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King Kong Ripoff From The 70s Is Spectacularly Ranchy

By Chris Sawin
| Updated

A*P*E is one of those strange and horny films from the 1970s that you wonder why, in the present day, it exists in the first place. Originally rushed into production to compete with the John Guillermin directed 1976 remake of King Kong (the one starring Jeff Bridges), A*P*E is a co-production between South Korea and the United States and was originally shot and presented in 3-D.

Co-written and directed by Paul Leder with special effects by Park Kwang Nam, A*P*E is considered by many to be a Z-movie; so low budget that it’s a complete failure. The film’s entire budget was $23,000, while the special effects budget for the miniature buildings was only $1,200. Shot in just 14 days, A*P*E is mostly a direct ripoff of King Kong.

Not To Be Confused With King Kong

The story is that a 36-foot ape has been sedated and captured with the intent of showcasing it across the world. He escapes and causes havoc as he makes his way from the sea to Seoul. There’s also an actress in a red dress that he kidnaps on two separate occasions and obsesses over.

The film was originally advertised as The New King Kong before being slapped with a $1.5 million lawsuit by RKO Pictures. The film’s title was then changed to Super Ape and then A*P*E; a play on M*A*S*H and an abbreviation for “Attacking Primate MonstEr.”

The tagline was also changed to “Not to be confused with King Kong.” South Korea and other foreign countries were able to keep the references to King Kong with alternative titles such as Super King Kong and King Kong Returns. Other titles for the film include Ape (without the asterisks), King Kong’s Great Counterattack, Hideous Mutant, and Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla.

Mr. Canadian Tuxedo Saves The Day

The film opens on an oil tanker in the dead of night, out at sea. Two shipmates discuss the giant gorilla, claiming that he’s been sedated enough to be out cold for five days and that his exhibition will begin at Disneyland, of all places. The ape wakes up and destroys the tanker in an impressive explosion. He then stands up in the middle of the water, clearly showcasing a wet ape suit as it struggles to cover up the actor’s wet arms and neck.

He proceeds to dance-wrestle a shark. He cradles it in his arms, and weaves back and forth in the water with it as if it’s a toddler that he’s teaching to swim. Soon after, he tears the shark’s jaw from its face. The ape then arrives on land and destroys a town in a fiery blaze. He stomps around all of these destroyed homes and throws explosive barrels around. One of these “barrels” is thrown into the camera, and it’s noticeable that they’re just a pile of unlabeled tin cans (think Spaghetti-O cans with the label ripped off).

An American actress named Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns in her film debut) has traveled to South Korea to make her first foreign picture. The picture in question, based on the scenes that are shown being shot, is filled with nothing but assault scenes. Her sort-of non-serious boyfriend, Tom Rose (Rod Arrants), decides to surprise her and is the first person to welcome her off the plane.

Tom is cringingly horny, by the way. With his curly white man afro and doused from head to toe in a blue jean jacket and bell bottoms, Tom is DTF and wants Marilyn to blow off her shooting schedule so she can Donkey Kong all night long. He proceeds to be all over her in the car while she pretends to be interested in the buildings they drive past.

Size And Scale Are Merely Guidelines

The film has a funny way of showing scale, as well. A full-size cow is shown before the film jumps to the ape, who steps over what is clearly a tiny cow figure. A man is shown hang gliding one moment, and in the next scene, a tiny version of him is seen by the ape’s head. A giant hand is used to pound through walls and grab Marilyn whenever the ape decides it’s been too long since he’s felt such supple skin, too. For shots farther away with Marilyn, the ape carries a doll in a red dress.

The ape costume is fuzzier than you’re probably expecting, as it’s covered in this curly brown hair, more so than just rubber. There are also peculiar close-ups of him in which the actor slightly moves the mask’s lips. It comes off like a tic because it isn’t really expressive apart from the fact that he’s usually doing it while watching something he shouldn’t. It’s also not flattering at all; the ape has a beer gut, a lumpy butt that’s bulbous in all the wrong places, and giant dark salami areolas.

The ape’s journey from the sea to Seoul is filled with awkward detours. He scares a bunch of kids on the playground, he lip-quiver-stares at a couple who have reluctant sex through a skyscraper window, and he dances some more as helicopters fly above him in the desert while Marilyn hides in a cave. After finally swatting one out of the air, he flips off the camera. The ending sees him throwing rocks down a mountain to cause a rockslide in an effort to continue the comparisons to Donkey Kong.

The other instances of 3-D are rather bizarre. A soldier pulling up to one of the destroyed towns drives straight into a steel beam that crashes through his windshield and attempts to be a close call like the log sequence in Final Destination 2. The ape throws a snake directly at the camera, which immediately falls over. An action movie is being filmed when the ape shows up. They shoot flaming arrows at him that fly at the screen on strings. There’s a pool sequence where the pool stick comes at the camera before the break. The ape also throws rocks at tanks and the army when they start shooting at him, which are also on strings.

Worth Its Weight In Unintended Comedy

The dialogue is full of cringe as well. When news of the ape first starts making the rounds and people aren’t taking it seriously, the police captain is in the dining room with his family and states, “Eat your breakfast, kids, or I’ll become a monster! Rawr!” Colonel Davis (Alex Nichol) serves as the Secretary of Defense, spending the majority of the film on a telephone in a room that echoes like a public bathroom. He also yells at his assistant, who seems to take notes in a planning calendar. Davis makes it a point to exclaim, “If you happen to run into him, ask him if his name is King Kong!” His facial expression and body language imply that Davis thought he really ate with that line.

Upon Marilyn’s first kidnapping by the ape, the army sends in helicopters while Captain Kim (Lee Nak-hoon) and the police stumped upon how to reach them. Tom’s big plan is to run in to save Marilyn, which somehow works because that’s the power of blue-jean bell bottoms. As Tom and Marilyn are seen driving in the city, Marilyn says, “Take it easy, Tom! Somehow I felt more safe with the ape than I do with your driving.”

And finally, after the ape is finally dealt with in the only logical way after causing so many deaths and nearly destroying all of Seoul, Tom ends the film with, “He’s just too big for a small world like ours.”

Tom claims to be a reporter and never actually reports anything. He and Marilyn joke about getting married throughout the film, which is odd, since it sounds like they were essentially just a Tinder hookup before all of this. Captain Kim has two kids who have no dialogue. Every time they’re shown on screen, they’re laughing, sometimes for full minutes at a time, at the ugliest damn marionette you’ve ever seen. There are weird helicopter-flying and tank-driving montages because the production worked with the actual army.

A*P*E is an awful film with a conclusion that seems obvious from the start, but it’s also entertaining as hell. The special effects are better than they have any right to be, and the overall cheese is thick with a rich ridiculousness that is surprisingly satisfying. The entire thing plays out like a bad drinking game where everyone was totally smashed halfway through, but had to finish the film anyway. Watch it once, then pretend it doesn’t exist. You won’t be disappointed.

I watched A*P*E via the Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, which is now out of print. The film is currently streaming for free on Tubi, Plex, and YouTube.

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The 6 biggest cybersecurity breaches of 2026 so far

The year is only halfway through, yet 2026 has already been filled with data breaches, hacks, and cybersecurity incidents.

So let’s take a look back at the biggest cybersecurity breaches of 2026 so far. Mashable has picked the six most impactful incidents. There’s likely lessons to be learned in order to protect yourself for the rest of the year.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Grand Theft Auto VI fans and Rockstar Games

GTA 6, the most anticipated video game for the past decade, will finally be released this year. And malicious actors are already targeting its fans and even the game’s developer.

Fake GTA 6 pre-order websites, fake GTA 6 mobile apps, and even fake sites that copy legitimate game download platforms have been popping up since developer Rockstar Games confirmed a late 2026 launch for the game.

It’s unclear just how many users have already been affected, but it’s obviously growing, as hackers will continue to target Grand Theft Auto gamers up until the game’s release and likely well beyond.

Not even Rockstar Games is safe. Earlier this year, the now-infamous hacker collective ShinyHunters announced that it had breached the game developer’s networks. ShinyHackers sought out a ransom in exchange for not releasing the data it had stolen.

Rockstar downplayed the severity of the data breach, saying the breach occurred at a third-party provider. It also appeared that the data comprised corporate assets rather than private user information.

Instructure data breach

Edtech giant Instructure, the company behind the popular Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas, was a victim of what was easily one of the biggest breaches of the year so far.

The Instructure breach was also carried out by ShinyHunters, the hacking collective that is becoming quite notorious as the likely culprit behind so many data breaches. The stolen data in this breach included users’ names, email addresses, student IDs, and private messages exchanged on the platform, which was used by a whopping 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools around the world. These users included students, teachers, and school staff.

To make matters even worse, ShinyHunters breached Instructure’s platforms again just one week after the company claimed it had fixed the security issues associated with the original data breach. This time, however, ShinyHunters defaced the login pages of specific schools.

The data breaches forced some schools to postpone final exams and assignments, as Instructure took its platforms offline to address the cybersecurity incidents.

ShinyHunters is well known for carrying out breaches and demanding a ransom in return for not releasing the data. It appears that Instructure struck a deal with ShinyHunters to prevent its users’ data from being disseminated. It’s certainly a worrying outcome that doesn’t bode well for how future data breaches may pan out.

