THE BLOODY APE *** USA 1997 Dir: Kevin Crocker. 77 mins
That sound you hear is Edgar Allan Poe turning (or, perhaps, wanking) in his grave at being credited for inspiring this horny, rough-and-ready Super 8 “homage” to the oft-filmed “Murders in the Rue Morgue”. You’ll know quite early on as to whether this is your cup of snuff: if you like your camerawork to always be in focus and don’t find the line “Your cock smells like an ape” thigh-slappingly funny, it might not be for you.
For the most part, it’s an enjoyably grungy, eager-to-please tribute to 42nd Street sleazebag cinema and quite nicely captures the feel of earlier, affectionate, knowing schlock like Henenlotter’s BASKET CASE. It’s a movie in which a naked brunette with a big hairy bush is raped by a homicidal gorilla who cums on her arse cheeks and then hollows her out like a canoe with tits. Which automatically makes it more fun than all those painfully protracted true-crime shows on Netflix in which around an hour of actual content is padded out to four via lots of scenes of people sitting at computers in dramatically backlit rooms.
The cast is populated by irredeemable scumbags like Larry Koster’s fat, masturbating mechanic, Salvatore Finkel’s deliberately stereotyped Rabbi and Paul Richicki’s carnival barker. It’s from the latter’s circus that the eponymous horny, violent ape escapes. Richicki is hot on the trail of the dangerous primate, though keeps getting distracted by the need to serenade his girlfriend with romantic epithets like “My love for you is as deep and wide as the expansions of your vaginal cavity”.
THE BLOODY APE is too cheap to edit out moments where actors are clearly corpsing, and the relentlessly chintzy Wurlitzer score will drive you insane, but its dedication to thrusting a (dirty) middle finger in the face of Political Correctness is adorable. More importantly, it’s a movie in which a guy describes his beloved as “the crab in my crotch” while a rapey 400lb gorilla rips a rubbery nipple from an ugly lesbian and runs over a racist traffic warden.
Review by Steven West
THE BLOODY APE IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON