Aaaaaaaah!

Pant-hoot Suite

Aaaaaaaah!
UK 2015 Directed by Steve Oram
Fright Fest Blu Ray Zone B

Pant-hoot - noun: A breathy hooting or honking call uttered by a chimpanzee, typically in a series rising in a screaming crescendo and tailing off with quieter calls; a series of such calls.
Oxford Living Dictionary.

If you’ve seen Steve Oram’s movie which he co-wrote and starred in with Alice Lowe... Ben Wheatley’s  Sightseers (reviewed here)... you’ll no doubt already know that this guy’s film projects are worth watching. Even so, this movie was not even on my radar until a friend of mine recommended this film to me (along with a few others which will make interesting review material) when I was touring the merchandise stalls at the Frightfest last August. Well... I say recommended it. What happened was we were looking at the stall where all the Fright Fest* branded films were and I pointed to this one with a dubious title and a strange cover of a gorilla unzipping from a human suit and asked him if he’d recommend it. He looked at me with a smile on his face and said he really loved Aaaaaaaah! but that he was reticent to recommend it because it’s extremely bizarre. I then went on to explain to him that this statement was, in fact, the best recommendation he could give me so I went for the extremely ‘value for money’ purchase of the blu ray version. I didn’t realise just how ‘value for money’ that was until I finally got around to watching it this gem.

Aaaaaaaah! is one of the most insanely entertaining, completely unique and mesmerising movie watching experiences you can have. It's even just a little mind blowing in some places but... you know... mind blowing in that good way. If you’re anything approaching a cinephile or even a casual watcher of movies (like myself) then you really need to be grabbing this one and seeing what all the fuss is about as soon as possible.

Oh, wait a minute. What fuss? There hasn’t been any notable fuss about this and on checking the internet, I can’t even buy this for any of my American friends because it’s never even been released over there. This is definitely a 'crime against filmanity' right there and some wily distributor needs to rectify this as soon as possible.

The only thing I can liken this film to, in my history of watching good movies, is the very first time I watched David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Aaaaaaaah! is one of the great moments of movie art of the 21st Century and it needs to be seen by anyone who is in love with cinema. Although, saying that, it’s got some pretty strong imagery at times and it’s not exactly ‘safe for work’... or for relatives, for that matter.

So what is the film actually about? Well, I’m not 100% sure that’s the right kind of question for this kind of movie experience although it does, when you think back on it, have a sort of story to tell. This is how the movie starts off...

Steve Oram and his friend trek into a forest. Oram gets out a photo of a bride, presumably now deceased by the expression on his face. He puts it on the floor and, rather than bury it, his mate starts pissing on it before Oram stops him. Oram then whips his own cock out and starts defecating on said photograph, while the tears of grief are still streaming from his eyes. His mate then cleans the head of his penis and Oram goes to have sex with a tree while the other squats and watches, before they go off to see what else is going on.

After not very long you will realise that all of the inhabitants of the movie, who are speaking in grunts and groans and using their bodyies to communicate just as much as their vocalisations, are in fact apes. That’s the premise here... everybody is a physically a human being living in a, mostly, human world, but they are all of the mindset of apes and so you get a thorough and blindingly funny, dissection of the way their small tribes (or family units in human terms) interact with each other.

They have their own TV show showing a cooking programme, hosted by a lady with her breasts on display as part of her outfit as she prepares to roast a hog and also, cover it in sugar (or perhaps salt but my guess is sugar). When two ladies go out to do a bit of clothes shoplifting, they are caught by the manager and his assistant which, obviously, means they have to be molested by said shopkeepers... before one of the girls does something a little more drastic to cut short the assistant’s pleasures.

There’s even a party scene with various apetastic social interactions on display such as a courting ritual for Oram and one of the girls and a teabagging moment (which will lead to a heck of a lot of trouble for some of the characters later in the film). The shindig is presumably thrown by the mother figure of the household, played brilliantly by once-upon-a-pop-star Toyah Wilcox. In fact, all the actors in this are absolutely brilliant. If you want to see some absolutely amazing, Oscar worthy acting then this movie is the absolute epitome of unbridled expression to achieve an end. And we see the soft but ferocious hidden sides of characters too, like the one I call Battenburg man (played by Julian Barratt), who carries his Battenburg cake with him as a precious object and even, in one instance, uses it as a makeshift brush to help paint the walls of his new family’s home.

But it’s not just the acting, of course.

