A*P*E

1976 "See APE *defy the jaws of giant shark *destroy a teeming city *demolish an ocean liner *vanquish monster reptile"
2.7| 1h27m| PG| en
Details

A newly discovered 36-foot gorilla escapes from a freighter off the coast of Korea. At the same time an American actress is filming a movie in the country. Chaos ensues as the ape kidnaps her and rampages through Seoul.

Director

Producted By

Kukje Movies

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Reviews

ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!
Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews
AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
utgard14 Truly awful King Kong rip-off that is so bad you have to see it to believe it. The ape, said to be thirty-six feet tall, is just some guy in a cheap gorilla suit that the filmmakers got at a costume shop or a yard sale. This isn't even a full body ape suit. It's got sleeves with gloves. There are several instances where you can see the skin of the guy's wrists as he moves his arms about. That's the level of quality we're talking here. That's how few *beeps* this movie gives. He's filmed mostly from the chest up. When they do try to show you some scale for the ape's size, they do it with cheap stuff like toy boats and crummy miniature buildings. The ape also moves in slow motion throughout the movie. Let me be clear: they didn't slow down the film. The "actor" in the ape suit just moved really slowly to emulate slow motion! Like a kid playing make believe.The cast is especially bad. This is the film debut of Joanna Kerns, the mom from "Growing Pains." Her screams will haunt me for weeks. So unbelievably shrill. Be prepared to turn your volume down. Laughably, at one point while in the palm of the ape's hand, Kerns stops screaming and says "Be gentle with me, big guy." She returns to screaming almost immediately. Bizarre! Kerns has a romantic subplot with a very '70s-looking guy named Rod Arrants. They kiss a lot. Pretty much every time they are in the same scene, Arrants is all over her. Long-time character actor Alex Nicol plays a foul-mouthed Army Colonel here. I have to believe his performance is intended to be funny. It makes no sense any other way. Bruce MacRae is listed as responsible for the music. He should have been arrested and charged with assault. The score is relentless and will make your ears bleed.As the helicopters approach the ape, he stands there and makes these wild gestures with his arms. For the life of me, it looks a lot like he's dancing. Was the guy in the ape suit inebriated? Very likely. Further evidence of this is the scene where the ape flips off the Army. Yeah. The guy in the ape suit was loaded for sure. It's so terrible. There are lots of pointless scenes. Such as when the ape pulls a snake off of a tree and throws it -- hitting the camera! This goes nowhere. It just cuts away to another scene and when it returns to the ape he's moved on to something else. The only reason I'm giving this a 2 instead of a 1 is because of the unintended comedy. It's one of the worst movies ever made.
jfgibson73 A giant ape escapes from a ship and destroys a city. That's about it.I've read that this is a Korean made movie that tried to make money as a King Kong ripoff. Some of the stories about how this movie was made are more entertaining than watching the actual movie. Anyone who sits through this today could only be interested in the camp value, and there are a number of moments to laugh at. The movie has every problem that is generally associated with bad movies, such as bad dubbing, terrible dialog, stilted acting, and poor effects. What takes the fun out of the movie are the long stretches of repetitive or stagnant shots. For example, when the ape fights the shark, he swings it back and forth for what feels like five minutes straight. A guy in a bad ape costume with a dead shark. Swinging it around. Over and over. So for that reason, I would not want to sit through this one again. I had to watch it once, all the way through, just because of some strange fascination with how inept everything was. This might actually be the worst movie ever.
MartinHafer This film begins with an obvious toy boat being destroyed by a guy in a cheap gorilla suit--the sort you'd rent for just a few dollars at a costume shop. Then, he proceeds to destroy a bunch of buildings that look even cheaper and sillier than those found in the Japanese giant monster films from Toho Studios! Most of the time, he moves about in super-slow motion and does a whole lot of nothing. And, as he does not much at all, you hear circus-like music. This time, however, the movie is a bit different, as the extras are all Korean AND their command of English is amazingly bad--so bad that it's rather funny to hear some of them stumble over even the simplest words.Sadly, however, as the movie progresses, you learn that the cheap sets and guy in the gorilla suit and Koreans who can't speak English are the BEST aspects of the film!! That's because the acting is abysmal, the editing was done by a chimp, many scenes featuring screaming Korean peasants went on too long, the music highly inappropriate as well as annoying and the dialog is among the worst I've ever heard. Believe me, Ed Wood couldn't have made a gorilla film any worse than this (including his own BRIDE AND THE MONSTER).There are unnecessary subplots involving a rather bland-looking actress and her boyfriend as well as a Colonel who is a total idiot (and needs a good haircut to even remotely look military) and curses CONSTANTLY--possibly more than any character in the 1970s. Aside from these stupid subplots, the rest of the film is essentially KING KONG but set in a Korea that is chock-full of crappy sets.Overall, there really is nothing to recommend this film--unless you really need to see a guy in a gorilla suit flipping off the army (I kid you not--this REALLY happened in the movie). It's so bad, that it's a film almost exclusively for bad movie fans. It's also a great film for Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange or Dino De Laurentiis to watch so that they can see that by comparison, the poor 1976 KING KONG film is like a Merchant-Ivory production! However, I do NOT recommend that Kim Jong-Il see the film--he might be tempted to nuke South Korea, since they were responsible for this atrocity of a movie!
warlorde I must confess to liking giant monster movies, but this film is really just plain awful! Bad special effects, even worse acting, silly premise. By the way that big snake would be considered a monster! Anyway painful as it was I made it through to the end. I chuckled a few times while watching this mess, just not believing what I'm seeing or hearing.1 out of 10, for bad movies beware 5 out of 10. Suffer with me.