23 Jun 2012

Night of the Bloody Apes - Will's Review

Badly acted, badly directed and edited, with dialogue  translated word-by-word from Spanish with no thought to syntax or English sentence formation, this is a near perfect drive-in or freinds-and-beer movie.


It's also (especially in it open moments) incredibly colorful; in fact between the opening scenes being about a pair of luchadora (costumed female Mexican wrestlers) and the gawdy Eastman color film stock, you'd be forgiven at first for thinking you'd tuned into an old episode of the 60's version of Batman. Strangly though, the plot (and even score) seem to come streight from a Black and White 50's B-movie.


Will The Red Cat's plan come to fruition, find out
next week, same bat-time, same bat channel...

Despite featuring so prominently in the opening scene, the luchadora are rarely seen again - apparently, this film is a remake of (the same director's) 1962 film Las Luchadoras contra el medico asesino ("The Wrestling Women vs. the Murderous Doctor"; U.S. title "Doctor of Doom") - in this remake the gore and nudity is ramped up, but (sadly) it is no longer the wrestler who saves the day, but her boyfriend the police lieutenant. Shame - I think I would like to see a violent version of the wrestler version (WWE Studios, are you listening?)

The plot is utter bobbins; A dotors son has leukemia, and the doc comes to the conclusion that a blood transfusion from a stronger beast (i.e. a gorilla) could cure it; but, apparently, the human heart could not handle such strong blood (!) so a heart transplant will be required too.

With this in mind, the doctor and his assistant kidnap a man in a bad gorilla suit from a nearby zoo and perform the operation. it seems though, that a side effect of the operation is that the patient will periodically change into a putty faced beast and go on murder sprees, because the gorilla heart...  pumps too much blood to the brain... or... something...

Appart from the operations (which uses genuine stock footage of heart surgery) the effects are laughably bad - an eyeball gag seems to utilize porridge, and a 'scalping' is clearly a bald man, who's head has been painted red, having his wig removed.

Aside from having a terrible plot and effects, it's also incompetently edited (why are so many of these things seemingly scored before the final cut) the dialogue has seemingly been translated from the original Spanish one word at a time, using a Spanish-to-English dictionary, by someone who speaks only the former. The result is often hilarious as the actors speak lines seemingly conjured up via Google translate:



It's worth mentioning that the dubbed version have a couple of scenes of extra violence and nudity that were not in the original Mexican version - and these are mostly very obvious; never more so than when a woman has her dress torn at the shoulder when the beast grabs at her and then, after killing her boyfriend, the beast grabs her again and rips the top half of her dress almost completely off while dry humping her. When she escapes and runs to a nearby shop for help, the dress has miraculously heal itself back to its original shoulder tear...

All in a a terible, terible film, that I'm sure would be great in the right crowd, with the right refreshments; Unfortunately, I saw it alone, so missed the chance to experience it for all its so-bad-it's-good glory; it was there, clear as day, but alone it just didn't work. I'll tell you this though; if I ever win the lotto and open that revival cinema I always promise myself I will, I'm showing this movie!

Body Count: 9
Boob Count: 2 Pairs
Animal Body Count: 1
Most memorable kill: I need that wig to survive!!!
Please use the comments bellow only to comment on this post - to write your own review, please comment on the main post for this movie.

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