapes captivity and gets into a long, tedious fight with a great white shark that is clearly a rubber prop. It's also damned near as long as the ape is tall. He later tangles with a snake who is similar in length to the shark. Seems our King Kong wannabe ain't the only big-ass creature in these parts—not that a single person ever mentions the other giants.

The film has trouble establishing the ape's height. Though supposedly 36 feet tall, in some scenes he looks no bigger than the average human. When he escapes from the cargo ship and stands up in the ocean, it barely comes up to the ape's chest. He also towers over buildings that are many stories tall.

When he first gets news of the odd goings-on outside of Seoul, U.S. Army Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol), on the phone, bellows, “What kind of bullshit are you handing me? A footprint five to six feet long? This is Korea, not Scotland! The Loch Ness Monster couldn't make it over the Berlin Wall.” (Gosh, not even for tree-fiddy?) Near the end, as the Army delivers the killing blow to the ape, a jubilant Colonel Davis comes out with another gem: “Let's see him dance for his organ grinder now!”

Meanwhile, U.S. journalist Tom Rose (Rod Arrants) takes a more philosophical approach: “He was just too big for our small world.”

Item: The title is an acronym for—get this—Attacking Primate MonstEr. I swear I'm not making that up! As for the stars in the title, I'm guessing it was an allusion to M*A*S*H. Of course, the only similarity is that A*P*E also takes place in South Korea—some 20+ years after the Korean War ended, but still.…

Item: The ape suit has a hole in it through which the actor's T-shirt is visible.

Item: The original theatrical release was in 3-D. That part was handled just as poorly as the rest of the film. Though I did not see A*P*E in 3-D, I've read that the process they used called attention to the sizes of the miniature mountains, buildings, roads and vehicles. Also, there are close-ups of soldiers firing toward the camera at an angle that might have hit the ape in his toes.

Item: We see the same stock footage of assorted military vehicles over and over. We also get protracted scenes of Korean fire engines racing to an ape-made inferno. We're even treated to the process by which they unhook the hoses and ladders from their trucks! I'd say director Leder needed to pad out the film's running time.