AAAAAAAAH! (2015)

Directed by Steve Oram, Starring: Toyah Wilcox,  Steve Oram, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Tom Meeten, Julian Barratt, Lucy Honigman, Noel Fielding.  Comedy, Horror. UK, 2015, Cert 18

If John Waters re-made PLANET OF THE APES and set it in South London, the result might be something not too dissimilar from writer/director Steve Oram’s debut feature.

Oram (who also co-stars as alpha male ‘Smith’), instructed his brave cast to firstly learn their dialogue before throwing the script out of the window and asking the actors to perform as primates, translating their lines into guttural grunts and whoops, and transforming their character’s actions and gestures into simian behaviour. The result of which is a truly bizarre, often uncomfortably hilarious, avant-garde satire of the human condition. 

Filmed in a handheld 4:3 frame to give a documentary footage vibe, we firstly see alpha ‘Smith’and his beta ‘Keith’ (Tom Meeten) shuffling through the undergrowth of deepest darkest South London parkland. So far so slightly surreal (but safe) TV comedy sketch-show territory. Then Smith proceeds to piss on a framed photo of his ex-‘mate’ (wife in wedding dress) before his companion Keith gently dabs dry the end of his dripping penis and suddenly we’re not in Kansas anymore Toto...

The ‘plot’ as such involves a primate-like struggle for supremacy between outsider Smith who launches a primal bid to overthrow Julian Rhind-Tutt’s boorish alpha who presides over a household with alpha mother Barbara (Wilcox) and daughter Denise (Honigman) - having himself usurped the former patriarch (Julian Barratt). 

After the initial snigger inducing moments when you are still adjusting to the fact that the actors really are going to spend the entire film in ‘character’ as apes and that no instinctive primal urge is considered taboo, e.g. marking one’s territory (the fridge) with urine, taking a dump in the kitchen whilst preparing supper, using a tree for sexual gratification (and even a small rodent at one point), the experience of watching the film gradually takes on a surprisingly engrossing nature.

For this the entire cast must be given tremendous plaudits. What could have ended up as an embarrassing pile of puerile schlock is instead transformed into a blackly funny, often poignant, and genuinely disturbing commentary illustrating just how thin the veneer of our ‘civilised society’ really is. There’s a scene where daughter Denise surreptitiously hands a piece of Battenberg cake to her banished father that is played so beautifully by both Lucy Honigman and Julian Barratt that it evokes bona fide pathos. And then there are the physical indignities visited upon the cast – notably Toyah Wilcox’s alpha female Barbara – quite why she agreed to the role is a mystery, oh, it’s a mystery (sorry), but fair play to her and the entire ensemble for throwing themselves wholeheartedly into their roles.

For a first feature film, I think it’s fair to say that AAAAAAAAH! is not obvious ‘calling card’ material designed to make major studios sit up and take note (unless 20^th Century Fox wish to take their rebooted ‘Ape’ franchise in an entirely different direction). But what Steve Oram and his splendid troop of fellow Homo sapiens have delivered is an inspired dollop of jaw-dropping satire, jolting gross-outness, and a measure of guttural profundity.      

****(out of 5*)

Paul Worts

This review was orginally published on the FrighFest website.