I have to hand it to writer/director Mark Polonia. He wanted to make a crossbreed of a futuristic Women in Prison flick and a Planet of the Apes rip-off and he went out and did it. He didn’t care that he only had $20 in his pocket. He went out and did it. He didn’t care that the ape masks were so cheap that they made the troll masks in Troll 2 look like products of the Rick Baker Make-Up Academy. He went out and did it. He didn’t care that the special effects looked like something a kid could’ve made with Mario Paint. He went out and did it. He didn’t care that the sound was so bad that you couldn’t hear what the actors in the ape masks were saying. He went out and did it. He didn’t care that the sets looked like something out of a second graders’ school play. He went out and did it. He didn’t care that the spaceship props looked suspiciously like the space gun props that were simply repainted and repurposed. He went out and did it. He didn’t care that the production design of this film made the production design of his Amityville in Space look like Star Wars in comparison. He went out and did it. He didn’t care that the only good line of dialogue was when the leader of the apes targeted the human heroines for “an aggressive reproduction campaign”. He went out and did it.
I think the biggest takeaway from Empire of the Apes is that if Polonia can go out and do it, maybe you can too.
So, we got * for technical filmmaking craft. **** for sheer chutzpah for making a movie this ambitious with no technical filmmaking craft. That comes in at about a ** ½ average. Now, part of me wants to give it a lower rating because it’s all REALLY uneven, but I can’t completely dismiss any movie that ends with a woman giving birth to a half-human, half-ape potential savior of mankind, so there’s that.
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