6. Ape (1976)
Tagline: “Not To Be Confused With King Kong”
Ideas don’t grow on trees, and genius movie premises are like gold dust. So when someone hits on something great, it’s only natural to want a piece of the action. This seemed to be the case with 1976’s Ape, which borrows a few story ideas from King Kong.
Okay, so maybe more than a few… it’s a complete rip-off. Though most acts of transparent plagiarism at least partly try to feign originality, Ape did the opposite. The film’s tagline directly references the original movie it stole its premise from.
“Not To Be Confused With King Kong” is a slap in the face, because Ape literally steals King Kong‘s entire story. Asserting that it shouldn’t be confused with the film it’s emulating is a weird and brazen choice, and it makes for a truly awful tagline. Ape not only apes the much better monkey movie, but it tries to make out that it’s something legally distinct, too. It’s not. It’s really not.