Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)

This is another of those films which somehow got itself caught up in the whole 'video nasties' furore and ended up effectively being banned in the UK, but when seen today leaves the viewer incredulous that it could ever have been considered offensive or morally corrupting to warrant such treatment.  Sure, Night of the Bloody Apes (1969) boasts a lot of gore - including an eye being gouged out - and what seems like acres of bare boobs and bums, as a sex crazed ape man goes on a killing/rape rampage.  OK, put like that, it might sound more than a little offensive, but the whole thing is executed on the level of a comic strip with the gore laughably faked (more striking are the scenes of real heart surgery cut into the film), and the sexual molestation of women fumbled and, to be honest, rather half hearted, (the ape man never takes his trousers off while attacking women). Indeed, director Rene Cardona seems to be going for a comic book aesthetic in the way his film is shot and looks: all bold colours and scenes framed like comic panels, with exaggerated, almost stylised, action and violence.  Both plot and dialogue (at least in the English dub) are quite basic, with the emphasis placed upon the visuals. Despite this minimalism, the film is as lunatic and bizarre as Cardona's other films from this period, such as Wrestling Women vs The Aztec Mummy (1964) and The Bat Woman (1968).  In common with these and many other popular Mexican movies of the time, Night of the Bloody Apes is, to English speaking audiences, a strange and wild melange of themes and genres, combining elements of horror, sex film, police procedural and wrestling movies to create an almost surreal experience.

The film is actually a loose remake of Cardona's earlier Doctor of Doom (1962),  with both films using a mad scientist plot straight out of a forties Bela Lugosi-starring Monogram movie as their basis, but takes it in directions that the poverty row studios could only imply.  Night of the Bloody Apes sees a scientist kidnap a gorilla from the local zoo in order to transplant it into his son, who is dying of leukemia, (this treatment is not available on the NHS).  Of course, this inevitably causes said son to periodically turn into a muscle bound ape man who goes on bloody rampages, climbing up buildings and going through open windows to tear the clothes off of women and violently molest them.  Anybody who tries to stop him is bloodily mutilated and murdered.   Parallel to this, we have a plot involving a lady wrestler who, at the start of the film, inadvertently puts an opponent into a coma, with the film cutting back to her wrestling matches every so often, as she struggles with her guilt, resulting in her losing matches as she pulls her punches for fear of injuring another opponent.  Apart from the fact that her boyfriend is the cop investigating first the gorilla abduction, then the rapes and murders, this sub-plot seems to have no connection to the main plot, seemingly existing only to pad the film out with wrestling sequences and more bare breasts.  We keep waiting for the wrestling lady to somehow get involved in the investigation, anticipating a face-off between her and the ape man.  But it never happens.  The plots finally intersect when the scientist kidnaps the comatose woman wrestler and transplants her heart into his son in place of the gorilla's heart, in hope that this will halt the transformations.  Logically, of course, the son should now turn into a masked wrestler and go on rampages.  Instead, he just keeps turning into the ape man.

The failure to properly dovetail these two plots is a major misstep on Cardona's part, leaving the audience feeling disappointed, particularly in view of the fact that he had done this on Doctor of Doom.  Whatever the reason for Cardona changing the scenario in this way, it leaves Night of the Bloody Apes with a somewhat underwhelming conclusion, as the beast ends up gunned down by the police on a hospital roof top, rather than being held in a headlock by a lady wrestler.  Which is a pity as, up until then, the film had been an exhilarating experience, careening along at breakneck pace, leaving the audience little time to worry about the absurdities of the whole situation.  It offers crude, but vigourous thrills, ripped, it feels, from the pages of one of those weird pulp magazines with garish covers depicting semi-naked women about to be subjected to bizarre and painful tortures.  Yes, to modern sensibilities it might well seem offensive in its treatment of sex crime and its overt linking of sex and violence, but it is very much of its time.  Contemporary English-language horror films might have liked to think themselves more sophisticated and less overt, but they still trod much the same ground in terms of the themes explored.  Night of the Bloody Apes is basically a 1940s mad scientist film, but updated for the mores of the late sixties, adding in the sex and gore that Monogram and PRC doubtless would have liked to include, if not for the production code.  One of its alternative Spanish language titles Horror y Sexo (Horror and Sex) sums up the film rather well.