Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Tweekums This short film from 1940 features Boris Karloff as Bernard Adrian a doctor who is determined to find a cure to help a young woman, who has been paralysed by polio, to walk again. His animal experiments have only had him so far; now he needs human spinal fluid. When a gorilla kills its brutal trainer before escaping from the circus he sees an opportunity. The trainer is taken to Dr Adrian's lab, where he dies. Dr Adrian extracts the needed spinal fluid and injects it into his patient; early indications shows that it is working but after an accident he needs to find a new source of spinal fluid. Meanwhile the people of the town are hunting for the ape which has killed again and shows no sign of leaving the area.This film was quite a bit better than I expected; Dr Adrian may be using methods that can't be considered ethical by any stretch of the imagination but he isn't an unsympathetic character; he clearly really wants to help his patient rather than wanting the glory of finding a cure. The townspeople are less sympathetic than one might expect with children throwing rocks at the doctor's house and one man having an affair and treating his wife more poorly than one would expect of a film of the era. The ape is obviously a man in an ape-suit but it is better than one might expect to see in a B movie. There are some good twists before the end; the final one nicely explains certain things that seem a little off earlier. Boris Karloff does a solid job as Dr Adrian and the rest of the cast, who were unknown to me, were okay. Overall this might not be a classic but it is a fun way to pass an hour if you are a fan of older films.

Bezenby Boris Karloff has promised his niece he will cure her paralysis at all costs, despite his research making him a bit of a pariah in his home town (doesn't help that he experiments on dogs that he kidnaps). When an Ape escapes from a local circus and mauls its keeper, who had it coming, Boris extracts spinal fluid from the guy and creates a formula that seems to work. Problem is – he needs more spinal fluid. Solution is – the Ape is going around killing people and Boris has just murdered the Ape in his kitchen (in a hilarious scene), so now Boris can disguise himself as the Ape and get more spinal fluid. It's simple as well as completely daft.Dressing up as an Ape and wandering about while there's an armed posse looking for a gorilla is as crazy as dressing up as Hitler and walking down a street in Stalingrad during World War 2, but that's what Boris does. He's determined to help his niece walk and nothing's going to stop him, dammit! Mad scientists are ten a penny, but Karloff's mad scientist has a heart, and even though his method is slightly off, he's trying to help folks, so you end up rooting for him to finish his research before the posse riddle him with bullets. Besides, his victims are all sort of hick bad guys, so you can't feel too sorry for them when Boris leaps on them with his Ape suit. The film itself isn't too eventful, but the bittersweet edge to it was more than welcome.

piratecannon With a title this blunt, one would expect that the actual narrative of The Ape follows suit. It actually does try to switch things up with some last second bet-you-didn't-see-that-comin' idiocy, but this is a movie about an escaped circus gorilla terrorizing a rural community. Oh, and then there's the outcast scientist who's illegally experimenting on a paralyzed young woman named Frances.Yeah—it's every bit as random as it sounds. How the escape of the ape in question correlates with this doctor's ethical quandary is hazy to say the least, and the behavior of the townspeople is just as weird. Apparently, they're all scared of this doctor because he practices medicine in an "unorthodox manner" (that's about as much details as we're given). In fact, even the kids around town hate him; so much so that he catches them pelting his house with rocks. In any case, the good doctor is forced to treat a circus trainer who was attacked by the beast in question. The doctor draws some spinal fluid from the dying man, injects it in his paralyzed patient, and marvels at her ability to begin twitching her hitherto unresponsive feet. Meanwhile, the escaped animal breaks into the doctor's house; during the chaos, the aging practitioner throws some sort of liquid in the ape's face and then stabs it with a knife (and, we assume, kills it). What's really weird is that he informs his mute assistant that no one in town should know the gorilla is dead. This seems to have a sinister motivation at first, but we later discover that the doctor begins dressing as the ape (I think? Or maybe he skinned it and then made a suit?) in an effort to motivate Frances to finally stand on her own two feet—*cough, cough*—and prove that his research had scientific credence all along.Uh-huh.In short, this is a movie that uses the presence of a lumbering ape to try and add an element of horror to an otherwise straightforward—and boring—story about a renegade scientist who's misunderstood. It's the classic "he's-got-good-intentions-and-we-should-all-feel-like-jackasses- for-doubting-him" tale.There are plenty of chances for the film to be inventive, but it suffers from a particularly bad case of "convenient circumstances"; you know, the sort of thing that happens at just the right time to allow the narrative to move forward in an absolutely unbelievable way.Case in point: an official from the institute that trained the doctor shows up to investigate strange occurrences in the town. The man accuses the doctor of breaking all sorts of ethical codes. How does the scientist respond? He suggests that the official see the result of his research, and takes the man to visit Frances. The official requests that Frances prove she's recovering from her Polio by wiggling a foot. She can't do it. Based on all of this you would assume the mad scientist is in deep doo doo, right?Wrong. Instead, right when it seems that our anti-hero is about to be taken into custody, the official says, "Well, she didn't move her foot. But I definitely noticed a muscular reflex. Congratulations, doctor!" Umm… what?These sorts of occurrences plague The Ape, making it one of the most eye-rolling attempts at scary film making to have ever come down the pike. But, like a lot of the "B" offerings from this era, it does have its moments of unintentional humor. Because of that, I'll award it half a star.

catfish-er I'm working my way through the Horror Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection. THE APE is one of the movies in the set.I thought that THE APE was a fairly original adaptation of the "King Kong" story, with Boris Karloff playing the part of am eccentric doctor, who's only aim is to cure a young woman of paralysis. Albeit his methods may be unorthodox.The doctor his held up to mockery and ridicule in the community. Worse, a jealous boyfriend fears his girl won't need him any more if she's cured, so he resents the doctor's attention.It really is a silly, melodramatic mess of a plot; but, it works; and, Karloff is really in top form.The special effects surrounding the ape are very poor by today's standards; but, fairly impressive for 1940!