Ape Girl (1979)

Hell has no fury like a monkey scorned!

Ape Girl must have been a fever dream of writer Hou Cheng because it was several bananas short of a bunch. A combination slapstick, beauty makeover, cross-species (?) kung fu flick with little coherent writing made almost bearable by a simian performance from little known actress Chin Feng Ling. It was burdened by an abundance of over the top cringey humor and in the version I watched almost unintelligible dubbing for some of the characters.


Some spoilers follow---
A kung fu master finds a girl in the jungle who had been raised by apes or is an ape, the story changes back and forth from scene to scene on what she actually is. Ape Girl is hairy and has a tail but otherwise looks like a human, a human trying out for the Broadway show "Cats". The apes in the first scene looked like Teletubbies on crack. The master takes her back home, teaches her to speak and write and refines her natural monkey kung fu. Like a curious kung fu monkey she gets into trouble wherever she goes and in one scene is helped out by the 4th Prince played by kung fu legend Chen Sing. She falls in love with him, follows him, and is brought on as his bodyguard. The Prince is charming and attentive, but it's Chen Sing so we know he will have a nefarious plan waiting to hatch. The Prince is attacked by an assassin, Lo Lieh, another kung fu legend, and the two fight it out. Chen Sing never met a shirt he didn't want to take off, but unlike the striking Bruce Lee, no one was every hoping he'd rip his shirt off in a fight. His nefarious plan is revealed when he tricks Ape Girl into retrieving the emperor's will so that he can change it so that he will inherit the crown.

When our little Ape Girl discovers the Prince thinks she's ugly in two shakes of a monkey's tail she rushes to the Master's friend to have the ultimate depilation treatment. The treatment takes place over three days which is interrupted by the Master, leaving her smooth and beautiful but with a tail still attached. The Master hadn't wanted her to transform because then like all other girls she would fall in love and have her heart broken. The Master trains her how to use her tail in kung fu, I kid you not, and confines her to his property.

Ultimately, she finds out about the Prince's betrayal. For some reason Lo Lieh has changed teams and is a bad guy now and the 8 Heroes show up out of nowhere and it's on like Monkey Kong with Chen taking his shirt off---again!

The fight choreography by Wang Tai Lang was engaging for the most part. Chin Feng Ling was quite athletic and nimble. She seemed to take delight in her monkeyisms and playful fighting. And when it was time to strangle people with her tail she was up for that, too. Lo Lieh and Chen Sing are two of my favorite old school stars and I was delighted to watch them fight each other. Ape Girl swung about with occasional wire-fu but most of the other fighters kept their feet on the ground.

The quality of this old Taiwanese movie has degraded. It didn't look like a big budget film to begin with. For the most part it was on par with a lot of these old martial arts movies made there. The soundtrack was funky 1970's music that could have come straight out of a US cop show.

I wish I could say this was more fun than a barrel of monkeys, but there was just too much monkeying around with the script leaving all logic scattered about like a three day bad banana binge. If the cringey humor hadn't gone on fur so long, I might have enjoyed it more. The fight scenes were fun and Chin was interesting to watch in them, the rest of the movie was painfully bad. If you run across this movie, before it makes a monkey out of you, find the nearest vine and swing far, far away.






7/21/22

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