The point is, how did Oram’s mind actually map this thing out in the first place? He’s said he was watching a video of two tribes of gorillas, one of whom was attacked by the other and about the death and rape in that moment and the reflection of it by the male apes of the attacking tribe afterwards. Well, I don’t know how Aaaaaaaah! was filmed but I am assuming that the majority of the cast and crew had to get pretty familiar with the rituals and habits of the various ape families to be able to turn in the enthusiastic performance they did here. Especially since the whole thing was apparently shot in two weeks.  I’m assuming that there was a fair amount of improvisation on the set too but, as I intimated earlier, there’s certainly a structural narrative in place. I’m also pleased to say that the final denouement of the movie is something I did not, for once,  see coming... so I’m really pleased about that. The point is, though, the story line does kinda work towards that ending in a few sections of the film but I was sufficiently misdirected to not figure out what the end pay off to that was (and I’m not 100% sure now I'd have been able to second guess it anyway). But I do know it didn’t let me down.

The camera work is fairly roaming and energetic in certain places, as you’d expect, but the edit makes it all work really well and not seem jarring to the eye at any point. It’s already jarring to the mind in some places, to be honest, and that’s not a bad thing. Usually I rely on the score to unify this kind of stuff and, about that...

The film soundtrack uses a lot of synthesised, zany sounds and beats and I wasn’t sure about this matching up with the tone of the movie until I realised that this simplistic approach may well appeal to the apes/people inhabiting the movie and then it all clicked into place for me. So when we see montages like Oram and his new lady friend, played insanely well by Lucy Honigman, going shopping while he is still carrying around the arm he tore out of another character in the film, the music provides a narrative about the absurd simplicity and intensity of the lives we are watching, even as it helps glue the edit together. I’m actually not sure, now, whether those particular scenes I just described actually have any music on them but... you get the idea. It’s a clever modus operandi for the film and it works a treat.

And there’s not a heck of a lot more I can add to this, to be honest. Is this a solid recommendation from me? Yes, of course it is. I think anyone who’s into film should pop this on in the format of their choice, possibly cover it in sugar and watch it until their eyeballs show signs of falling out. Easily one of the most original works I’ve seen in quite some time and I’ve already inflicted it on one set of friends with, I expect, more to follow (yeah... sales of Aaaaaaaah! are going to be going up a little sometime soon, I reckon). Not something for everyone, I would say but, even if you don’t actually like the movie, it’s definitely an experience and you should probably, at least, try it once.

*Although why this movie was branded up with Frightfest is anybody’s guess... since it’s totally not a horror movie.

Simians and Serialism

Killer Serialism

Simians and Serialism: A History and Analysis of
Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes
by John O’ Callaghan
Pithikos Entertainment
ISBN: 978-1-5136-0066-6

STOP THE PRESS! This book had already sold out it's entire print run by the time I'd finished reading it and written this review. However, a limited reprint is now available from the author. Don't miss out on this second opportunity to acquire your own copy of this superb tome. You can purchase your book directly from the publishers here at http://pithikosentertainment.com/

When John O’ Callaghan brought it to the attention of the cantankerous Film Score Monthly message board community that he was about to publish a new book, Simians and Serialism, concentrating on Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes (the film is reviewed by me here and slightly updated in light of information disclosed in this new book) the response was much more enthusiastic than you may expect from the particular message board in question. The author wanted to gauge how big his print run should be and I was one of the many people who eagerly sent an email expressing interest in the project. I’ve always been an avid listener/buyer of film and television music and, naturally, Jerry Goldsmith is one of my favourites... one of the giants of musical composition to support the moving image. It’s also one of his best scores. I’ve often disagreed that the music is a serial score although, as it turns out, my belief that all serial music was strictly atonal music as the reasoning behind this was actually false. Because of this book I now know Schoenberg’s rules of serialism in music can, if you are as good a composer as Mr. Goldsmith, produce melody, harmony and rhythm and still be totally serial. So already this book gets a shining review from me because it taught me something... and it doesn’t stop there but I’ll come back to that in a minute.

When the book was finally ready for sale a few months later I found myself in the position of having to see if I could justify to myself the excessive shipping cost for overseas customers that was attached to the total price tag. I did try to find cheaper alternatives such as Amazon, Abe Books, Ebay and so on but it soon became fairly apparent that the only place I was going to be able pick up a copy of this was from the writer’s website. A week or so later I went to a live performance of the score, played against the film at the Royal Festival Hall, and so I enquired at the British Film Institute book store to see if they could get me a copy... actually thinking they’d already have some in stock to coincide with the show just along the same stretch of river from them. Alas, the BFI cupboard was bare but when it became clear the organiser of the concert had also been dipping into a fresh copy of the book, when he was joined by the conductor for a pre-concert talk... I realised that I really should just bite the bullet and go with it. The Pithikos Entertainment website was, indeed, the only game in town when it came to this particular tome.

