Night of the Bloody Apes

Night of the Bloody Apes

Mexico - 1972

Director - Rene Cardona

Something Weird Video, 2002, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 24 minutes

Hollywood is so prolific, churning out such a tremendous volume of visual distraction that it’s impossible to keep up. Even less so to follow foreign cinema. Hence it may come as a surprise to many United Statesians to discover that Mexico also has a film industry. Actually they have for quite some time. Many other countries do, but the American Academy only acknowledges one a year and those have been overwhelmingly European. But it’s true, Mexico has a film industry, and like its contemporaries, Mexican cinema has its own genre conventions. They have their classy commercial films and their grimy low budget exploitationers, both of which may or may not make the treacherous journey north. If the metaphor serves for what types of Mexicana are acceptable in Gringolandia then it should come as no surprise that the latter circulates somewhat under the radar. My own introduction to Cine Mexicano was not gentle. I was cast bodily into a grimy pit of vice from the get go, and while my experience remains limited (less and less so), it is forever colored by my first Night of the Bloody Apes.

Coming just under a decade after Blood Feast uncorked the gore-film upon unsuspecting Gringos, Night of the Bloody Apes went further and faster, taking cues from the then current European Mondo fad and mixing it up with a generous dose of nudity and Mexicana. The story concerns the distraught Doctor Krallman (a suitably ‘German’ name*) whose son Julio is dying of Leukemia. In an attempt to save him, the good doctor and his lurching, half-blind henchman replace the son’s heart with that of a gorilla. This gives ample opportunity for the showcase gross-out scene in the film; footage of an actual open heart surgery complete with squirting blood and still beating organ.

But what curative medical procedure ever works in horror? It is around this very failed operation that our film is also given a lease on life. The heart proves “too strong” for poor Julio, unleashing his deep animalistic urges during spells of apparent catatonia. When Julio passes out, the inner ape stirs and smashes his way onto the streets of Mexico City in search of men to kill and women whose clothes are easily torn off.

In a pursuit one would be hard-pressed to call ‘hot’, follows police Lt. Martinez. Still, his enthusiasm lies predominantly in chasing something that is; Lucy, a sturdy Luchadora who dresses in a red-devil costume before kicking ass. If it wasn’t for Lucy’s overzealousness in the ring, Lt. Martinez might not have been trying to solve the Ape-man murders at all. During a bout Lucy severely injures her opponent who ends up in the same hospital where Krallman works. A second grisly operation using the heart of Lucy’s comatose opponent coincides neatly with another violent-disrobing right across the street from Krallman’s home/basement-laboratory and the jig is up for his erstwhile eugenics project.

While its debt to H.G. Lewis et al. is evident, Cardona is also in some ways the Mexican version of Italy’s Mario Bava. After working on his father’s films (they co-wrote this one) Rene Cardona Jr. went on to direct his own low (and not so low) budget horror films, some of which, Beaks and Tintorera, we’ve covered here at LVA. I hate to make apple/orange comparisons that rob films of their individuality. If doing so will make the Cardona legacy and Mexican Cinema tangible and hopefully more accessible however, then the overgeneralization is worth it. Night of the Bloody Apes is among my favorite monster/splatter films. It is a beautiful example of the ‘serious’ exploitation filmmaking that is all but impossible in our current age of post-Scream meta-irony. Loaded with budgetary shibboleths and logic loopholes, it plows earnestly ahead with little more than coincidental interest in "art."

 This sleeve comes courtesy of Itsonlyamovie.co.uk

This one from Lars Jacobsson

A poster from Radio Magma

*Mexican movies of this and earlier eras (see LVA's coverage of the Aztec Mummy) loved to give the bad-guys European names. This was part of a larger project to establish a distinctly Mexican national identity as separate from European or American influence which then, as now, was often considered more ‘pure’ and important because it was whiter. Night of the Bloody Apes (a remake of Cardona’s own 1962 film Doctor of Doom) would seem to suggest that these dangerous foreign influences are just going to fuck Mexico up.

House on Bare Mountain

House on Bare Mountain

United States - 1962

Director - Lee Frost (R.L. Frost)

Something Weird, VHS, 1993
Run Time -1 hour and a full 2 extra minutes of hilarious bouncing and bootlegging.

Granny Good runs an exclusive finishing school for girls high in the mountains of somewhere. At Granny Good's School for Good Girls, many of the lessons are conducted in the open air. As one would hope, physical education takes place without material confinements, but even the more intellectual pursuits are taught free of binding restrictions.

With the increasing emphasis on privately subsidized education these days however, Granny is finding it incredibly difficult to meet the school's financial needs. To make up for the shortfall she's begun distilling moonshine in the basement. Or rather, she's impressed a werewolf to do the distilling while she assists in the girl's unrestrained education. Unfortunately one of her new students, while not too concerned about physically covering up, is metaphorically speaking an undercover cop. Right in the middle of one of those wonderful go-go parties that lend such energetic authenticity to low budget films of the 60's, the Feds bust Granny's still and the school is shut down, bringing our titilating tale of woe to a tumultuous termination.

A textbook Nudie-Cutie from the auteur who brought you such classics of good taste as Black Gestapo and The Thing With Two Heads, House on Bare Mountain is pure dumb entertainment from the days when pornography was still kitschy. It's a concentrated nugget of exploitation history, a lowbrow vaudeville/burlesque comedy chock full of gyrating pelvises, big boobs, amazing hairdos and men in rubber masks. But you know, to tell the truth, if I have to participate in base objectification, I'll feel a lot better about it if it's goofy.

Godmonster of Indian Flats

Godmonster of Indian Flats
1973 – United States
Director – Frederic Hobbs
Something Weird Video, 2001, DVD

Tracked this one down based on an encouraging review in an old issue of Cinema Sewer magazine, and if it’s released by Something Weird, it’s guaranteed to be either, creative, informative or sexy on some level. Godmonster promises a lot and my expectations are appropriately ratcheted up for the type of absurd z-grade monsterama I’ve come to love from the creative and DIY 1970’s.

At a casino in Reno Nevada, loudmouth cocksure jerk Elbow Johnson offers to take the whole gang of drunken strangers clustered around his generous wallet-hole up to a nearby historical old-west town called Silverdale for a night of drinkination and banjo mania. On the way they pass through the hills of crude early exposition and foreshadowing where some abandoned phosphorus mines lie waiting for their important upcoming role in the plot.

Elbow’s main drinking pal is Eddie a shitfaced shepherd who gets his face smashed in by Silverdale’s ignorant masses before even tasting the rim of his glass. Pitched bleeding out into the street, he is driven home by local Bourgeoisie Intellectual Anthropology Professor. In a sloppy drunken catatonia, Eddie goes into hallucinatory convulsive fits and the next morning Athroprof and his Assistant find him in his barn caressing a giant blood covered wooly meat-bolus which they whisk into the laboratory where Anthroprof fills Eddies simple peasant brain with crazy secret communistical ideas organized around his revolutionary mutant sheep creature.

Later at the cemetery, Eddie seduces the innocent impressionable Assistant with a groping hand and tales of his idyllic agrarian life close to the earth, and extra close to his animals. She returns to the lab filled with romanticized visions of a simple worker run society which her mentor Anthroprof fosters with his revolutionary sheep experiment talk. Invigorated with thoughts of their utopia they head to the mines to conjure up some flimsy support for class struggle where they discover noxious Phosphorous fumes.

The godless red conspiracy (which makes you wonder why it's a "God"monster), with our comrade in it's holding tank.

During “Bonanza Days”, Silverdale’s annual celebration of capitalist progress, the normally tranquil white community is kept distracted from the looming threat of the Red Sheep by violent social upheaval caused by the appearance of a black person. In order to keep the facade of equal opportunity so important to Capitalist Imperialism, the white citizens of Silverdale stage a dog assassination for which the black man is framed and sent to jail. Just as he’s about to be executed, he escapes and the village lynch mob gives chase, following his flight to the laboratory where their hollering and gunfire awaken the Red Sheep Menace which smashes it’s stiff top-heavy way out of the lab and attacks them.

After fleeing persecution by an unreceptive middle class Red Sheep flees to the hills, where it meets our enthralled Assistant eager to shed the stuffy traditionalism of her parents generation. They dance together in a touching scene of solidarity, fickle corruptible youth embracing the leftist revolutionary Comrade Red Sheep. Just wait until she has to get a job and pay her own rent.


Showing up just in time with a far superior weapons stockpile, the Capitalist lynch mob wrangles the beast and places it in a rickety cage like a museum piece in the gallery of defunct ideologies (or will it rear it’s head again somewhere?). The mayor it turns out has sold the commonwealth out from under the village anyway and in a paroxysm of misguided rage the population of Silverdale showers the beast with stones, nevertheless leaving the exploiter in power and babbling more hollow rhetoric from his flimsy lectern.

The atmosphere of Godmonster reminded me a various times of Russ Meyer’s Wild Gals of the Naked West, without the copious chest flesh. In fact it does deliver -albeit with less vigor than I had hoped- the homemade monster action I was looking for, and the Cold War metaphor only heightens the level of z-grade enjoyment.

The Teaser

The Teaser
United States - 1973
Director- Greg Valtierra
Something Weird Video, 2005, DVD

One of Something Weirds awesome series of "classic" sexploitation double feature DVDs.

Becky an uptight 19 year old girl working in Mr. Condors stamp shop argues briefly with her semi-steady boyfriend Stanley who’s come to sweat her for a date. He leaves flustered and after work she hops in her car to her second job, gyrating on the floor of a divey LA strip club wearing nothing but a smile. Buck, a slimy dude exuding rape through his matted fur lined coat comes into the club tries to buy a private “show”, but is rebuffed, and instead follows her when she leaves and sure enough, takes her by force. Afterwards, a young couple finds Becky tied up, violated and naked in her car, and comforting her, take her home and ply her with wine and full body massages. The next morning, Becky and the wife lounge about and frolic in the nude completely unconcerned, while under cover of getting Beckys car “fixed” the husband clandestinely calls his slimy hippie buddies.
Back in the house, the wife lubes Becky up with some more booze and seduces her into prolonged lesbian friction in front of a warm welcoming hearth. The husband arrives home to find the ladies in a post coital cat-nap and decides to smoke a hookah and again call his buddies who begin to show up like paisley feathered vultures to a groovy fresh roadkill.Creeping into the party on his slime trail is Buck, and while all the other suburban hippies start grinding all over the nasty furniture he tries to dose Becky with rufies.
Just in time to save us from seeing these people dance again is Stanley who’s back to redeem his character (despite the fact he too merely wants to screw Becky) and bring another flesh fueled movie about the supposed depravity of the “free love” lifestyle which it so freely displays to a gloriously noncommital finish. Now that’s sexploitation.