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!!!

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Night of the Bloody Apes - Lisa's Review

*** SPOILERS ***

I read the title of this one and thought 'oh gawd, here we go.  How can this possibly be any good?'.  I slightly shame myself however to admit that I enjoyed this one, BUT for all the wrong reasons.  For me, this one was a 'So bad its good' movie.  I found myself tittering all the way through.  Just when you were getting over the humor of the last cheesy line, terrible peace of acting, awful effect or desperately flawed storyline, lo and behold, something else happens to amuse you!

So where do I start?  The movie is dubbed and is originally spanish.  I speak a bit of spanish (not much admittedly, but the script would have made more sense to me in its original language).  The dubbing is awful and the actual translation itself seems to have no consideration for how it might sound in english, but is rather a crude literal translation of the original language.  That did just add to the fun for me though.

The storyline here follows a surgeon, Dr Kralman and his hapless, limping, gormless side-kick Goyo.  The Dr's son Julio has leukemia and for reasons I could not understand needed gorilla blood to cure him.  This blood however would have been too strong for the human heart, so the gorilla heart had to be transplanted as well.  Sooo what do they do?  They go to a zoo and get themselves an ape of course!!  This is where the only good piece of gore in the movie takes place and that would be because it was real.  Actual footage of real open heart surgery was spliced into the movie.  What perplexed me about it however is how shaky and incompetant the hands of the real surgeon appeared!  I certainly wouldn't want his hands in my chest cavity, thats for sure!
So, the son comes around, but he now has a ridiculous ape face, that looks like its been put on by that brown window putty you used to get years ago (can you still get that?).  He also has an insatiable need to attempt to rape women (I say attempt as he never actually manages that) and murder them.  I think the rape part was just as excuse for the movie to get as many pairs of tits and arse cheeks out as they could as there need be no hint of an excuse for a pair to pop out and Oooops, out they come.  'Oh dear!  I'm running.  I'm not wearing a bra, my boobs seem to have mysteriously popped out of my dress.. dearie me'.   Later followed by 'I've just taken a shower, someone has come to the door.  I won't do what a normal person would and ignore it, or pull a dressing gown on... no, I think I shall wander to the door with a towel wrapped around my front so my arse is hanging out.  Nice look that'.  I also learned that women like to make mundane calls to their boyfriends when completely nude, with NO ulterior motive, Hmmmmmm.

Anyways Nudity covered (mwahahahaha) the next humorous thing was the effects.  We had an eyeball gouging (which would usually have me cringing, I'm not good with eyeballs) but if a pile of fatty looking mash is what's behind an eyeball, I have a lot to learn.  A toupe is pulled off a bald mans painted head (I loved that bit!) and a sellotaped piece of latex is torn away from someones neck.

We also manage to return to the start of the movie where we had 2 women wrestling (although it was clearly big men in the wrestling scenes and not the slim women shown before the fight started).  One was very badly injured and ended up in hospital in a coma.  When our surgeon dad realises what has happened to his son due to the gorilla heart, he decides to remove the female wrestlers heart and transplant it into him.  Here we have another excuse for boobs to come out.  Goyo disposes of her in the hospital furnace but sadly Julio still resorts back to his monkey-boy self.

Nearing the end of the movie, Julio runs wild at the hospital and captures a little girl.  His dad manages to convince him to hand the little girl over and in true King Kong Style, he is gunned down where is stands on top of the roof.  Finally as with werewolves, he then turns back to his normal self as he lies dying, we have some 'Walton-like' music and hey presto, its all over.

Little about this movie is good in the sense that it is meant to, but I still found I enjoyed it and would watch it again with friends.

Watch if you like a good laugh at 'So bad its good' movies!

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