Of course, the advantage of that was that, when the book did finally land, not long before the writer managed to impressively sell out his entire limited edition print run a week or two later, it was signed by John O' Callaghan himself.

Now, one of the things I have to make clear is that I don’t know a heck of a lot about music. Almost any of my friends would probably be able to tell you that I absolutely love music and have a particular penchant for motion picture scores but, when it comes to the notation of them, I haven’t a clue. I didn’t even realise until I asked my lady friend about one of the terms used in this book that when it comes to music, what I thought were called notes are actually called tones. Apparently, tones are the sounds and notes are strictly the ‘written form’ of the same... which was news to me but makes perfect sense to me semantically because, obviously, when you unscramble the letters of ‘tone’ you get ‘note’. So, yeah... note short for notation perhaps? I don’t know... I have no idea. But either way, a little of the murkiness in comprehension I was having from the cobwebs in my brain at some points in this book suddenly got brushed aside when she said that.

Of course, being English, music notation was a million miles away from the thorough and actually quite intriguing technical sections of this book compared to what I had been expecting. Where were the crotchets and minims and semibreves? What was all this fourths and fifths nonsense? I have to say that I got a heck of a lot from this book but I did struggle in the technical parts of the score analysis, for sure. Luckily for me, the writer also includes a handy glossary of terms at the rear end of this book so, if you are having trouble like I was at understanding certain of the more elaborate, technical sections... you at least have a ‘handy help’ section to refer to at the end.

It turns out that the author, a director in his own right, went to a lot of time and trouble to try and decode what is apparently the original ‘serial grid’ that Goldsmith must have been working from which, after a lot of musical detective work, became his Rosetta stone. So the score is pretty thoroughly analysed in this book but, even if you’re like me and not musically minded, there’s still plenty of other stuff to get your teeth into because O’ Callaghan did a lot of research into how all the movies in the series came to fruition and each one of those is also touched on. In fact, he uncovered a lot of information which has not been made public before, or possibly swept under the carpet it would seem, and which is only now seeing the light of day.

For instance... some myths are very quickly dispelled in the book. I myself have always been guilty, for instance, of attributing the famous trick ending of the movie, which isn’t in the book (the book is a lot different to the movie inspired by it), to writer Rod Serling because the endings on his famous TV series The Twilight Zone are exactly that kind of writing. However, from correspondence about the various drafts of the script and studies of said manuscripts etc, O’ Callaghan reveals that, although it was Serling's idea to have some kind of stronger ending... the idea of the famous Statue of Liberty reveal and all it implied came from other quarters. Serling worked on a couple of versions of that ending but not, by the looks of it, the one which they finished up with in the final film.

Information like this about the production and the way the varied movies were produced etc. are all over this book and it also goes for the development of the sequels including, of course, the choices for composer on each of the original five films. For instance, I didn’t realise that Jerry Goldsmith was originally attached to do the score for Beneath The Planet Of The Apes and it tells the story of why, in fact, he didn’t end up scoring it. There’s lots of telling, perhaps sometimes damning, information like this scattered throughout the details of Simians And Serialism. After reading it I felt, as much as I learned about the score to the first film, I also learned a great deal about how this motion picture got off the ground, how the production went and various other things about the stars, writers, directors and composers of the entire franchise that I didn’t know before... a fair amount of the information revealed in this book for the first time, it would seem.

All in all then, despite my inadequacies to fully appreciate some of the technical aspects of the score and its use of strict twelve tone serialism, I learned a hell of a lot from this tome and, if nothing else, it was a fascinating read. It’s definitely worth picking up and having a look at this one, for sure but, be warned, Apes fans who think they know their stuff might have to be prepared to have a few of their myths busted when they sit down to read this. One of the better books I’ve read on both films and film scoring in recent years and certainly a hearty recommendation from me. Hopefully the writer can be coaxed to go to a second print run sometime so that more people can get a chance to look this one up. I’m certainly glad I did.

Planet Of The Apes at NUTS4R2

Planet Of The Apes 

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

Planet Of The Apes TV Show (live action) - to be reviewed

Time Of The Apes - to be reviewed

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes  

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

War Of The Planet Of The Apes

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

Simians And Serialism - A History and Analysis of 

Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes 

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes

The Great [esc]Ape

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes
USA 1971
Directed by Don Taylor
20TH Century Fox
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, there’s an ending spoiler on this one too. Sorry. 

