Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #147 Going Ape! (1981)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

When I was a young man, I had the outsized ambitions of a young man. I wanted to both travel the world and make my mark on it. I wanted to publish a book every year, each more popular than the last. 

I wanted to live one of those epic literary lives full of adventure and achievement. I wanted to give speeches and write novels and screenplays and attain a state of mastery with my craft. I wanted to make my fortune in the market and be in a position to retire at forty. 

When I was a young man burning with energy and ambition I wanted everything, and I didn’t want to have to wait for it. Why should I? I’m an American. Entitlement is in our DNA. As a forty-four year old dad and small businessman just barely holding on, I just want to not lose what I have left.

My ambitions have changed. I’ve downsized my life goals so dramatically that they barely even qualify as ambitions any more. They’re more like vague goals now. I have, for example, committed myself to watching and writing about every primate-themed comedy ever made out of a strange combination of misplaced duty, morbid curiosity and professional masochism. 

Name a more iconic duo. I’ll wait.

I am certainly not doing this for pleasure. I can assure you that there is little to no pleasure to be gleaned from watching and writing about movies like 1987’s Goin’ Bananas or 1981’s Going Ape! Nor is there any pleasure to be acquired, guilty or otherwise, from forcing yourself to watch the Matt LeBlanc monkey baseball movie  Ed or Clint Eastwood’s twin exercises in apesploitation, Any Which Way You Can and Every Which Way But Loose. 

These are all joyless, mirthless endeavors to be endured rather than enjoyed. Don’t let the literal and figurative monkeyshines and wackiness fool you: these are tragedies rather than comedies. This is particularly true of the poor performing animals involved, who are forced to suffer the torments of the damned for our non-enjoyment. 

One of the orangutans used in Any Which Way You Can was beaten to death by its trainer for purloining donuts from the craft table. I would feel terrible being amused or entertained by commercial enterprises rooted in animal abuse but there is no amusement or entertainment to be had from these crimes against film as well as the animal kingdom. 

A kind patron has been paying for me to explore the sometimes wonderful, sometimes woeful filmography of pint-sized national treasure Danny DeVito. Being a generous soul, he did not want to subject me to Going Ape! but I insisted on covering it anyway due to my weird, half-formed obsession with seeing all of the simian-based cinematic comedies, no matter how unbelievably abysmal. 

No one can accuse Going Ape! of deceptive advertising. Everything about it promises hot, steaming, unapologetic garbage. It delivers! Going Ape! isn’t a title: it’s a warning that wackily but unmistakably conveys, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” to moviegoers tempted to discover for themselves just how bad a movie like this could be. 

The answer? Even worse than you think. 

Going Ape casts an exhausted and defeated Tony Danza as Foster Sabatini, a directionless young man from a prominent family of superstar circus folk. Foster’s old man Max is so successful, in fact, that when he dies he leaves Foster five million dollars with an unfortunate condition: he must look after his three beloved orangutans for two years.

If Going Ape! was an actual movie, it would feature at least a montage sequence taking Foster from a place of skepticism and defiance to one of acceptance and affection with his brood of antics-prone apes. Going Ape! Is not a real movie, however, so it skips directly from Foster being apoplectic at the conditions of his inheritance to assuring his mortified girlfriend Cynthia (Stacey Nelkin) that his beloved orangutans are highly intelligent and should be treated just like people.

That’s because the sassy simians are played by  Bobby Berosini's orangutans, a top troupe of wacky apes that headlined Vegas and sold out shows before PETA released a grainy video of Berosini appearing to physically abuse his animals. 

It’s difficult, if not downright impossible, to enjoy physical comedy you suspect is the product of a psychotic animal handler electrocuting a poor orangutan’s genitals to manipulate it into making a silly face. 

Along with the orangutans, Foster inherits Lazlo, his father’s fiercely loyal sidekick and protege. DeVito plays the eccentric circus performer as a bizarrely misguided homage to two of his Taxi costar Andy Kaufman’s most beloved and hated characters. 

Lazlo combines Kaufman’s Foreign Man with Tony Clifton in the least interesting, least entertaining manner imaginable. Like Kaufman’s Foreign Man, he is an uncomprehending, child-like immigrant. He alternates between quoting nonsensical aphorisms from Max, his great teacher and guru, and spouting untranslated, non-subtitled gibberish in a random, vaguely European foreign language like he was a Wookiee in the Star Wars Holiday Special or something. Yet he’s also a feral man-beast with an eye for the ladies like Clifton. 

In Going Ape! Lazlo understandably has a huge hard-on for Cynthia’s mother Fiona (Jessica Walter). Yes, Jessica Walter of meme and Arrested Development fame. Walter sure does class up the joint with her presence, even if every moment she was onscreen I found myself wondering what on earth it must feel like to work hard to master your craft and find your voice as an artist and express your truth through acting and then arrive at a point in your career where you’re acting opposite a trio of outrageous orangutans.

Ape (Left) Jessica Walter (right)

Foster needs to keep the animals alive for two years or his father’s fortune will go to the Zoological Society, who dispatch a pair of bumbling hitmen to murder the orangutans before Foster can collect the five million dollars. 

This is consequently a dumb lowbrow comedy for very small children predicated on bumbling criminals repeatedly attempting to murder animals for financial gain. It features 3 Stooges-style slapstick only dumber and even further down the evolutionary food chain because charmless apes are the ones engaged in shenanigans. 

Going Ape!’s tries to convince us that these orangutans each have very distinct, very different, very entertaining and very anthropomorphic personalities but the only one that stood out is the one that’s sweet on its owner and consequently feels very threatened by human women expressing a romantic interest in what she sees as her man. 

This is such a bizarre movie that when there’s a nitrous oxide leak in Foster’s apartment and Foster and his girlfriend start laughing uncontrollably about all the horrible things that have happened since Foster inherited the monkeys I initially thought they were laughing because they had finally cracked mentally and laughing big, loud, inappropriate laughter was the only way they could keep from crying.

In a real switcheroo, Danza and DeVito went from starring on Taxi, a cinematic sitcom legendary for its sophistication and quality to a big-screen sitcom notorious for its unbelievable stupidity. 

Most of Going Ape! takes place in Foster’s apartment as he tries to keep the apes’ presence a secret from his landlord but in the third act there is a wild chase that feels like a lame outtake from one of Clint Eastwood’s Clyde the Orangutan movies but at least gets the movie out of its one boring location for a while. 

Writer-director Jeremy Joe Kronsberg worked on the screenplay for both of those movies, Any Which Way You Can and Any Which Way You Lose, leading the Internet Movie Database to claim that Kronsberg is “often referred to as the godfather of the modern ape chase movie.”

Kronsberg did a terrible job with those screenplays. He does an even worse job here. He may be the godfather of the modern ape chase movie but he also fucking sucks.

Suffering through Going Ape at least brought me one big step closer to finally being able to check “Watch and write about all American monkey and ape-based comedies” off my Bucket List.

Even though Going Ape! runs a mere 87 minutes do not waste a minute of your life watching it. Leave that to professional masochists like myself, who engage in this kind of monkey business so that you don’t have to.

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