Review #132: 'Night of the Bloody Apes' (1969)

Part of the short film wave in Mexico that combined extreme gore with wrestling (or 'lucha'), this low-budget horror was part of the 'video nasty' list in the UK. It tells the story of a brilliant surgeon, who when finding out his son will die from leukaemia, has the brilliant idea of giving him the heart of an ape. He thinks that by replacing his heart, his body will be able to sustain the chimp blood being pumped around his body. As a result, his son grows a big hairy face, terrorises the city and murders lots of people in particularly brutal fashion. Hot on the doctor's tale is Lt. Martinez (Armando Silvestre) and his wrestler girlfriend. Will they be able to stop the manic ape-man? Will the doctor be able to save his son from his affliction? Will the Mexican to English language translation ever manage to string an actual sentence together?

As you would expect, this film is bad. First of all, the title is a lie. There are no apes involved, it involves a beast with a wrestler's body and a big hairy face. And there's only one of it. But I don't think that director Rene Cordona was striving for the next Citizen Kane (1941) (which is clear from the film's wildly imaginative alternative title, Horror And Sex). The film has plenty of enjoyable gore, and I mean plenty. But Tom Savini did not work on this film - instead I think a blind film student did. The bad effects are most evident when the beast is tearing open the throat of an one unfortunate, only for the close-up to reveal that he's clearly peeling of a large plaster, with the gore beneath.

It is all rather enjoyable though, so I must give the film credit for that. The film's slender running time breezes by, and there's plenty of laughs to had in the stodgy dialogue, bullshit scientific discussions, and watching the beast butcher a seemingly endless amount of people. The main reason for the film's UK ban must be for the scenes of real open-heart surgery, which was spliced into the film upon it's US release by director Jerald Intrator (responsible for such classics as Satan In High Heels (1962) and The Curious Case Of Dr. Humpp (1969)). I refuse to believe that it's because of the extremely unrealistic and silly gore scenes. Not really a guilty pleasure, but certainly something to watch while refilling the glass of brandy and thinking of what film to put on next (in my case).


Directed by: René Cordona
Starring: José Elías Moreno, Carlos López Moctezuma, Armando Silvestre
Country: Mexico

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie