Tag: 3-D

Comin’ at Ya! (1981)

COMIN’ AT YA! (1981) ***
Certain movie titles just don’t lie about their contents and intents.

For example, Comin’ at Ya (Bye-bye, exclamation point! You only get one, baby), because it keeps every object and every Spaghetti Western hallmark coming straight at us for 90 minutes. We get the objects because Comin’ at Ya inaugurated the resurgence of 3-D movies, a wave of exploitation that included such followers as Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone and The Man Who Wasn’t There, not to mention Friday the 13th Part III, Jaws 3-D, and Amityville 3-D.

I’ll try and not spoil all the fun by revealing every object thrown at the screen, but I will say that Comin’ at Ya absolutely loves arrows and works in a yo-yo showcase. Trust me on this one, you’ll go bats during Comin’ at Ya.

American actor, writer, producer, and director Tony Anthony, not the British Christian evangelist or the retired professional wrestler better known by his professional name Dirty White Boy, made a living in recycled Spaghetti Westerns like A Stranger in Town, The Stranger Returns, The Silent Stranger, Blindman, and Get Mean before writing the original story and starring in Comin’ at Ya. He certainly knows his way around a cowboy hat and a horse.

Veteran movie viewers will recognize just about every Spaghetti Western standard trotted out by Comin’ at Ya, especially its revenge revenge revenge plot, landscapes derived from Leone, music derived from Morricone, and mannerisms derived from Eastwood. Comin’ at Ya director Ferdinando Baldi and his writing team of Wolfe Lowenthal, Lloyd Battista, Gene Quintano, Anthony, Esteban Cuenca, and Ramon Plana also use clichés older than cinema or even dirt itself, like a dying old man who musters just enough life to give our hero critical informational bits and then dies from his wounds after muttering his remaining life, er, his final word. How many times have we seen that one? No, please, don’t tell me, it’s a rhetorical question.

It’s about time I get around to mentioning Comin’ at Ya shells out big doses of bad dubbing.

Between all the 3-D and Spaghetti Western brandishing and bludgeoning, mostly badly dubbed, one might think that’s more than enough to recommend a single movie. That’s wrong, though, because Comin’ at Ya features one of the most beautiful women in the world, Spanish actress and singer Victoria Abril, early in her career. Abril later starred in four Pedro Almodovar films and played the bisexual housewife in the acclaimed French sex farce French Twist.

I recommend Comin’ at Ya for any true connoisseur of clunky cinematic junk.

A*P*E (1976)

A*P*E (1976) One-half star

Finally, now I can mark this one off the bucket list.

I have wanted to watch A*P*E ever since I bought an used copy of John Wilson’s “The Official Razzie Movie Guide” more than 12 years ago. The infamous shot of the man-in-a-suit ape flying the middle finger graces the front cover of the book and of course, I surrendered the hardly-earned on that beautiful book. Wilson wrote of the ape suit, “(It) looks more like your grandmother’s lamb’s wool coat collar than an actual simian.”

On December 2, 2019, a date that will live in Internet infamy, I watched A*P*E and it was even worse than I thought possible, believe it or not. Not sure why it even received a half-star.

This joint South Korean and American production cost an incredible $23,000, including a reported $1,200 for miniatures, and they filmed this 87-minute craptacular in a mere 14 days. Please keep in mind that Robert Rodriguez made EL MARIACHI for $7,000, so I am not knocking A*P*E because of its budget.

It was a quickie exploitation picture designed to cash in on the much hyped KING KONG released in late 1976. A*P*E originally announced itself as THE NEW KING KONG, but RKO filed a $1.5 million suit against Kukje Movies, the Lee Ming Film Co., and Worldwide Entertainment, the producers of A*P*E. They changed the title to APE (we are no longer stylizing a title of a movie with very, very, very little style) and added the tag “Not to be confused with KING KONG.”

APE (a.k.a. “Attacking Primate monstEr”) is so bad that it makes KING KONG ‘76 look much, much, much better.

Let’s start taking down APE flaw by flaw.

Prerequisite screen ingenue Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) and reporter Tom Rose (Rod Arrants) suck face through a lot of APE. I mean, get a room, for crying out loud. When they’re not sucking face, their mouths are utilized for uttering mushy-mouthed dialogue so bad that we prefer them sucking face.

There’s a scene where Miss Baker screams for what feels like an eternity. She probably screams more during this scene than Fay Wray, Jessica Lange, and Naomi Watts did in all their scenes combined in their respective KONG movies.

Between Miss Baker’s screams and two Korean children laughing for another eternity, I was blessed to not have a pencil nearby, because it’s quite possible that I would have grabbed it and jabbed both my eardrums until I could no longer hear.

I love how when they’re evacuating South Korean cities, the voice over the loud speakers speaks English. Guess that’s how imperialism works and this cheap KING KONG rip-off was the cinematic wing.

I shall regroup here and move away from imperialism. They filmed APE in 3-D and even if we did not know that coming in, we could figure it out for ourselves very quickly considering all the objects coming at us, including arrows, boulders, and that infamous middle finger.

The title character not only looks like a shoddy rug, but it is very distracting when he changes in size from scene-to-scene. He’s supposed to be 36 feet tall, but we don’t believe it for a single fleeting second.

In an early scene, the ape kills a shark, just another jab at JAWS. APE joins a club that includes GIANT SPIDER INVASION, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and ORCA THE KILLER WHALE.

APE arrived in theaters in October ‘76, beating KING KONG by two months. That’s the only thing APE had on KING KONG.