The title works as a double-entendre; these people are crazy about chimps, but they’re also just bat-crap crazy, and their eccentricities make for a compelling watch.
You won’t be surprised that the director behind this look at the nutty folks who keep chimps as pets and for breeding is the same guy who brought Tiger King to the world, and its central figure, Joe Exotic. To mix animal metaphors, they are all birds of a feather.
Tania Haddix is a bleach blonde woman of a certain age who makes weekly appointments to have her lips injected and says flat out, on TV, that her chimps are more important to her than her own children. It sounds insane to hear someone say that, but as we visit her at-home chimp camp we
see that isn’t hyperbole. She sits on the floor, staring and cooing at, in particular, Tonka, a thirty-something chimpanzee.
The four- part docu-series touches on just a couple of other chimp people, director Eric Goode’s own Tiger King success has made him a marked man in the exotic animal community, but Haddix is more than enough-taking up all the oxygen in a given room. Goode ends up hiring a “proxy director” to conduct many of the interviews.
The dramatic hook comes when PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and actor Alan Cumming get involved in trying to take custody of the animals which, it is deemed, are living in less than humane conditions (again, shades of Tiger King)
After a raid involving more police cars than a drug cartel bust, all but one of the chimps are confiscated, except…except for Tonka! Where has Haddix’s beloved (pri) mate gone? It’s one of the plot twists worth staying tuned for, but there are others, too.
In the end, the doc is so well balanced that your sympathies go back and forth from the loving owner to the welfare of the chimp and back again. But there is no denying that groups of people who have “special” relationships with exotic animals, from chimps to tigers, are their own special breed.
Chimp Crazy premieres with weekly episodes on HBO Sunday, August 18th
