Dir. René Cardona
Mexico
Film #11, of Thursday 11th October, for Halloween 31 For 31
Simians across the world can
breathe a sigh of relief. Taking a time machine back to 1969, they see the only
gorilla-to-human transplant to ever take place suffer from a setback when, as a
father secretly performs the operation on his dying son, it causes the younger
man to transform into a half beast creature who rips men apart, and tears the
clothing off and assaults the (mostly red headed) female cast. Now the global
ape population can gloat as the porcine mammals the pigs were discovered to be
appropriate organ donors, asking such in-poor taste questions as ‘if a man has
a pig’s heart surgically placed in his body, does eating a bacon sandwich after
quality as cannibalism?’ to mock them.
Also connect into this a subplot
about a female lucha libre wrestler who is having setbacks in her career
choice. Her boyfriend is pursuing the man-beast, so she passes by in the main
story with no direct participation in it, exactly how this sort of event
involving man-beasts would happen in real life. I have to question though,
despite my lack of knowledge on Mexican wrestling, why she walks around in
public without her mask on. Is it a custom only practiced by male wrestlers
like Santo, or have I gotten the codes of Mexican wrestling wrong? Maybe if
going into a hospital to see your hospitalised opponent from the ring, it’s
polite to take the mask off like a hat? I need someone to inform me on the
rules on this in full detail.
A long time passes until a
man-ape appears on screen and a while until he gets momentum and gets a body
count going. The film looks promising in the opening credits with Eastmancolor
red gore dripping on black card, but the film’s rudimentary creation is exposed
by how lumbering its pace is. You may question the morals of entertaining
yourself with gushings of blood and quasi-sexual molestation acted out on
screen by the ape-man – ‘quasi’ not in a dubious way to offend any female
readers, but because the man-ape is baffled by how to lay on another person let
alone consider taking his pants off – but exploitation films exist to promote
the basest of humanity. Some are masterpieces or gems who use this to provoke
powerful emotions, others as far back as the beginning of cinema just to show
female nudity and blood being spilt. If they cannot pace themselves well or
engage the particular viewer through their nudity and gore is useless. You can
go see other films with as much, or more, of these things that are better made
or more interesting. The fickleness of genre cinema is that it can produce
films more-to-the-point and intelligent than overbearing award fodder, the
termite arts able to hobble the lumbering white elephants with bites full of
enough critical re-evaluation and cult praise to take down ten more, but it has
to sacrifice so many of its own kind, making them into tedious cheap products,
to make this happen. That more bad films exist in the hundreds compared to good
films is an established rule, but it seems like a sick joke when pointed out in
genre cinema, especially horror cinema. It has been picked on, dismissed as
trash and laughed at by critics in the cinematic playground, a cheap target
when the more popular dramas in the class get away with things incomprehensible
in the manners of quality film making. Something like Night of the Bloody Apes, for me at least, does not help things.
The ape-man does his best – like
David Banner if he didn’t turn green and developed a very hairy noggin instead
– with eye trauma the Italians would be proud of, but the film is tedious. It
plods along, never getting to even cheap titillation that snaps you in with its
illicitness or grossness. For Mexico’s entry in the Video Nasties list for the
United Kingdom, it’s another film off it that really does not stand up when The Evil Dead (1981), Possession (1981), Inferno (1980) and the rest of the critically acclaimed entries
that were banned outright or temporarily are sat next to it. In an
uncomfortable place between the rich 1960s colours and paint red blood of
Hershell Gordon Lewis and the scuzzier 1970s films, it doesn’t take advantage
of both worlds very well.
And yet, even though this film
was excruciating to sit through, I want to leave on a positive light and show
the four good things I got from the viewing :-
1) As
someone who grew up watching wrestling, and for a brief but great year or so a
whole channel dedicated to wrestling, it was great to see the lucha libre sequences.
And for anyone who only grew up with the WWF/WWE Divas like me who wandered
around shaking their bottoms and could only throw pissy hip tosses, the sight
of stocky masked women throwing forearms and snapmeres with enough force to
probably batter a man who was dumb enough to fight them was refreshing.
2) One interesting editing flourish, which the
Nucleus Films DVD uses as a menu transition, is that to progress to the next
scene the film sometimes has shots of a camera going along a wall covered in
multicolour paint. Who painted this rainbow coloured wall? Whoever it was they
deserve some credit for one of the most memorable parts of the film.
3) I have to talk about the use of real heart
transplant surgery footage, probably the biggest reason this film may have been
put on the Video Nasties list. Considering this possibility, it actually adds
another shame about the whole 1984 Video Recording Act fiasco and the banning of
these films. A life saving procedure that happens countless times in real life
and yet, regardless of its dubious placement in a Mexican exploitation film, we
are shocked when a scene of a real person’s body being cut open is shown, his
heart extracted while it’s still beating, a crimson mass of pure muscle I have
never seen in this detail except with any footage involving this film, and
think it’s going too far. Regardless of my negative opinions of the film, that it’s
an Mexican exploitation film that’s willing to show a real life medical procedure,
the sight of the blood squirting out shocking but levelled by the anatomical beauty
of the organs and flesh of the human body, deserves praise on the behalf of
director René Cardona and contempt for respectable people who sweep these
images under the metaphorical rug.
4) Along
with natural blonde hair on women, I have a lust and passion rich for naturally
red hair too, making the largely fiery maned female cast eye-catching for me. So
shoot me...
