Prepare the gorilla! (Night Of The Bloody Apes (VHS))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	Night Of The Bloody Apes (VHS)
Date:	14.09.06 (372 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing bad film from Mexico

Disadvantages: Possibly not available uncut in the UK

(This is a review of the film only.)

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Imagine you’re a surgeon. Imagine your beloved son has some kind of ill-defined but fatal heart condition. What to do? Pray? Weep? Curse the heavens for such bad luck?

Well, maybe. I’ll tell you what not to do, though. Under no circumstances should you transplant the heart of a gorilla into the body of the young chap.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘Transplanting the heart of an ape into the body of a young man sounds like a *great* idea. What could *possibly* go wrong?’ I once thought much the same thing. But then I saw Night of the Bloody Apes, thank goodness.

A cautionary tale from Mexico, made in 1968, it has a plot much like the one I’ve described above. Desperate doc, ailing son, gorilla. Add to that some baffled cops (always with the baffled cops, these exploitation movies); female wrestlers; a limping dogsbody; and some actual heart transplant surgery footage and you have one of the finest examples of bad cinema ever made.

Our hero is a cop, Arthur. His girlfriend, Lucy, is a female wrestler (being Mexican, the wrestlers wear masks, allowing some *very* obvious use of stunt doubles in the wrestling scenes). The scientist, Dr Krallman, more to be pitied than hated, kidnaps a gorilla from the local zoo. His weedy son, receiving the brute’s heart, becomes very muscly and his face goes all weird (not terribly apelike, just kind of generic monstrous). He then goes on the rampage, killing people pretty much at random. You can probably guess the rest.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable film. The acting is appalling, of course. Dr Krallman looks a bit like General Pinochet, but you won’t have seen any of the actors in anything else. Top marks probably go to the old lady who, upon discovering a dead body, screams ‘Oh! A dead man! A dead man!’ over and over again.

The whole thing makes next to no sense, but in a wonderful way. When Krallman and his assistant go out to surreptitiously look for the transformed ape-son-thing, they always park their large car right next to the inevitable crowd of concerned onlookers and cops, but no one ever notices them. Arthur somehow figures out that the police should be looking for a man-ape hybrid without having a shred of evidence to back up his claim, and all the other policemen just accept it as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. (Perhaps it is in Mexico, I don’t know). And why, when presented with a zoo full of real apes, does Krallman opt to capture the one that is obviously a man in a really poor gorilla costume?

This is a pretty short film – only about 80 minutes long – but there’s an astounding amount of padding. There are three lengthy wrestling sequences that add nothing at all to the plot, and merely serve to demonstrate how boring women’s wrestling is if it doesn’t involve mud. And we are treated to many interminable shots of the interior of Krallman’s house, as the doctor or his assistant walk very slowly up the stairs, or walk the entire length of the house in order to answer the phone. (The assistant limps, usually, so it takes him an especially long time to get anywhere. He’s also pretty bad at performing every other duty his employer gives him.) This is one of the all-time classic ‘pointless walking’ films.

It’s also astoundingly cheap. This is a film with few sets, no actors of note and woeful special effects. The photography is bog standard low-budget lurid, and the direction, by one Rene Cardona, absolutely lousy. My main disappointment was that the music didn’t really stand out – you occasionally get incredible soundtracks on films like this, but sadly not on this one.

The gore is for the most part pretty mild. This film was actually on the video nasties list in the UK back in the 80s (British DVD releases might still be cut). There’s one scene where a naked woman is murdered in which she gets a certain amount of blood on her breasts, which was always a big no-no as far as the BBFC were concerned (where the blood is meant to be coming from is unclear). The rest of the deaths are brilliantly inept, and include a great, bad eye-popping and a fabulous, completely unconvincing head-being-ripped off. Top marks to the filmmakers for trying, but they’re definitely overreaching themselves.

The only gore moments that are convincing are when the film suddenly throws in real heart transplant footage. This, admittedly, is a bit of a jolt. One minute we’re watching the doc and his assistant hovering over an operating table, the next we’re presented with some grainy footage of a patient’s chest being carved open – the film stock is completely different, and there seem to be too many pairs of hands involved to correspond with what we’re supposed to believe is going on. I assume these sequences were added to give the film a bit more ‘bite’, but they do represent its one lapse into genuine bad taste. Everything else is a slightly sleazy delight.

I’m not entirely sure where the title comes from, as there’s only one ape in the film; he’s not even a real ape, and nor is he bloody. An alternative title was the rather pithier ‘Horror and Sex’. The dialogue is all dubbed, and not terribly well, but it would probably be less enjoyable if it was subtitled instead. Quite how this found itself on the video nasties list is anyone’s guess. Like the equally delirious Blood Feast, it is so manifestly harmless that you have to wonder about the sanity of the relevant authorities.

This is a masterpiece of bad film, a genuinely enjoyable experience. Just thinking about it makes me laugh. There have been DVD releases in this country (check on amazon), but I don’t know if they’re cut or not. I suspect they are. I got a copy from the States – this is a film that deserves to be seen in all its uncut glory. One’s life is more complete for the experience.

(Oh, and if in spite of everything, you *do* decide to go ahead with your foolish gorilla heart transplant, for goodness’ sake don’t make things worse by then giving him the heart of a female wrestler. You might think that will solve the problem; in fact it’ll just make him grow fangs.

This film really does have *everything!*)

Summary: An unlikely video nasty that deserves to be at least as famous as Plan 9 from Outer Space