This film was absolutely ridiculous but honestly, I kind of loved it? It is about a group of people who end up together on an expedition to the jungles of the Congo (I think the DRC… They talk about Zaire a few times). Laura Linney plays Dr Karen Ross, who works for a communications company that is looking for rare diamonds for their new satellites – a previous company expedition, which included her former fiancé, had recently gone missing in the area. Dr Peter Elliott, a primatologist at the University of Berkeley, has taught a gorilla (called Amy, and played by a person in a gorilla suit) to use American Sign Language but has decided to return her to her place of birth. Tim Curry plays Homolka, a heavily accented Romanian ‘philanthropist’ who offers to fund returning Amy to the wild, but who has his own mysterious agenda. When they get to Africa, they meet Ernie Hudson as Captain Monroe, some sort of guide who can lead them to the place they’re all looking for.

The premise itself is a bit nuts, but it gets even crazier from there. The group encounters some sort of coup when they land somewhere in central Africa, have to bribe a local militia, their next plane gets shot down, they encounter some tribespeople, get attacked by a hippo… And all of this before they even make it to where they’re going. I won’t spoil where the film ultimately goes but it is absolutely wild. It is based on a book by Michael Crichton, which I haven’t read, but is nowhere near as good an adaptation as Jurassic Park.

I’m not sure how good a primatologist Dr Elliott is though… He wants to return Amy, a gorilla he’s been using for his research, to the wild but happily lets her drink martinis, smoke cigars, play with dolls and engage in ‘tickle fights’. It’s unclear how long Amy has been with him at the University of Berkeley; she was born in the Congo and she says she is seven years old (did he buy her from poachers or what?) but it doesn’t seem like she would have the skills to survive among wild gorillas as she’s very habituated to humans. He wants to take her back to where she was born because she’s been having nightmares, but by the end of the film I wasn’t clear why she wanted to go back there at all as it seems terrible. He clearly didn’t do much research into this trip either; he accepts funding from Tim Curry’s dodgy ‘philanthropist’ without question, and didn’t seem to know anything about the volatile political situation he was taking the gorilla into (although the political situation was pretty vague and not really explained to the viewer).

I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about communication technologies either, but how these rare diamonds are meant to improve satellite technology wasn’t very clear. Laura Linney is way too good for this film; I don’t know how she ended up in it. I felt bad for Ernie Hudson being in this film too, and his dodgy accent (was he meant to be British?), although according to IMDb this is his favourite role of his career. Seeing his character parachute out of a plane with a very fake-looking sedated gorilla was a personal highlight. He has some wonderful cheesy lines, such as “When the moon is like that, every monkey for 200 miles thinks he's Elvis Presley!” And of course Tim Curry is a delight in any role he plays, and always gives it his all no matter how absurd the material.

The special effects might have been ok for 1995, but at least they seemed to be practical effects, and I think bad practical effects are still better than bad CGI. Even though most of the elements of this film aren’t very good, it somehow all comes together into an enjoyable end result.