Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Scott LeBrun Girls, gore, and a gorilla mix in this deliciously demented schlock flick from two legends of Mexican exploitation: Rene Cardona and Rene Cardona Jr., who co-wrote the script as a remake of Cardona Srs' "Doctor of Doom". Cardona directs the nasty nonsense with flair, giving us a scenario in which lady wrestlers, real life open heart surgery footage, in your face gruesomeness, and the requisite T & A all combine.Jose Elias Moreno gives his all to the role of doctor & mad scientist Dr. Krallman. Krallmans' son Julio (Agustin Martinez Solares) is very sick with leukemia and the foolish doc will do ANYTHING to save the life of his son. In the tradition of Dr. Frankenstein characters everywhere, Krallman hits upon what he thinks is a genius idea. Give his son a gorilla heart! Yes, you read that correctly. Unfortunately, the surgery regularly turns Julio into a raving beast (Gerardo Zepeda), who goes about molesting women and murdering both males and females with amusing regularity.Krallman hits upon an even *more* genius idea in the later parts of the film, but I'll leave you to discover that on your own."Night of the Bloody Apes" truly lives up to that time honoured phrase of being "so bad it's good". It adds to its engagingly ridiculous premise with a fair amount of energy and a decent forward pace. The makeup is passable and does serve its purpose. The film is so damn exploitative that it's likely to keep schlock addicts smiling.The acting is perfectly serviceable for this sort of thing, with Armando Silvestre as our dashing, intrepid detective on the case, Carlos Lopez Moctezuma as the scarred, loyal assistant to our antagonist, and Norma Lazareno as the luchador dating the hero.Even in light of how silly the movie is, it does manage to be absurdly touching in its final moments.Seven out of 10.

Darkweasel Around 1981/82, my parents used to take me to Redditch every Saturday morning. No, not as part of some cruel and unusual punishment, but to rent video tapes. We'd recently bought a new VCR (a state of the art, new fangled Akai top loader with orange and red buttons and everything) and we'd go to Rumbelows to borrow two or three video tapes for the week.Upon entering the shop, the first thing I used to do was disappear around the corner to the horror section and pick up the same three videos week in, week out. Night of the Demon - because of its nasty looking cover and warning stickers, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things - because of the title, and Night of the Bloody Apes - because of the title and it's nasty looking cover (a surgeon covered in blood holding an even bloodier scalpel). Every week I would hope that my parents would finally relent and let me watch one of them. I was ten. Not a chance.However, if they had ever given in and let me borrow Night of the Bloody Apes, it would have completely shattered my expectations of what the film was actually about. I had a pretty vivid imagination back then, and thanks to the brief synopsis and fairly graphic pictures on the back of the video box, had already filled in all kinds of blanks as to what the film would contain. But not even I could have guessed that it was actually a Mexican film with subtitles which had been released in back 1969. Surprisingly, the video case failed to mention any of that at all.So, we begin (as all Mexican films should) with two lady wrestlers. One seriously injures the other and has to be taken to hospital. After performing the operation, the surgeon suddenly decides to capture a gorilla to save his son dying of leukaemia. Eh? Yes, the doctor (like the story) is completely f**king mental. He has a limping assistant who calls him master, and apparently he can't tell the difference between an orangutan, a gorilla, and a man in a very unconvincing furry suit.After transplanting the heart of the fake orangorilla into his son (featuring some real life footage of open heart surgery - one of the main problems the BBFC had with it), the young man turns into a monster with plasticine on his face and fake fangs in his mouth. He then runs off in his pyjama bottoms and kills loads of people in spectacularly unrealistic ways (the toupee removal scene is as bloody as it is hilarious). Anyway, there's some more gore, some nudity, more wrestling, and a bit more gore before the doctor finally admits what he did may have been a bit wrong and it all ends with the son dying and the doctor being led away by two sexy nurses. I'm really glad my parents never let me borrow it now."Prepare the gorilla"

LoneWolfAndCub Don't wish too much from this cheap Mexploitation flick except to have a damn good time, and with a title like Night of the Bloody Apes (although there is only one ape) what would you really expect! The film is ineptly made on all accounts, some of the more hilarious aspects include the random subplot involving a female wrestler feeling sorry for another female wrestler she injured, the poor dubbing and translations and general laziness in concealing goofs (a good example being the grass moving underneath someone's body revealing the stage).The story centres on a doctor who plans to cure his son's illness by performing a heart transplant with an ape. Unfortunately this turns the son into a dirty man-ape who wanders aimlessly and maims various people.There isn't much to see in this review really, I'm not gonna do some page-long dissection of all the different filmmaking aspects when really, the bottom-line is if you enjoy Grindhouse theatre then this movie was made for you, with all its inept special effects, uneven pacing and overall oddness.2½/5

lastliberal This was one of the infamous video nasties banned in Britain and released with approximately 1 minute of pre-cuts in 1999.The quality of the DVD was excellent and really made the film enjoyable. Even the dubbing was good.A doctor (José Elías Moreno) whose son had an incurable disease tries to save him by transplanting a gorilla heart. Of course, the son (Agustín Martínez Solares) turns into gorilla man. If he didn't have an ugly gorilla face, he could easily be in the top five for Cosmo's bachelor hunt.He searches out victims and manages to rip some flesh from one man's neck, pop out the eyeball of another and decapitate a third in his quest that left six or eight dead.I have absolutely no idea why the Luchadoras are in this movie. It switches from the doctor's operations to wrestling. The wrestling has nothing to do with the story, but it was fun to watch.Eight boobies, three boobies, and, of course, one dead gorilla.