Video nasty number 33 is the first entry from Mexico and damn if I wish there weren't more Mexican films on the list because....... well it's not remotely good but it's much more entertaining than I remember.
Apes though? Plural? That's false advertising.
The story of a desperate doctor's outlandish attempts to save his dying son was released in 1969 in a version a lot tamer than what would eventually become a nasty. To appease the more liberal American market it was laced with extra nudity and gore and little did producers know it assured it an infamy lasting way past the drive in cinemas it was aimed at.
Dr Krallman's son Julio is succumbing to luekaemia and he only has one solution, replace his heart and blood with that of an ape stolen from the local zoo. Why? Who knows. But he's sure it will work. In the same hospital lies a comatose woman, hospitalised after a wrestling accident fractured her skull. The woman who put her there is wrestler extraordinaire (luchadora - Spanish for woman wrestler) Lucy Osorio and the stress of her part in the accident is doing her in. Her boyfriend Arturo is a police lieutenant investigating the missing ape while trying to keep his relationship with Lucy running smoothly. Smooth becomes very bumpy when the transplant turns Julio into an apelike killer with a penchant for strangling women and gouging the eyes out of men. Julio and Arturo must now capture Julio before he kills again but the only person strong enough to take him on is Lucy.
You'd think.
Wrestling has always been huge in Mexico, but back in the day before Netflix and 1000's of TV channels they lived for it, with the luchadores wearing masks and capes and being depicted as superheroes in many films like the Santo series which saw him taking on werewolves, demons and even Dracula. You'd assume the same was going to happen here but sadly the wrestling subplot comes to naught with Lucy only existing to add a touch of gratuitous nudity to the film. This waste of an opportunity is one of the many many things wrong with this film but despite that there's something endearingly shoddy about the entire enterprise. It has the feel of cheap and sleazy AIP/Hammer films but, in the international version especially, it goes far beyond what they ever showed in terms of sex and violence. Heads are torn off, naked women are terrorised, throats and eyes are torn out and in the film's big gooey setpiece an ape heart is transplanted into a human chest. The special effects here are miles ahead of the rest of the film and then you realise, queasily, that's because real footage of a heart transplant was spliced into the film. It's a grim stand out in a rather camp film and it's the big reason this film became one of the banned 39.
It's first official release was a cinema one in 1974 where the BBFC relieved it of about a minutes worth of gore and nudity. The 80's rolled around and with it came the unregulated VHS market with an audience hungry for unedited horror. Night Of The Bloody Apes hit VHS in 1983 and during the course of the video nasty hysteria it's lurid video cover (see above) got it noticed and eventually prosecuted for obscenity. A decade later an uncut version was released by mistake but rapidly recalled leaving just a lucky few with their hands on an infamous horror. It then took another 19 years before the BBFC relalised that this laughably silly horror film was capable of doing no harm to anyone.
Well, the acting within might hurt you if you're sensitive to bad performances. It's truly terrible but it all adds to the fun. That and the dubbing. Oh jesus the dubbing.
Did Night Of The Bloody Apes deserve to be a video nasty? Not a hope. But that heart scene was always going to cause trouble during James Ferman's censorial reign.
Is it worth a watch? Oh yeah. It's a perfect film to drink beer and laugh at. It's sleazy in places but so much tamer than the rest of the nasties.
Next up - The Night Of The Demon. The one where a yeti rips off a biker's cock. Never not funny.
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