So the first sequel to the original film, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (reviewed by me here), was a guaranteed franchise ender... or so the film makers thought. What with them blowing up the entire world at the climax and all. What they hadn’t banked on, I guess, was that (terrible or not) the second film was a roaring success with the general public and a sequel was required. So how do you go about fixing that?

Well, quite creatively, as it happens.

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes is, for my money, the very best of the original sequels (just slightly better than then next movie in the series, which is also quite excellent). There was no way that the storyline could be continued any further forward in the future so the writers took the other direction and sent three apes, Cornelius, Zira and a character called Milo, back in time. This was Roddy McDowell’s second time playing Cornelius after having to stand out of the last film due to directing commitments (having somebody else copying his delivery in the role) and Kim Hunter’s third and final performance as Zira.

The film opens strongly with a brilliant sequence that would have been a whole lot stronger if people didn’t know this was supposed to be a Planet Of The Apes movie but... how do you get an audience to go to a movie without telling them what it is? So the really nice thing about the opening is that it starts off with a shot of a beach not dissimilar to the one on which Charlton Heston has his big, final moment in the original movie. It keys into the expectations of the paying customers that they are watching a scene about to unfold in Earth’s far future... like the previous two movies. Then the film nicely crashes that expectation when we realise we’ve got the noisy uproar of a helicopter on the soundtrack before seeing it come out from behind a cliff. We are in contemporary times, it seems. Well not really because the film was released in 1971 and I believe the time frame in which the film is set is two years later so, to offer up a cliche, we are in the 'near future'.

A space ship which we all recognise from the first two films is floating in the sea near the beach and the military have recovery operations well in hand... although I still don’t see how the insides of the craft as seen in the first film can even be possible, bearing in mind that the scale of the outside of the ship looks incredibly small in comparison and certainly not enough for one, let alone three passengers. As the astronauts, in full spacesuits, emerge from the capsule they are lined up on the beach and a military emissary from the US government offers his hand in friendship. It’s then that all the humans on the beach find out, by way of a sting, what we in the audience presumably knew all along... bearing in mind the title of the movie. The three apes, Cornelius, Zira and Milo, are revealed inside the space suits and Jerry Goldsmith’s awesome main title music kicks in as we see the apes escorted by the military as the credits play out.

It’s a bold move for the writing team as they try and do a reversal of the 'fish out of water' aspect of the original apes film, this time with the apes being treated as dumb and locked up... until they finally reveal their powers of speech and make obvious their already apparent intellect. It does so, however, with a lot of humour which is undercut by a quiet sense of menace as the human “bad guy” of the story, Dr. Hasslein, played by Eric Braeden (a character which is mentioned by both sets of humans in the previous two movies) tries to find out the facts about the apes' future civilisation that they are keeping to themselves while the 'good' Doctors Dixon and Brantan, played by Bradford Dillman and Natalie Trundy, try to make sure the apes are protected and not exploited, or worse, at the hands of contemporary, human society. Interestingly, like McDowell, Natalie Trundy was in four of the five original apes movies (all the sequels) but she played both apes and humans in different movies.

The film makes a lot of the natural comedy hijinks which ensue when, for example, the apes dress themselves in front of the unknowing humans and, when being presented with three oranges, set the table with plates and use knives and forks. Other comedy moments come from Zira outwitting all the ‘pet psychiatrist’s’ intelligence tests in a few minutes, leading into her solving a way to reach the banana which is being dangled for her as a reward. When she just sits on the steps and ignores the food offered, she becomes annoyed by her captors’ lack of ability to understand why she is leaving the morsel and exasperatingly shouts at them... “Because I loathe bananas!” The effect of the apes first words in the presence of humans is priceless and a nice comical counterpoint to Heston’s own speech revelation, “Take your hands off me you damn, dirty ape!” of the first movie.

The film plays the comedy route for quite a while with the apes becoming celebrity figures and using their reactions to the segments of human society they are exposed to in a critical, satirical  and often truthful way... such as Cornelius’ shock at the exploited barbarism of a boxing match or Zira’s strong, guest speech on the liberation of women. There’s nothing particularly innovative in the movie but it is immensely entertaining and a lot frothier than any of the other entries in the series. That being said, when Dr. Hasslein gets the now pregnant Zira drunk on “grapejuice plus” aka champagne, he begins to uncover the truth about life in the future and aims to get more information.

