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"

After buying a few months ago a copy of the Crypt of Terror DVD release, containing the Mexican films "Infernal Dolls" and "La horripilante bestia humana" (The Horrifying Human Beast), and after only watching the first title, last night I finally decided to give the second a try. Most of the reviews I have read do not refer to the original, but to the atrocious American version called "Night of the Bloody Apes". The original turned out to be another bad example of horror films with wrestling matches, lacking the doses of humor and camp that turned similar products into enjoyable crap as the cult film "Santo Against the Vampire Women". It was also very sad to see in the cast the names of Carlos López Moctezuma, José Elías Moreno and Armando Silvestre, admired actors from classics like "El peñón de las ánimas", "Black Wind" and "The Net". Although all three had been in other horror films (López Moctezuma in "The Weeping Woman", Moreno in "She-Wolf", Silvestre in "Santo Against the Zombies"), here they have ungrateful roles: Moreno, sillier than ever as a weeping mad scientist; López Moctezuma, pathetic as his cripple assistant, and Silvestre as an ineffective secret service agent. "The Horrifying Human Beast" is vulgar and inelegant, with a pedestrian script by exploitation specialists René Cardona and his son René Cardona Jr., and directed with usual laziness by papa Cardona. For the international market Norma Lazareno did a couple of nude scenes, while two other women were stripped by the horny monster. But I do not think that adding these shots would have improved the product. For the American version sex-obsessed Jerald Intrator added (with very bad taste) shots of a real heart-transplant operation, filmed gory shots of mutilation with different actors and props, retitled his mess "Night of the Bloody Apes", made the already obnoxious production look even worse, and helped it gain a bad reputation for "sins" the monster did not commit. It is not, by any means, "the pinnacle of Mexican schlock" (I do not know which is), because all that "schlock" is not included in the original Mexican version. It is not even funny as some pretend. Moronic lines are found every day in any A product made by Hollywood with a lot of cash. "Night of the Bloody Apes" is simply worst than the already bad "Horripilante bestia humana".

Part of the short film wave in Mexico that combined extreme gore with wrestling (or 'lucha'), this low-budget horror was part of the 'video nasty' list in the UK. It tells the story of a brilliant surgeon, who when finding out his son will die from leukaemia, has the brilliant idea of giving him the heart of an ape. He thinks that by replacing his heart, his body will be able to sustain the chimp blood being pumped around his body. As a result, his son grows a big hairy face, terrorises the city and murders lots of people in particularly brutal fashion. Hot on the doctor's tale is Lt. Martinez (Armando Silvestre) and his wrestler girlfriend. Will they be able to stop the manic ape-man? Will the doctor be able to save his son from his affliction? Will the Mexican to English language translation ever manage to string an actual sentence together?As you would expect, this film is bad. First of all, the title is a lie. There are no apes involved, it involves a beast with a wrestler's body and a big hairy face. And there's only one of it. But I don't think that director Rene Cordona was striving for the next Citizen Kane (which is clear from the film's wildly imaginative alternative title, Horror And Sex). The film has plenty of enjoyable gore, and I mean plenty. But Tom Savini did not work on this film - instead I think a blind film student did. The bad effects are most evident when the beast is tearing open the throat of an one unfortunate, only for the close-up to reveal that he's clearly peeling of a large plaster, with the gore beneath.It is all rather enjoyable though, so I must give the film credit for that. The film's slender running time breezes by, and there's plenty of laughs to had in the stodgy dialogue, bullshit scientific discussions, and watching the beast butcher a seemingly endless amount of people. The main reason for the film's UK ban must be for the scenes of real open- heart surgery, which was spliced into the film upon it's US release by director Jerald Intrator (responsible for such classics as Satan In High Heels and The Curious Case Of Dr. Humpp). I refuse to believe that it's because of the extremely unrealistic and silly gore scenes. Not really a guilty pleasure, but certainly something to watch while refilling the glass of brandy and thinking of what film to put on next (in my case).www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Night of the Bloody Apes can be described as a Video Nasty version of Hammer Horror's Frankenstein films, only instead of camp performances and a fun tone; we've got inept acting and a load of poorly done gore scenes. The film is something of a lesson in bad film-making, but in spite of that; it does what few Video Nasties manage to do, in that the film's lack of talent does manage to translate into a fun time. The plot is based on an amazingly stupid idea, and as such puts its plot together by way of a load of obscure plot details; including women's wrestling and the transplant of a monkey's heart into a human. The title is somewhat misleading, as the film isn't about a bunch of monkeys that wreak havoc; and the film puts its focus on the aforementioned unlucky beneficiary of a primate's heart. First we are introduced to a woman wrestler who has a moral crisis when she beats up her opponent. We then switch to a doctor whose son is suffering from leukaemia. He seeks to cure his lad by giving him a monkey's heart...what could possibly go wrong? The heart ends up turning the boy into a disgusting (and rather silly) half-man, half-ape, who takes it upon himself to go round savaging people. This leads to a lot of blood and gore, but it's all rather monotonous and hard to take seriously. Fellow Video Nasty 'Snuff' professed that life is cheap in South America, and it would seem that film-making is also; as the effects here are as terrible and the monkey man at the centre looks more like he's been digging holes with his face than someone with monkey genes. The film was banned for the actual transplant footage that sees the monkey heart being transplanted…but unfortunately I saw a version with that part cut out. I'm sure I didn't miss anything. The plot hardly develops at all, and the way you'll see the film playing out is exactly the way it does play out. There's some attempt to add some emotion to the plot line, by way of a scene involving a child; but as the characters are so terrible, it's impossible not to laugh. The acting is as bad as you'd expect, but actor José Elías Moreno manages to stand out in the role of the silly doctor; while lady wrestler Norma Lazareno makes an impression in the rather dull grappling scenes. On the whole, this is not a good film; but there's something appealing about it, and it certainly isn't the worst film on the British censors' list of recommendations.