NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES
DVD. Nucleus Films.

At last available in its uncut form, legendary Mexican shocker Night of the Bloody Apes comes to DVD is all its gob-smackingly ludicrous glory, and you are unlikely to see a more unintentionally entertaining film this year.

Directed by Rene Cardona Sr – patriarch of the Rene Cardona clan and inventor of the Mexican horror wrestling film – this is a delirious mix of old fashioned horror, wrestling and, thanks to some post-production additions by American distributor Jerald Intrator, moments of ultra gore. The combined result is a film so utterly deranged that it’s irresistible, a work of outsider art that you have to see.

You’d think that by 1968, mad doctors would’ve got the message that messing about with gorilla transplants never ends well, but Dr Kraymann (Jose Elias Moreno) clearly didn’t get the memo, and when his son is diagnosed with terminal ‘looseemia’, he does what any devoted father would do and breaks into the world’s least secure zoo, shoots a gorilla with a tranquilizer and gets his crippled assistant Goyo to help him carry the beast back to his basement lab. There, he performs a heart transplant (complete with real, gory transplant footage spliced in), giving his son the gorilla’s organ. Predictably, this goes badly wrong, and his son is somehow transformed into a ferocious half man, half beat (and yes, all horror) who escapes the lab and breaks into a woman’s apartment to ravage her in a mix of coy fumbling and graphic blood ‘n’ boobs inserts. The doctor and Goyo recapture him, but foolishly leave him in a lab lightly tied up with wooden boards over the window he had wrecked earlier, so it’s no surprise that he’s soon on the loose again, tearing the clothes off women and the body parts off men in a flurry of scenes that are gory and frantic enough that you almost don’t notice the amateurishness of the effects (at one point, a throat tearing is shown by having a bloody hand rubbing someone’s neck!).

Meanwhile, the cop in charge of the case (Armando Silvestre) is trying to juggle police work with keeping his wrestler girlfriend Norma Lazareno happy – a difficult task as her opponent from an earlier match has been hospitalised after a bad fall from the ring. It’s a good job they don’t know the doc has kidnapped her to transplant her heart into his ape-son in a futile effort to cure him! The police inspector finally figures out what is going on, but his theory of a beast man is mocked by his superiors with what is possibly the greatest line of dialogue ever delivered on film:

“I’ll say it’s absurd. The proofs are insubstantial. It’s more probable of late that more and more you’ve been watching on your television many of those pictures of terror”.

Because people in the 1980s were stupid, Night of the Bloody Apes rapidly made its way onto the video nasties list at the start of the decade, its blend of ultra-realism and scientific plausibility apparently a threat to the ever-gullible British public who would, presumably, immediately start kidnapping gorillas and transplanting their hearts into family members if allowed to see it. Or maybe wrestling in devil-masked catsuits and talking wildly out-of-sync nonsense. Whatever the reason, the fact that we’re only now seeing the film uncut is more ridiculous than anything you’ll see in this gloriously mad, deliriously tasteless and hilariously ludicrous movie.

And watch out for the fantastic Easter Egg, which is both a masterpiece of incoherent nonsense in its own right and hilariously positioned in the menu. Enjoy!

DAVID FLINT

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