Going Bananas

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Audience Member This movie sure had some changes before it got to the screen. Bonzo was going to be a real ape* before Deep Roy was cast, while Big Bad Joe Hopkins was going​ to be played by Bud Spencer — on the 1986 Cannon reel of upcoming films this was called Ben, Bonzo and Big Bad Joe — and Menahem Golan — who wrote the script, based on the Kofiko books by Tamar Bornstein-Lazar — and Sam Firstenberg were going to direct until Boaz Davidson was picked. What emerges is pure Cannon. Benjamin (David Menden-Hall, who if he annoyed you in Over the Top is ready to destroy your mind and play with it) is on an adventure with his guardian Joe (Dom DeLuise) and friend Mozambo (Jimmie Walker) in Africa. Specifically Momba-Zomba Land. There, he meets Bonzo, a talking monkey who can not only fly a plane, but can practically fly — or if we follow the old TSR Marvel Super Hero rules, he's like The Hulk who has Class 5000 Hyper-Leaping — and the whole story is about Herbert Lom as a cop stealing the monkey and putting him in a circus and that never works out whether it's King Kong or Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Or Going Bananas. A lot of people debate, "What's your favorite Cannon movie?" No one has picked this one. *Clyde the Organgatan from Every Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way You Can has a meeting at Menahem Golan's office and there was an attempt to sign him as a Cannon actor, if you can believe that. When it fell through, Golan introduced Deep Roy to Davidson and said, "Meet your new monkey!" This story seems like it isn't true, but it's Cannon, so it probably is. Also, according to Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, Golan asked a publicist of Clyde, "Would you f*ck this monkey?" Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 02/06/23 Full Review Audience Member Dom DeLuise and Cannon-stand-by-kid-of-this-era David Mendenhall go on a trip to Africa. Mendenhall is the son of a US senator ... DeLuise is looking after him on the trip. (First problem with this film ... a senator trusts the welfare of his son to Dom DeLuise) They meet their guide Jimmy Walker, and go gallivanting about the African wilderness until they encounter a friendly monkey played by Deep Roy in the ugliest monkey suit imaginable. It turns out this monkey can talk (no, I have no clue why) and then lots of unfunny crap happens. God damn I hate this film. At first it's just unfunny and more than a little racist, then the monkey enters the picture and it's painfully unfunny, fairly racist and full of annoying monkey shrieks. When I say this movie is racist, I am not applying modern standards to film from the 80's. This film is racist by the standards of the 80's. In fact, it plays exactly like a cheap, unfunny comedy from the 40's. It would have been a bad movie then ... in the late 80's, it's abominable. The saddest thing about this film is that Herbert Lom is in it. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member I discovered it on ThisTV. I've seen my share of crappy movies. Bad dramas make me laugh. Bad comedies make me cringe. "Going Bananas" isn't different, rife with painful racial stereotypes about Africans, wacky sound effect overdose, & a frightening costumed chimp. It's the type of awful cinema that's best stumbled upon a free TV channel, not sought after on streaming. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/22/23 Full Review Audience Member Slapstick family adventures in Africa as American youngster on a trip to "Momba-Zomba" lands in Africa discovers a chimp that can talk and must save him from being sold to a circus by a local corrupt police chief. Not the bread-and-butter material from the Cannon Group and here lies additional proof that this is a team should have stuck with the top shelf action films that earned their stripes. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 02/13/23 Full Review Audience Member Dom Deluise, a young child and Jimmie "Dyn-O-Mite" Walker (managing to somehow do a terrible impersonation of Djimon Hounsou 10 years before anyone knew who that was) have an adventure in a fictional African nation called Tangola, where the befriend the least convinsing chimpanzee in movie history and teach him to talk (because they only talk because nobody has said "Bonzo, say banana" before). Soon they're mixed up with a circus and a corrupt police cheif (Herbert Lom), and the audience is laughing at all the wrong things. Freakin' Jimmie Walker Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 02/08/23 Full Review Audience Member I practically don't remember any of the story. Saw it when I was a kid. Monkey was great. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/07/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Going Bananas

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