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Night of the Bloody Apes (1970)

Dir: Rene Cardone.

"Apes" is your typical 'Rene Cardone' helmed trash fest, but here the wrestling element has taken a backseat to the classic 'Mad doctor playing god and coming unstuck' horror film plot we all know and love.

We start with a red masked women wrestler (Norma Lazareno) going for it big style in a fight with another fighting femme, much to the delight of the hometown crowd. Unfortunately she fractures her opponents skull when she tosses her out of the ring (insert your own jokes about tossing and rings). The slam dunked wrestler is taken to hospital, with our red clad beauty and her police inspector boyfriend (Armando Silvestre) in tow. Bu our red masked wrestling beauty has lost her nerve now, scared she might cream another opponent in the ring (now stop laughing at the back).
A Doctor Kraumann is put in charge of her case but does not hold out much hope.

We learn that Dr. Kraumann has a son called Julio who is dying of an incurable illness, but the Doc refuses to give up hope. With the help of his crippled assistant Goyo, who calls Kraumann "Master" and shuffles around in true Igor style, the crazy Doc tranquilizes an ape (well an unfortunate Mexican in a moth eaten carpet) and nips it back to his laboratory. It turns out he has decided to transplant the gorillas heart into his sons body thus curing him! How none of the other Doctors didn't see this obvious solution is of course a mystery. The unimaginative fools! So we have some real life heart operation footage shoved in our face, which helped get this cheesy chap banned in the UK and placed on what became the laughably shameful 'Video Nasties' list .
This footage does gets pretty freaky when we see a still beating heart scooped out and held up to the camera. But the most horrifying bit of this footage is that the Doc has mutated and grown an extra pair of hands! Goyo is holding the sleeping gas mask over Julio's face as Kraumann, on his own, performs the surgery. The footage however shows four hands at work! Now that's the kind of surgeon any health service could do with more of.

But because we are here to see a rampaging monster flick after all, the gorilla's heart takes over Julio's body and turns his face into a half ape half human crusty mess (with that Lon Chaney JR "Wolfman" time lapse photography that already looked dated when Universal used it). Before you can yell "Frankenstein" the 'Bloody Ape' is breaking out and going off into the night in search of pretty young ladies to maul and less than pretty men to rip apart. See, Julio may be half Ape but he knows what his priorities are.

Using his supreme mad Doctor brain, Kraumann comes to the conclusion that the gorilla heart was not such a good idea after all and decides to transplant a live human heart instead. So it's off the hospital to pay a visit to our highly unfortunate comatose wrestling woman. Meanwhile last night's bodies are discovered and the 'wrestling groupie cop' is put in charge of the case. The police think the missing ape is too blame. Ahh, little do they know.
How will the horror end?....

 

Mexican wrestling films, where to start? Well the most famous of the many Mexican leotard wearing heroes was Santos who starred in countless films and became a national icon. The masked superman would fight anything and anyone who was up to no good, from gunslingers, the Mummy, psycho headhunters and ghostly stranglers. There were of course other spandex clad do-gooders, the most well known being the wresting women who starred in the film, other than "Night of the Bloody Apes", that is the best known outside of Mexico "Wrestling Women Vs The Aztec Mummy". Most of these films were made by the Cordone Family, who all used the Christian name Rene making it almost impossible to work out which member of the dynasty Directed what!

Thinking the worst of this film due to its bad reputation and articles stating that the heart operation footage was the only gore in it, I was actually pretty surprised to discover, that although badly made, this little bit of monkey business was a lot of fun and also had it's fair share of enjoyably trashy delights.

The scenes of the women being attacked are amazingly exploitative. They are stripped and pawed at in sequences that would never see the light of day in our present climate. The first women attacked, after taking a shower (because all trashy movies decree a nekkid, damp chick is essential to the plot) is throttled and clawed up with blood splashing up the wall and, in that big no no as far as the UK censors are concerned at least, smeared all over her breasts. The other women are also partially stripped and jumped upon in true exploitation style. Although why our man/ape molests all these women is never made clear. Watch out for an amazingly bad scene where one of the women is attacked on what is supposedly grass but when she moves the grass moves with her like a loose rug, revealing a floor underneath!!

The gore on show is extremely poorly executed, but still worth a laugh or two, as victims are dispatched via throat ripping, eyeball popping (a supremely cheesy scene), nose squashing, a very crappy decapitation and even a knifing (hey, he's a resourceful ape). One particularly crude effect sees a bald man having a toupee theatrically pulled from his head to reveal a strawberry sauce smeared dome to simulate a scalping. Most of this gore was actually filmed and inserted into the film for it's American release by Jerald Intrator ("Satan in High Heels"), to spice things up.

The dialogue contains a few choice moments as well. Upon discovering the eye popped victim an old woman runs to the police shrieking "There, around the corner, a man…and he's dead"! The aforementioned scalping victim is discovered and a policeman declares "he's been murdered". That's just in case anybody thought it was scalping by misadventure. The best though is given to the police chief who, upon hearing the conclusion of 'wrestling groupie cop' that the murders are the work of a man/beast, declares "the proofs are insubstantial, it's more probable that you are watching on your television more and more of those pictures of terror" Aren't we all?

The lead performances are mostly flat, not helped by an extremely sub standard dubbing, and the direction is plain and unexciting. Mostly a case of just pointing the camera at the scene and letting it play out. As for the wrestling scenes, well WWF this is not! But it is amusing and, although it's all confined to the ring, makes for a bizarre change to a horror films normal ingredients.

The ending though is rather limp given the exuberant build-up and is made even weaker by a characters remark that sums all this tragedy and murder up…."It's unfortunate, really sad". Indeed.

But overall what we are given is a simple, enjoyable slice of schlock that delivers the trashy groceries, makes a welcome change to the normal U.S and European exploitation fare and never gets boring. In fact it's enough to make you go ape.