In 1982 the film It Came From Hollywood was released. It is a documentary film with a compilation of clips from “Bad Movies” drawing heavily on the book The Golden Turkey Awards. There is a short clip of a film not covered in the book that I was unfamiliar with that featured a giant ape being attacked by helicopters. The man in the ape suit is slapping around toy helicopters on strings, knocking them into paper mache mountains. This was a low budget version Korean knock-off of what the Japanese had been doing much better for years with the Godzilla series. The highlight from the clip of this battle is when the ape flips the bird at the camera. He’s not flipping off the military, he’s flipping off the audience.
Years later, I became obsessed with 3-D films on Blu-ray discs. I learned that this short clip was from a 3-D film called A*P*E when it was released on 3-D Blu-ray. This quickly became one of my favorite bad movies and 3-D films. The 3-D effects have plenty of pop-out moments that make these films fun. But the appeal of this movie comes from the poor use of special effects to make the giant ape seem giant. One scene that shows this well has the ape walking through the countryside. He encounters some cows. As he walks down the hill, he goes by a normal size tree, destroying the illusion that he is a giant ape. They show some footage of some real cows followed by a clip of the ape foot crushing some obviously toy cows.
The female love interest is played by Joanna Kerns, most famous for playing Maggie Seaver on the television series Growing Pains. One of the highlights is when she is being held by the ape and tells him “Be gentle big fella”.
The film was made in 1976, the same year that Dino De Laurentis released his remake of King Kong. The company originally promoted their film with the title The New King Kong but was changed to Super Ape due to a lawsuit from RKO, who produced the original King Kong. During its original release, the name was changed to A*P*E which was supposed to stand for Attacking Primate MonstEr. The title was also supposed to be a parody of M*A*S*H. The film has a scene with the ape fighting with a shark, apparently trying to cash in on a connection with Jaws. The poster of the film highlights this scene. Seems like none of these rip-off ideas worked very well. But the film is extremely entertaining in a bad way. It is worth searching out even if you can only find a flat version.