Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)** 1/2 (out of 4) Dr. Krallman (Jose Elias Moreno) has a son who is dying and as a last resort he tries to transplant the heart of a gorilla into him. At first it seems like it might have worked but before long the son turns into a disfigured monster and goes on a killing rampage.NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES was a huge box office hit back in the day and if you watch the trailer it's easy to see why. It did a terrific job at promising various thrills and gory action and I must say that this is a rare example of where the trailer didn't lie and the film delivers on the promises. I say that because this here is a pretty gory and pretty violent little film that's certainly worth watching if you enjoy these Mexican horror films.This here was a remake of DOCTOR OF DOOM but this one here takes the subject a lot further. For starters, this one here is in color, which allows the gore to just jump off the screen. The most famous thing about this is that they took an actual heart surgery and placed it in the film at a couple different spots. I can only imagine how many kids watched this back in the day and were traumatized from it. There's other gory action and the film even delivers some wrestling as well as nudity. The film certainly went far beyond what most films were doing during this era.The American dubbed version adds a few laughs as the track is pretty silly. The highlight of this version is the woman screaming when she finds a dead man in the street. The film's monster is pretty good looking for what it is and for the most part this is an entertaining and fun movie. Obviously this isn't Oscar-material but it's a fun drive-in picture.

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"

One would assume that a 60's gore-fest, with the words "bloody" and "apes" in the title, which also features a sub-plot involving women's wrestling, would be at least mildly entertaining. Not so. Not even a little. I hate it when this happens. With a rad little title such as Night Of The Bloody Apes, it's all a gore-hound can do is have high expectations. But then it hits me... Oh yeah!! Mexican B-Horror. You see, no one is to blame for my boredom but me. I was well aware how terribly dull low-budget Horror is from down there. Believe me. This won't happen again. But now that I've started this review, I guess you expect me to keep on typing a while longer, so I can tell you about it... *SIGH* Alright, fine...There seems to be a lot of this "transplant Horror" from this era, and the decade before. I can't remember ever being this bored by one of these. About a Surgeon desperately trying to save his ailing son, Julio's life by replacing his bum ticker with that of an orangutan. And don't forget the routine, surgery, stock-footage. Not bad. And of course, Julio now turns into a Gorilla-person. Doing only what a Gorilla-person would do. Julio goes on rampages, ripping women's clothes off, and perform random acts of brutality. Not to worry, as he doesn't stay like that. It's kind of an on and off thing, like a werewolf, I guess... Oh yeah!! And there's also chicks rasslin'. A quality which seems to serve no purpose. No tie-in to the main story or anything. Or maybe that is the main story. Who knows? I know what you're thinking, but trust me, it's not nearly as good as it sounds. absolutely all of this manages to come off completely flavorless. It really is a shame. A total waste of an awesome title. Dare I say it's even worse than Cheerleader Autopsy. The son of the guy that directed this bloody letdown, would go on to make a movie about killer cats, entitled Blood Feast. That's right. Blood Feast. As far as the one about the Apes goes, my advice to you would be to forget you ever heard of this lousy flick, and its glamorous title, and spend your money on something worthwhile like Brain Of Blood, or TeenApe Goes To Camp. At the very least, Night Of The Bloody Apes had a choice to give us some "so bad it's good" humor. It couldn't even give us that. Shame on you, Bloody Apes 3/10