Its then that the film’s dark heart comes into play and the last act of the movie is much bleaker and distressing in tone. Under sodium pentathol, Zira spills all the beans about dissecting humans, using them for target practice and the war which destroys the planet... which has the government running scared. Meanwhile, the back story that Cornelius gives of apekind’s rise to humanity is, frankly preposterous in terms of continuity of the series. In the first film, set a very short time after the previous and, again, hardly any time at all in terms of ape chronology, from this installment, it’s made clear that the apes mostly know nothing at all of their evolution from man. What limited knowledge there is in that direction is kept secret and repressed by such officials as Dr. Zaius. So when Cornelius starts telling the story of the day the talking ape Aldo stood up to his human masters and said “No”... it’s a great story. However, when he says te day is celebrated by all ape kind it makes no sense because, frankly, the apes of the future depicted in the first and second installments have absolutely no idea that mankind was ever a thinking, intelligent animal.

However, the consequences of Zira’s revelations about ape/human interaction in her time and the ultimate destruction of Earth is what the last part of the film are about. It’s ordered that Zira’s pregnancy is to be officially terminated by the government and the apes sterilised. Meanwhile, Cornelius accidentally kills one of their captors and so the manhunt... err... ape hunt begins. Doctors Dixon and Brantan hide Cornelius, Zira and their new young son named after the doctor who landed with them (and who didn’t survive to this point in the film) in the circus with their friend Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! Sorry, I meant their friend Armando, played by Ricardo Montalban. However, it’s not long before our family of three have to move out again, to an abandoned ship in a disused harbour.

And then the bleakness engulfs the movie with a grim finale full of death which is actually extraordinarily downbeat. It’s another great ending but it’s the post finale scene back at the circus with Armando which really hits home. I’m pretty sure I saw this in a cinema as a double bill with the next film in the series at some point in my childhood and the end was certainly one which stays with you. Armando and the circus are preparing to move on to the next location and we see the young ape who was the offspring of another ape in the circus... but it’s wearing the amulet that Armando gave Zira and Cornelius’ son. We realise that Zira pulled a switch with the child, before leaving the circus, leaving Armando with the care of her offspring This is made more implicit as the ape starts yelling “Mama. Mama. Mama” over again as the film finishes. The delivery of it and the way it’s treated in the sound design, even when backed up with a crude visual loop of a real young chimpanzee mouthing the line, is quite chilling and the writers and producers were obviously not thinking they were going to make the same mistake as last time... leaving a pretty big sequel thread hanging for the scriptwriters to tug on next time around.

The film is entertaining but, for the most part, not very innovative in either its content or in terms of the 'work a day' practical nature of the competent but not overly creative cinematography. It zooms along though and it also has what is a classic and extremely fun Jerry Goldsmith score. The composer skillfully does his thing and delivers a score which is completely different to what he was doing in the first movie but, at the same time, keeping the orchestration within the same basic arena as the musical syntax he developed for that first outing and which was, it could be argued, supported stylistically, somewhat, by Leonard Rosenman’s score for the second. It also has some nice sequences where the composer pitches a very strong, jaunty melody line which is not unlike something he might have composed for the Flint movies and throws in kettle drums and sitars all playing together in the mix. It’s quite a phenomenal set of cues. My one criticism of this particular movie score... and it’s very rare that I would ever criticise the great Jerry... is that there seems to be room for a lot more in the movie. Goldsmith was a master of working out where music should and shouldn’t go and this score has around a half an hour of music for the whole 98 minute movie... which is fine. However, watching the movie again, I felt it was devoid of some good sequences which would have been lifted a little more by having some scoring in them... it would have been nice to hear what the composer would have done with certain situations. Still, Jerry knows best and it is what it is... a very enjoyable score absolutely on a level with the longer score he composed for the first movie. It doesn’t really break any new ground but it is appropriate to the film that’s been made.

And that is pretty much it. Although it lacks a certain panache I thought the first movie had in spades, it still easily the best of the Ape sequels and it wouldn’t take long before the writers would be tugging on those deliberately left sequel threads and bringing out another, very interesting entry in the series. So watch this space for my review of Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes. Coming soon to a review blog near you.

Planet Of The Apes at NUTS4R2

Planet Of The Apes 

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

Planet Of The Apes TV Show (live action) - to be reviewed

Time Of The Apes - to be reviewed

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes  

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

War Of The Planet Of The Apes

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

Simians And Serialism - A History and Analysis of 

Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes