“A completely bizarre mish-mash of wrestling, gore, bad monster make up and mad scientist fun, Night of the Bloody Apes is a blast from start to finish. The effects are shoddy and as fake as fake can be and the make-up looks like something out of a high school play but that’s all part of the film’s low budget charm” DVD TALK
Who made it? Directed by René Cardona & Jerald Intrator | Written by René Cardona Jr. & René Cardona | Director Of Photography Raúl Martínez Solares | Music Antonio Díaz Conde | Special Effects (not credited)
Who’s in it? José Elías Moreno | Carlos Lopez Moctezuma | Armando Silvestre | Norma Lazareno | Agustín Martínez Solares | Noelia Noel | Gerardo Zepeda
If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…
Candy | Bullitt | Funny Girl
Production notes and whatnot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Bloody_Apes_(film)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063090/
What’s it all about?
Well we start with some gloriously bombastic bloody credits. Yellow text in a 70s “Spangles” font tell us the name of the movie, while off screen, a substandard Neil Buchanan (or similar) squirts squeezy bottles of red poster paint all over the screen to let us know what to expect. This is going to have some gore, and then some. And then a bit more on the side I expect.
Sadly however, this turns out to be about as bloody as the whole movie gets. Like so much of the genre, it’s all mouth and no trousers. Shame. Ah well, let’s move on.
We start properly with the secondary theme of the movie (aside from gory ape make-up): Female wrestling. Yep, we are in the odd world of the “wrestling/horror” crossover. We are going to get gore, hair, murder and transformations…but with generous interspersing of canvas-pumelling Saturday afternoon “World Of Sport” grapple-fan tosses and holds. The whole bit. Leotards, boots, masks, half-nelsons, pinnings. Yep, we are in odd crossover territory here. Where Dickie Davies meets Lon Chaney. Lon Davies, if you will. Or not. The Undertaker. You get the idea.
So, to the plot. Of sorts.
Backstage before a bout, a female wrestler, with the help of her preposterously handsome detective boyfriend, dons a red “batman-esque” mask ready to go toe-to-toe with her pay-per-view opponent. (What any of this has to do with killer apes we can only assume will become apparent).
So. Boom, we’re in the ring. Dressed as they are like Mexican toy knock-off “El Power Rangers”, we watch throws, clinches, rope twanging, Giant Haystacks vs Big Daddy (if you’re British. I assume WWF’s Hulk Hogan vs Hulk Hogan if you’re stateside) action happens as our red-masked heroine tosses her green-garbed opponent out of the ring.
Is she hurt? Is she dead? Well, she’s not well, I think we can all agree, having landed spine first among the wood and chairs of a wrestling event. Much shouting for ambulances.
Meanwhile (and, as ever, there’s gonna be a lot of “meanwhile” in this), we are at a zoo. Shot in unconvincing “day for night” with a crappy VHS filter, a fat Doctor (a mix of Howard Keel and Jerry Stiller) and his “Igor” accomplice (a sort of Mauritian looking Joseph Stalin) shoot an ape in a cage, who promptly spasms and collapses in exactly the way a man in a polyester ape suit would. Yep. It’s that sort of movie.
Now we’re at the hospital. Where we find out the poor wrestling victim has skull fractures. There is much guilt and sobbing from red-masked Batwoman. We all wonder what will happen to this poor woman who lies comatosed in surgery. Hmm. Maybe someone might need her body, blood or organs later? I guess we’ll see.
Now we’re back with Dr Howard Keel (as I’m going to call him from now on). He’s in his lab with “Stalin”. We discover he has a son (Julio). A sick son. Dr Keel reassures his son that he will be okay,
although we in the audience know he’s a gonner. Not a fuckin’ hope. Unless..?
Dr Keel decides the only solution is to give his son strength. And what better place for strength than the heart and blood of an ape! (I have added the exclamation mark myself. I wish I had added this plot point myself).
And now we have some genuine bloody nastiness as Dr Keel performs a transplant of blood and heart between his son and the tranquilised ape. Cut to a much bloody medical procedure. White coats, slicing, hearts, blood, pulses, splashes and ER style treatment. More of that later.
We’re back then, in a “meanwhile” moment, to some more wrestling. As it seems the producers of the movie would only cough up the funding if there was an equal amount of latex-ring-tossing-grippy-WWF-shenanigans as there was blood-letting, our red-latex batman-esque heroine gets a bit of a pummelling.
But in the lab meanwhile? Our hero slowly becomes an ape! Of sorts. Hmn.
This being the only draw in a movie of this garish nonsense, let’s take our time here. Using some feeble fades, some stick-on “hair” and cack-handed prosthetics, his face goes a little “apey.” To be honest, a face covered in burnt chocolate sponge cake would be about right. And only from the chin up. In fact this may be because, when the prosthetics dept looked at their budget, the director said. “Ah well. Chin up.”