Conduent data breach

Conduent is a data management company whose clients include many major corporations, healthcare providers, and state agencies. So, when there’s a data breach at an organization that handles sensitive data belonging to Humana and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas, just to name a few, there is cause for concern.

Earlier this year, at least 25 million people in just two states were affected by a data breach at Conduent. A reported 15 million people were affected in Texas, which is just shy of half of the state’s more than 31 million residents. Reports state that more than 10 million people were affected in Oregon.

According to Conduent, the unauthorized parties “obtained some files that contained individuals’ personal information, which came into our possession due to the services that we provide to your current and former health plan.”

This data included users’ names, Social Security numbers, medical information, and health insurance information.

That’s a big cybersecurity incident involving some of the most sensitive user data that can be obtained.

Meta AI supports Instagram vulnerability

The most recent incident on this list perfectly encapsulates many of the unresolved cybersecurity issues with AI.

Meta rolled out an AI-powered support chatbot for Instagram. Hackers figured out they could simply request that the AI chatbot send a password reset link for any Instagram account to the hacker’s email address. Meta AI support complied with the requests simply because the hacker told them they were the account owner and needed the chatbot to send the password reset link to a new email address.

Malicious actors were stealing highly followed Instagram accounts through this method and then selling them on online black markets.

Meta did eventually fix the issue, but affected users were still locked out of their accounts for a time.

This may not have been the biggest, most widespread hack on our list. But the method used to steal these Instagram accounts is certainly the fastest-growing tool in hackers’ arsenal. We’ll be seeing many more bad actors tricking easy-to-fool AI-powered systems in the very near future.

DarkSword spyware

What if a hacker could steal a smartphone’s data with nothing more than their target visiting a website?

DarkSword spyware, which could do just that, had Google and numerous cybersecurity firms ringing the alarm bells earlier this year.

Google Threat Intelligence Group and cybersecurity companies Lookout and iVerify laid out their findings in March, showing how malicious actors were exploiting vulnerabilities in Apple’s iPhone to siphon data from a device after the target visited an infected website.

Call logs, contacts, iMessage and WhatsApp data, email, calendars, notes, photos, screenshots, location history, web browser history, signed-in account identities, device keychains, SIM card info, Find My Phone settings, WiFi passwords, iCloud content, and more were all able to be pulled from a malicious actor using DarkSword.

Nearly 25 percent of all iPhones are still running some version of iOS 18, the iPhone operating system that was susceptible to the attack. This meant that there were potentially hundreds of millions of iOS devices on which DarkSword could be deployed.

According to the reports, Russian hacker groups were already deploying the spyware “to fully compromise devices.”

To make matters worse, DarkSword was soon released into the wild shortly after the cybersecurity firms warned about it.

Apple did release updates and important information for users who were susceptible to the spyware. However, the existence of such an exploit shows just how easy it’s becoming for bad actors to carry out an attack.

WeedHack

Speaking of how easy it is to get hacked, WeedHack may be the perfect example of how accessible it is to become an attacker, too.

A recent report from McAfee Labs detailed a new hacker tool being offered as a $5 per month service to aspiring attackers who may not have the technical know-how to carry out a campaign themselves. 

WeedHack is a malware that’s deployed under the guise of a Minecraft client or mod. Once a device is infected, an attacker can collect system information, search for files on the infected device, take screenshots of the target’s system, and steal cookies and passwords from the target’s web browser. And that’s just the free version.

For $5 per month, an attacker could also gain webcam access to the infected device, keylogging capabilities, screen sharing with keyboard and mouse access, file management features for uploading and downloading files, and more.

Perhaps the most concerning revelation, however, was just how WeedHack was being used.

McAfee Labs uncovered a Telegram channel for WeedHack’s customer base and found it was largely used by teenagers and young adults who were using the malware to cyberbully other young people, threatening, harassing, and spying on victims. 

Malware-as-a-service has existed before, but WeedHack seems to be ushering in something that goes well beyond just your typical cybersecurity issues.

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The Best '80s Horror Movie Is A Secret Vampire Story, Stream Without Netflix Now

By Jacob VanGundy
| Published

I recently rewatched Hellraiser, one of the best horror movies of the 1980s, and I was struck by how much it resembles a vampire story. Aesthetically, thematically, and even in terms of plot, the story has more in common with Dracula than the supernatural slashers of the era. While elements centered around the Cenobites dominated the sequels, the original movie is more interested in exploring the vampiric antagonist, Frank.

Released in 1987, Hellraiser was written and directed by Clive Barker, who had adapted his novella, The Hellbound Heart. It made $14.6 million at the US box office ($30 million worldwide) on a budget of only $1 million and became a hit with horror fans, though it faced heavy censorship and a ban in Ontario. The movie was so successful it spawned nine sequels and a reboot. 

