Review of Ape

Ape (2012)
2/10
Decent no-budget flick, but not really worth your time..
25 April 2013
I saw this film at the Copenhagen Film Festival (CPH PIX), where the director, Joel Potrykus was also present, and he shared a handful of interesting facts about the film afterwards, among them being that the budget for the film was only around 2000 bucks, mostly going to catering the crew and transportation, so with that in mind, the end-result is actually quite impressing.

But, despite of this, the film has to be reviewed as a "real" feature-film, and not just some friends making a school-project, and in that regard, it falls completely flat in almost every way. The leading actor, Joshua Burge, playing the unfunny stand-up comedian Trevor Newandyke, is sympathetic enough, but generally just comes through as a lazy slacker bum, who doesn't want a real job, and would rather just hustle his way through life.. or "wing it", rather. All the other characters in the film are either just random bystanders, or similar goal-less slacker-types, like his colleague Dennis Spicer (Gary Bosek), who also deliver quite a few unfunny jokes throughout the movie.

For some reason, the director chose to throw in a few random scenes with a guy in a monkey-suit harassing Trevor, and a guy in a devil-suit doing the same, and quite a few scenes with Trevor using a spray-can as a flamethrower or throwing a poorman's Molotov-cocktail on the ground... again, for no reason whatsoever.

If you have absolutely nothing better to do with your time, and you love watching amateurish, "unfunny" unfunny movies with no real plot or character-development at all, this movie is perfect for you. For everybody else, it's not.

P.S: The director also mentioned, that all the jokes Trevor tells in the film, are actually his own bad jokes, from when he himself was a stand-up comedian, so you can't even tell him to "stick to his day-job" either, as the jokes really stunk.... hard.
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