The “ape man/cake-face” gets loose, by way of some feeble locks and wood. He goes on the “rampage.” Which means he climbs up an apartment building and breaks in to a woman’s flat while she showers and he makes…well he sounds like Mutley from Penelope Pitstop. “Rafnnfrafnn, suzzunfruzzun,” noises. You know the type.
The attack is screamy and writhy, although it’s not really clear what the beast is doing, aside from rubbing her boobs with red poster-paint and making even more aggressive Hanna Barbera noises. She is left for dead. Well, naked and covered with paint. Whatever.
The beast is caught by dad and hauled back to the lab. How to fix this? (Oh who cares?) Well dad cares. And decides, in an “at last” moment, that his son needs a pure heart and pure blood to put him back on the straight-and-poorly.
But where in the name of “confluencing plot strands” are they going to get an innocent person’s heart and blood? And at last the wrestling and ape nonsense collide. If Dr Keel can use the body parts of the victim of the earlier wrestling snafu, perhaps his son can be saved? (If you’ve lost interest by now, just think how I feel. We’re only about 20mins in…)
So a surreptitious stealing of the wrestler’s body transpires, and we get some very tedious “mock medical” chat about the swapping organs between the ape-man and the female wrestler. Someone has leafed through Grey’s Anatomy so it’s “corpuscles” this and “tissue damage” that.
After some more actual bloody medical business (footage taken from real transplants, I am told), the woman is killed and the son has fresh organs. However, inevitably in this type of caper, the swap is less than effective. Shock.
The ape-man/cakey-face hybrid escapes once more, (despite Stalin’s ineffectual guardship) and is off on his next rampage. Into a park he runs, all galloping lope and grunty noises. A park that is clearly an indoor soundstage covered in grass clippings, as any scuffle reveals the concrete underfoot. But wait! Who is this he comes across? The obligatory B-Movie “courting couple.” Some bloody attack and gratuitous boob-flashing causes a screaming wench to go hurtling from the park to a local convenience store. Her one loose boob continues to jiggle as she tearfully explains her sorry plight. “Apes! Boyfriends! Attacks!” and so on.
The counter clerk responds heroically, running into the park to find the beast…only to be stabbed violently by the creature.
Then oddly, the beast, in the most gratuitous “we’ve got the prosthetics, we may as well use them” moment, seizes – in a total cul-de-sac – on a by-stander and tears out his eye. Cue a soft-boiled egg being pushed through some plasticine. Nice.
We then have the obligatory approach of wailing sirens and ambulances as the authorities descend on the park to catch – what they still assume – is an escaped ape.
Meanwhile the traditionally ineffectual cops argue unnecessarily in their boxy office. Is it really the killer ape escaped from the zoo? Or is it, as handsome-McBoyfriend suggests – a weird man-ape hybrid?
The police chief, doing his best impression of The Rocketeer’s “all part of the show!” moustachioed huckster Jon Polito dismisses all talk of the supernatural. It’s an ape. Kill it. Back to work boys. But our hero fears different.
Dr Keel, having snatched up his rampaging cake-faced offspring once more, high-tails it back to the lab with the body. They can only wait a tedious 6 hrs to see if the boy turns back to normal…
Even though it feels like six hours in real time, the director chooses instead to zoom in on a clock…go out of focus, adjust the clock and refocus…thus demonstrating time has passed. Any longer and we would have had to see calendar pages fluttering off the wall.
The beast awakes, no better. Daww. So we are into our final pursuit. There is a lengthy “head removal” yanking scene that resembles a Victoria sponge being pulled apart by a bored chef. And the resulting smashing and crashing noises bring the cops a-running from the street.
There are fist fights and punch ups among the grandfather clocks and antiques of the doctor’s home. A police man is scalped by the beast, peeling back his toupe to reveal a gunky mess of Branston pickle and jam. Tongues are bitten, noses wrenched off in a mass of plastic and red paint. This, pretty much what we’ve all been waiting for, if the bloody credits and poster were anything to go by.
Until, in a shameless King Kong style finale, the beast steals a child and heads off to the roof for a dramatic showdown.
Down on the street, passers-by gawp and point, officers blam-blam with their handguns and in searchlight sweeps, the ape flails about with the child.
Dad appears (hooray!) for the final passionate talk-down. Some appeal is made to cake-features. Much cop yelling and public screaming. And the beast, of course, is shot.
In the final moments, much like An American Werewolf In London, the beast returns to human form and lies on the roof, all confused and bewildered as children are coddled and the spectators disperse.
Can his dad ever forgive him? Will we ever find out if the wrestler’s career takes off? Will the woman in the park find a sewing kit and get her boobs back in place? We can but wonder as the whole movie comes to the thundering trumpety close and we press eject and wonder what we’re doing with our lives.
