TheBloodyApe

The Bloody Ape (1997)

A carnival barker named Lampini is having a rough time of it. His mechanic can’t or won’t fix his car, his jeweler tries to sell him a glass engagement ring, and the love of his life leaves him! This drives Lampini to train his gorilla to attack, rape, and kill anyone that smells of bananas. Using this training he then unleashes the gorilla on his enemies, who are mangled and killed in all sorts of unpleasant ways. The police, after receiving a description of the killer, immediately assume that it is a black man and go off in pursuit. In the end everyone gets what they deserve, that is except for the innocent man accused of the crimes.

What can you say about a movie that stars a guy in a gorilla suit? The movie is at times goofy, like when the gorilla steals a car and kills someone with it. At other times it feel much like an old school exploitation movie, with the gorilla getting some unwilling loving from his female victims before dispatching them. Hell just the dialogue, which is not at all politically correct, will turn many people off with it’s use of racial slurs. Toss in a musical number, several long scenes of people walking around, and a hippy that gets his junk torn off by the ape and you have a real throwback to the days of the grind house cinema. The acting is also about what you would expect in an old grind house movie, which isn’t that good. Here the cast is hamming it up and delivering overly dramatic and poorly written lines of dialogue. For most of the cast this is their only screen credit, which makes me think they were all amateurs, which makes sense. But please don’t get me wrong because I think the overacting and cheesy dialogue is actually sort of fun.

Technically this is clearly a low budget independent movie. First of all the gorilla suit is the goofy looking kind that you can rent from any costume store. The attempts at special effects aren’t that complicated and look like someone rubbing raw meat on the “victims”. But when I sit back to watch a movie like this I am willing to cut them some slack, so I give them a “A” for effort here, though it isn’t well done at all. What really surprised me was how poorly the rest of the movie was made. First of all I appreciate the fact that they shot this on super 8 rather than video. This alone gives the movie a grainy look that you can only really get on film. But the equipment they used leaves a bit to be desired. You have frames where the camera can’t stay in focus and goes in and out. Also the audio isn’t very good at times and it is hard to hear the dialogue. There are also scenes where you can clearly hear the camera clicking along as it films. Why this is the case in only some scenes and not others I don’t have a clue.

The DVD also contains a special feature called Grind house Gorilla making of the Bloody Ape. This is a nifty little (23 minutes long) documentary that interviews the director and some of the cast members. While I’m not terribly hot on the movie I really like the director, Keith J. Crocker, and dig what he was trying to accomplish. I did get a chuckle out of his insistence that the movie was trying to address some breakdown in communication and was an anti racism movie because all the racists were basically bad guys. Funny stuff and is definitely worth checking out if you pick up the DVD or rent it.

The Bloody Ape is a nostalgic attempt to recapture the magic that was the low budget grind house and drive-in movies of the late 60s and 70s. Unfortunately many of those movies are at best mediocre and many times just terrible. For me the Bloody Ape isn’t terrible, but I do think it is mediocre. If you are a big fan of the exploitation movie then you might be interested to watch this once. To everyone else I don’ think this is going to hold much interest. You have been warned. This DVD is available from Wild Eye and is very affordable. Check out their website at http://www.wildeyereleasing.com/ for more on this and the other great DVDs that they have available.

2 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer