Dir. Addison Binek & Greg DeLiso (2024)
25 years after the events of the first film, Dr. ZOOmis and Nancy are interrupted by another appearance of the psycho ape.
I'm a big fan of director Addison Binek, who I got a chance to speak to shortly after the premier of his super-indie hit Psycho Ape! last year. The original film was so damn fun and absolute insanity, one of the lowest budgeted films I've ever seen and yet somehow better than so many other films with ten times the spending power. Binek's brand of ridiculous and hilarious horror was right up my alley, lampooning so many of my favorite films and doing a stellar job of making a movie that you feel like you could make while also remaining one that you can't take your eyes off of.
I won't try to explain the plot of Psycho Ape II: The Wrath of Kong because it's almost entirely nonsensical. It takes place twenty five years after the events of the original, and then twenty five years after that, and then twenty five years after that... Basically, Dr. ZOOmis (Bill Weeden) and Nancy (Kansas Bowling) from the original film are still friends all these years later, and Psycho Ape (Floyd Cashio) is finally being released from prison. As the newly formed trio re-experience Psycho Ape's trial in a mixture of dream sequences, ghostly visitations, and all sorts of straight-up stolen scenes from much better films, the audience gets an inside look at just what in the world is always going on inside the filmmakers' noggins.
Psycho Ape II is filled with references to films like Reservoir Dogs and Psycho, and there's so much going on in nearly every scene that it feels like an indie fever dream with monkeys. The gore is almost entirely digital, and what practical effects exist are so laughably fake, and intentionally so, that you can't help but laugh your ass off at the audacity of even making a film like this at all. There's even a scene in which Bill Weeden, the 84-year-old actor known for Troma's Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D., delivers a full frontal nude scene in a recreation of the "French girls" scene from Titanic. Why? Fuck if I know.
There's a good bit of this film that feels almost like a scam, as if the filmmakers got $14,000 from Indiegogo backers, bought a bunch of tickets to Los Angeles, and just filmed whatever they were doing to put it together and call it a "movie." In fact, I'm almost entirely sure that's what happened. The result is somehow comedic gold, a slapdash conglomeration of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking, nudity, and lots and lots of bananas. I literally cannot explain this film in a way that makes it seem entertaining, but holy hell is it entertaining. It's the type of movie that you get to the end of and aren't entirely sure that you didn't fall down and hit your head, and that the last hour-plus of film wasn't just your brain's last neurons firing blindly as your soul slowly seeps from your body into whatever exists of the afterlife. But, like, in a good way.
Lots of "errors" abound, almost giving the audience a look behind the camera as you occasionally will hear the directors giving cues to the actors on-screen. Multiple takes of the same scenes appear in the film, giving an almost psychedelic feeling to a lot of the film. And somehow, it all works. Psycho Ape II is a ridiculously over-the-top comedy that was made for $14,000 and somehow feels like that was an overpay. You don't watch Psycho Ape II, you experience it. And, in the end, when you gaze into Psycho Ape II, Psycho Ape II gazes also into you.
Who this movie is for: Indie horror comedy fans, Z-movie fans, Zoologists
Bottom line: Man, Psycho Ape II is so much damn fun. It's one of the worst made films I've ever seen, and I'm not even entirely sure that "film" is an accurate descriptor, but I loved every minute of it. A bizarre mishmash of ear piercings, random murder scenes, and movie parodies fill just over an hour of the craziest indie horror comedy that you've ever seen. It's utter nonsense, and if Addison Binek and Greg DeLiso make a hundred more of these films, I'll watch every goddamn one of them.