Is it any good?
Well its nonsense. Whether it tips over into funny, campy nonsense or remains firmly in the “oh what the hell are we watching” is a matter of taste.
The credits are deliciously runny, promising, as these movies often do, a lot more offal than we ever actually get. The composer Antonio Díaz Conde has much stabby and punchy fun in what in all honesty is a mix of the thundering camp of The Medusa Touch (now THAT’s a score) and the jolly Saturday teatime drama of Barry Gray’s work on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the like.
The dubbing is workmanlike, with no real attempt to match the length of sentence to the original, cue lots of yabbering mouths with no sound and a confusion of vowels and plosives that crash about the mouth. Best, as I oft do, to sort of unfocus and look elsewhere on the screen when the cast are talking.
The aesthetic is very 1960s, or what I consider that look. Tight Italian suits, skinny ties, sunglasses, pocket squares and oily wavy hair. Transitions betwixt scenes are a multi-coloured swoosh that put one in mind of the “daddla-daddla-dahh” skips in the 1966 Batman TV show. A very cheap equivalent of “meanwhile…”
The cars are chrome boxy sedans bouncing around corners in glinting gun-metal and green. Think Hawaii Five O or Get Smart for the look. Actually, now I recall it, it’s more like the frenetic chaos of an old episode of The Monkees. Which seems oddly appropriate. Night Of The Bloody Monkees would have done just as well. In fact, add a speeded-up chase scene with Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz and a few verses of “Daydream Believer” and it could pass for one of the weirder episodes.
Going for it, I suppose, is its commitment, amongst the silliness and gore-for-gore’s sake (what is that eye gouging/scalping all about?), we can admire the genuine footage of heart transplants the director has cut in for maximum effect. But as ever of course, the real can never surpass the imagined so for all its clinical accuracy, it moves the movie into “ER/Casualty” fascination, rather than shock or terror.
The Ape effects, as mentioned, are not in the least bit apey. In fact “Night of the Bloody…anything,” would have made as much sense. There is no simian tinge, not even a werewolf fanged look. Just a face from the neck up caked in dark-brown paste. Odd looking, rather than scary.
All in all, not much merit throughout and there is a temptation to start checking one’s watch or phone during the run time. The wrestling scenes are for variety and novelty to add at least “something” to differentiate this red-paint rapey schlocker from all the other cookie-cutter cheapies doing the rounds of B-movie flicks and drive-ins at the time. One can at least say, “Oh you know, it’s the one with the wrestling in it…” when trying to explain to confused loved ones what you’ve wasted these particular 83 mins on this time.
Nasty?
Well it’s a little unpleasant, let’s say that. The transformation from man-to-ape has nothing to have Rob Bottin or Rick Baker updating their CV. It’s all fades and stick-on prosthetics. The “beast” itself is more plasticine than powerhouse so is more of a giggle than a shock. There are scenes of rapey monster killing, with our hapless, helpless showering victim all screams and poster paint, writhing and shrieking under the weight of the “creature.” The “gore” is reserved for some quickie set pieces of eyeball removal (eggs and plastic) and scalping (wigs and ketchup) so it’s got an “urrgghhh!” factor. But as ever, so dated and cheap to be more upsetting by its half-assed amateurness than anything genuinely stressful. Women, as ever, are there to scream and be slapped and have their boobs flap about. Although in the plus column, we have out female wrestlers. Being very dynamic, modern, physical and righteous. Albeit with the hunky boyfriend there to tie the masks and give bicepy hugs.
Ban worthy?
A mixture here of the headline grabbing title, the cover art (some versions of which really do suggest some great creature-feature make-up) and the inclusion of actual transplant operations got the censors in a celluloid-snipping frenzy. Although, oddly, the fact that it’s genuine clinical surgery footage, and not the usual wax-and-lasagne splat, softens the impact and gives the scenes a school-biology lesson feel, rather than a gore-fest look. So no. Banned for silly reasons, caught up as it was in the furore at the time.
What does it remind me of?
As I said above (and if my writing was better, I wouldn’t be repeating myself). It really does have the feel of an “adult” cut of an old Monkees episode. Maybe it’s the fashions, the cars, the music, the hammy running-about. But loose the 20 secs of prosthetic “gore” and it’s a groovy slice of south American sixties fun. Suits, cars, hair. Book ‘em Danno. Murder One. Plus an eyeball on the sidewalk. So Murder two, perhaps. I’m not sure how it works.
Where to find it?
Well I saw it on the ever reliable tax-haven that is Amazon Prime. It cost me all of £2.49. A quick look on YouTube tells me you can’t see the whole movie, but there are plenty of clips, reviews, trailers and in-depth whatnots to whet sixties appetites. eBbay has old original VHS copies for abut £30.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=night+of+the+bloody+apes
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 