Film Review Found In An Abandoned Maisonette: Night Of The Bloody Apes

This endearing 1968 Mexican horror film was once banned in this country as a video nasty, perhaps because it uses footage of real open heart surgery. The footage forms a striking contrast with the gore effects on offer in the rest of the film, which display a comparatively shaky grasp of human anatomy. At least this is thematically appropriate given that the film is about a surgeon who decides that the best way to cure his son's leukaemia is to give him the blood of 'a more powerful animal', such as a gorilla. Yes, that should sort it out!

The surgeon's assistant (who calls him 'Master') ventures to suggest that such a transfusion might have catastrophic consequences for the patient (as an employee of NHS Blood And Transplant, I can only agree). The surgeon responds that he is aware of this, and has therefore decided, that instead of a transfusion, he is going to perform a heart transplant from gorilla to man. Oh. OK then.

It doesn't work. Not because the patient dies or anything – how boring would that be? - but because he turns into a hairy-faced muscular psychopath who goes round having sex with women and ripping them to pieces, more or less in that order. This is because the gorilla blood has got into 'the cerebrum' apparently. They make a lot of the cerebrum in this film, although it is not what you'd call a cerebral film.

Despite which, one of its greatest pleasures is the stilted formality of the dubbed dialogue. When the inspector in charge of the investigation declares that he believes the killer to be 'half-human, half-beast', his sceptical superior replies: 'It is more probable that of late you are watching on your television many of these pictures of terror'. Indeed.

There is also a subplot about a masked female wrestler whose relation to the main plotline is somewhat obscure, though she is the inspector's girlfriend and gets to utter the film's last line, summing the situation up with: 'It's unfortunate, really sad.' This is not precisely how I would characterise the murderous sex-and-murder-rampage of a psycho gorilla-man. But what you have to remember is, it's different when you're actually living it. If it happened in your life, you'd probably be the same – 'Yeah, that's a real shame isn't it? Cup of tea?'