When reviewing a Troma-style film, you pretty much have to throw all conventional review focuses like acting, directing, story, and camera work directly in the trash and replace them with things like fun level, gore factor, number of bad references, and how many times you hear or see the crew during a shot. Director and writer Addison Binek (Tromasterpiece Theatre) aims to please all the Troma-style horror fans with his most recent film, Psycho Ape!
In Psycho Ape!, a killer ape (and totally not a man in an ape suit, played by Steve Albers) escapes the Detroit Zoo and goes on a murderous rampage. It begins with crashing the sleepover over of teenage ape-infatuated Nancy Banana (Kansas Bowling) and her teenage friends, leaving Nancy for dead. Twenty-five years later, the ape (who now seems to be regular Business Ape) sees Nancy on the news and must find her, while still being hunted by the obsessed zookeeper that kept him prisoner, Dr. ZOOmis (Bill Weeden).
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The film is just plain fun. Show me a horror fan who doesn’t like watching a guy in an ape suit murdering helpless bystanders with bananas, and I’ll show you a liar. Although the main premise of the film directly follows John Carpenter’s Halloween, it is chock-full of other ape-related story references (King Kong, Planet of the Apes, Congo) to break the issues of replication. The film does go a little hard on reference jokes, to the point of me saying out loud, “Alright, alright, I get it!” but the intentional silliness didn’t turn me away at all.
The gore and goop were a mixed bag of low budget practical effects and cheap computer effects. Some were better than others, but all were hilarious. Some scenes went more realistic, like stomping bloody brains into a sidewalk, while others took the more comical approach of just throwing some blood and severed rubber limbs into a bathtub with a body or throwing a clothed skeleton off a building. I could have gone without the overlay blood splashes on the screen but understand that ruining your camera with fake blood kind of defeats the purpose of keeping things low budget. Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of gross blood splatter to go around.
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Most of jokes landed well. Troma-style films have a knack for purposely running jokes into the ground and going in with that expectation helps. Psycho Ape! is no exception as it hammers some of the same jokes repeatedly throughout the film. My only real issue was with the amount of time spent on a few specific lengthy jokes. Certain scenes seemed to drag on to pad screen time. The film was only an hour long and it would have made no negative difference to me if it were 10 minutes shorter, cutting down on some of the joke repetition.
One of my biggest takeaways from Psycho Ape! was that it felt good to watch people doing what they love and having so much fun with it. That has always been such a focus from some of the Troma greats like Lloyd Kaufman or Michael Herz. Sometimes it’s tough to remember that film is art, and a representation of the artist. Art doesn’t always have to be about the sad or angry emotions. Happiness and fun can come through just as much, and it spreads cheer to those that absorb it. Is Psycho Ape! going to win any major awards or be at the top of anyone’s best horror films? Absolutely not, and that is what Addison Binek wants. He just wants you to smile.
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