The Dracula Parallels

Hellraiser begins with the hedonist Frank Cotton using a puzzle box to summon Cenobites, a group of sadomasochistic extradimensional beings who torture him to death and take his soul to their dimension. When Frank’s brother Larry cuts himself in the attic where Frank died, it resurrects him as a skinless monster. Larry’s wife Julia is seduced into luring victims to Frank, who, now a vampire, needs the blood to restore himself. 

While the movie’s heroine, Kirstie, solves the puzzle box and is tormented by Cenobites for it, Frank is the clear antagonist. In his new vampire form, Frank requires the blood of multiple victims, becoming increasingly human in appearance as he feeds on the men Julia seduces and brings to him. He also attempts to seduce and murder Kirstie, making a much more explicit villain than the more mysterious Cenobites. 

Frank’s need to feed on blood is the most obvious way Hellraiser is a vampire story, but his entire character resembles Dracula. His origin, making a deal with demonic beings, is a common origin for the character and similar to the implied origin in Bram Stoker’s novel. The fact that he was resurrected from death by human blood also fits within the mythology. 

Hellraiser’s setting is also reminiscent of classic vampiric folklore. Taking place in a grand but dilapidated family home is similar to the decrepit mansions and castles common in vampire stories. The fact that Frank is confined to the attic of that home by his appearance takes the place of hiding in a crypt to avoid sunlight. 

Thematically, Hellraiser explores ideas that frequently appear in vampire stories. Hedonism, sexual taboos, and corruption are all central themes of the movie that can be found in everything from Interview With the Vampire to Carmilla. Solving the puzzle box also connects to the idea of forbidden knowledge, which is often a central piece of Dracula’s mythology. 

The seductive element of Frank’s character is another central connection to vampire lore, with Julia being Hellraiser’s version of Dracula’s bride. While Frank doesn’t directly turn Julia into a monster, he does lead her to behave monstrously, helping him murder multiple men, including her husband. The sequel would double down on this by making her a central antagonist after her own resurrection. 

Hellraiser Is Misunderstood

Hellraiser has more than earned its place in the pantheon of great horror movies, but it’s also largely misunderstood by those who haven’t seen it as a movie about Pinhead as a supernatural slasher. The movie is much more at home within the vampire genre than the broader oeuvre of 80s horror. Fans of horror, particularly fans of vampire stories, should watch Hellraiser, which is available to stream for free on Tubi, Pluto TV, Plex, and Amazon Prime Video.

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‘Love Island USA’ reveals the final four couples competing for first place

Following a lighthearted week of quality time and family reunions, Love Island USA finally announced the four couples competing for the $100,000 first-place prize.

After Corbin and Parmida were dumped from the villa in Season 8, episode 29, there were six couples left standing: Aniya and Carl, Kayda and Zach, Kenzie and Dylan, Melanie and Sincere, Tierra and KC, and Trinity and Bryce. The next few days were full of fun challenges like The Girls pranking The Boys, The Girls enjoying a fun waterpark-themed getaway from the villa, and the Islanders meeting each other’s family members for the first time.

Season 8, Episode 33 kicked off with a “mouthwatering” couples’ challenge, in which each islander had to transfer food items in water (like sardines) or condiments (like ketchup) from their mouth into their partner’s mouth. After the challenge, the couples had a few more tough pills (or, in this case, fortune cookies) to swallow at dinner that night: they found out the results of a public vote that decided which four couples were heading to the finale, and which two couples were going home.

One by one, the couples cracked open their fortune cookies, revealing whether they were safe. The final four were revealed to be Aniya and Carl, Trinity and Bryce, Melanie and Sincere, and Kayda and Zach.

Our big Guessing Game is back! Enter now for a chance to win an Apple Watch.

This left two couples dumped from the villa: Kenzie and Dylan, and Tierra and KC.

X users were sad to see them go, especially those who thought that Tierra and KC had a stronger connection than other couples in the villa. KC had just asked Tierra to be his girlfriend in Season 8, episode 31, which made the dumping even more shocking to viewers.

However, viewers were elated that Kenzie didn’t say goodbye without squatting down for one last iconic split.

While the islanders shared an emotional goodbye with Kenzie, Dylan, Tierra, and KC, they took the time to appreciate the genuine friendships they built in the villa – embodying what viewers called “Friendship Island” this season.

What makes the final four couples especially memorable this season is that the four girls are each part of the original group of islanders that we were introduced to in Season 8, episode 1, with X users saying that we have a “core four” finale in our midst. 

Now that the final four couples have been revealed, we’re only a few episodes away from finding out which couple will be crowned the winners of Love Island USA Season 8.

The season finale is scheduled to air on Sunday, July 12, 9:00 p.m. ET / 6:00 p.m. PT on Peacock.

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