The following "review" is one from the wrong side of the tracks, meaning two things: You will hear nothing but praises coming from me and don't be fooled by my rating. I also could tell you that this review contains no spoilers, but technically... that's a lie.Well,... Screw the review. I'm just going to ramble a bit. It has been a while since I had so much fun with such a bad film. And if you cannot enjoy this piece of utter drivel, then you simply have no sense of humor. First off, this movie was meant to be taken seriously, and that's the main aspect were the fun is coming from. The story? A doctor's son is terminally ill. Daddy-Doctor decides that a hart-transplant must be the only way of saving his son. So, in true mad-doctor-style, he decides that the heart of a gorilla will do the trick. Of course, the gorilla-heart is "much too potent for a human", so sonny-boy transforms into this hideous Ape-Man that immediately breaks free and goes on a killing and raping spree (because that's simply what any horny beast would do, isn't it?). The make-up of our Ape-Man is hilarious. There's simply no other way of putting it: The guys' face looks like a turd! I'm talking human excrement here, the solid brown kind! Beautiful! The gore in this flick is wonderful too: Aside from real footage of an open-heart surgery, we also have incredibly fake (but quite nasty) looking blood & gore effects: a decapitation, an eye-gouging, a throat-ripping, the scalping of someone's skull,... It's hilarious, and indeed it's quite incomprehensible why NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES ever made it to the notorious UK Video-Nasties list, because all of the nasty things portrayed in this film are simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Oh, and there's only one bloody ape running around in it too, by the way. So, needless to say that LA HORRIPILANTE BESTIA HUMANA is a much more accurate title for this terrifying and convincing tale of science gone horribly wrong.When not trying to shock with poorly staged acts of bloody violence or random portrayals of female nudity, this movie manages to be highly entertaining with ingredients like nonsensical dialogues, cheap cardboard sets, plot stupidity and incredibly bad acting. Just a few random examples, maybe? About the sets: One can clearly see that the set-designers just used the same walls, doors, windows (etc.) over and over again to be build various different interior sets (e.g.: One side of the hospital room - the window side - where the unconscious wrestling girl lies, looks suspiciously similar like the window side of the basement-laboratory from where Ape-Man escapes; The set-designers also took one of the side-windows from the laboratory, made it a bit larger and just placed it in the conference-room of the hospital; All the walls in any building are the same grey-ones;...). Then there's the setting of the park. Clearly shot in a studio, you can see (on several occasions) that the grass is loose. Whenever there's some struggling/fighting/raping going on, the grass just shifts and shuffles and you can see the grey concrete from the studio-floor beneath it.Just a few random lines that come out the actors' mouths: -- In the conference-room where all the doctors are debating the disappearance of Unconscious Wrestling Girl (a disappearance that would of course mean bad publicity for the hospital), Daddy-Doctor intelligently utters "We find ourselves in a situation that is difficult".-- During that same debate a colleague-doctor cleverly remarks "A sleepwalker! Any sleepwalker gets up.", hereby providing a solid excuse for the disappearance of Unconscious Wrestling Girl.-- After our investigating detective, through the amazing process of his own logical deduction, concludes and tells his superior that the murderer must be a half man/half beast, his superior answers that it's absurd, adding the line "It's more probable that of late, more and more, you're watching on your television many of those pictures of terror"... Truly one of the best lines of the movie.Other sources of laughter: -- The two scenes were Daddy-Doctor and his Igor-like assistant kidnap the gorilla from the zoo and Unconscious Wrestling Girl from the hospital - these well thought-out acts of abduction are like taking candy from a baby.-- Daddy-Doctor speaks to God a lot, doesn't he?-- Sonny-boy calling Daddy-Doctor "Papa" on more than one occasion.-- An old lady screaming "Aaargh!!! A dead man! A dead Man! A Dead Man!! A DEAD MAN!!!".-- The plot periodically stops to wallow in scenes of women wrestling, only to go on again and do nothing with that concept. Sure, Daddy-Doctor replaces Sonny-Boy's gorilla-heart a second time with that of Unconscious Wrestling Girl, but do you think something spectacular happens after that? Like Ape-Turd-Man growing breasts or something, trying to rape men this time? Our leading living wrestling beauty (Norma Lazareno) doesn't even go into a climactic wrestling contest with Ape-Turd-Man near the movie's finale... But Ape-Turd-Man does start to show some motherly love near the end... almost (and I say "almost") in true KING KONG-style (i.e. the top of a building and people on the ground pointing and screaming).Okay, I think that's enough now. I chipped in more than my two cents here. Vomitron's Rational Rating for this sleazy piece of hilarious dreck: 2/10. Vomitron's rating From the Wrong Side of the Tracks: 8/10. Go see this film, people. It is well worth it!