Ed

Now if there's anything the 90's film industry loved to do, it was to mismatch people with monkeys for a hilarity-filled series of mishaps. This film does that and more. Just when you think its on the verge of being the shittest movie you've ever sat through, BAM, the hits just keep coming.

All I knew about this film going into it was that it had a chimpanzee playing baseball. That was enough for me! Sign me up. And lo and behold, here we are. The film starts with what felt like too many instances of Friends' "Joey" Matt LeBlanc showing the audience he could pitch a baseball really fast. Then he went and tried out for a baseball team, and about 10 mins in he was collecting the new team mascot from the bus depot, cue chimpanzee. No explanation whatsoever is given for the fact there is now a chimp in the film, but plausible plot elements are not really this films forte.

Now the storyline really lacks, he's on a team, there's a chimp, for some reason they let the chimp play on the team, then the main character falls for his neighbour, and her daughter and Ed form a friendship, something happens and the chimp ends up in hospital, and makes a heroic recovery for the world series game or some bullshit and they win and he gets the girl blah blah.

The real meat is in the small details. The "I can't believe they went there" moments. You're sitting there thinking surely they pulled a few words out of a hat and it was some sort of exercise to turn it into a film premise, then they all got really drunk and actually wrote a script for it. I'm going to just dot point the highlights:

* Apparently its a person in a chimp suit with a robotic head. I googled it, and the robotic head was so noisy during filming that they had to go back and redub over all the audio. So on top of everything else, there's some terrible lip synching. Believe it.

* There are a lot of scenes of the chimpanzee farting

* At one point the main character gets drunk and the chimp proceeds to DRIVE HIM HOME, not before doing a few donut burnouts in the carpark, then having a weird comedic scene of it driving to a blue screen background with a Meat Loaf song playing.

* Matt LeBlanc's character and his neighbour go on a date and leave her daughter to be babysat by the chimp. So of course they make a mountain of popcorn, have a dress up montage scene, a farting contest, and then a sped-up 'they're home lets clean up' scene complete with chimp scrubbing the floor with brushes on its feet.

* One of my favourites is that Ed is somehow sick or injured and is in a coma, in a regular people hospital! Then, as if unprepared for the fact that this is a chimp and not infact some ugly Whoopi Goldberg look-alike, they all freak out when he wakes up and starts acting like, well, a monkey!

That's only a few reasons to watch this film. As far as Shit Cinema goes, it's really got everything. And if you want to make it a drinking game, I'd go with:
* Any time there's a fart sound
* Any time the lead character throws a baseball

That would do it.

10/10