Sometimes you come across a synopsis that, no matter how well-executed the movie really is, is an immediate strike against it. In 1940’s THE APE, Boris Karloff plays Dr. Bernard Adrian who, in order to get the human spinal fluid that’s so important to his experimental formula, dresses in the pelt of a dead ape and murders the local banker. Now, come on, who thought that would make a good movie? What’s worse, it was originally a play in 1927 (written by Adam Shirk). I’d just like to reiterate that plot. Dr. Adrian needs human spinal fluid, so he dresses as an ape and kills the local banker.

Granted, the banker had it coming to him as he was the most vocal of the small town’s residents against Dr. Adrian, suggesting they drive the doctor out of town simply because they didn’t understand his experiments. And perhaps Dr. Adrian feels the end justifies the means as his formula is intended to restore the feeling in Frances Clifford’s legs, which she lost to polio ten years earlier. And maybe, just maybe, Dr. Adrian’s good intentions have blinded him to the bigger moral issues of right and wrong. But he dresses in the pelt of an ape and kills the banker. How do you make that pitch to a producer and do it with a straight face?

That idea should have been put down in the early stages. Alas it was not and not 68 years later we’ve got the movie to remind us.

I suppose it wasn’t all bad, Maris Wrixon gave a pretty good performance as Frances. And . . . Well, I guess that’s about it. Really, it was a bad movie. Director William Nigh (THE FATAL HOUR) created a convincing Mayberry-esque small town, and he moved the story along at a pretty decent clip, breezing through the circus performance, and the real ape’s escape and arrival at Dr. Adrian’s house (although the fight for survival that resulted in that meeting went down in flames thanks to Karloff and Ray Corrigan who were obviously not meant to play action scenes), but he never gave us a sense of place within the community nor did the townspeople seem too concerned there was supposedly an escaped killer ape on the loose as evidenced by the four young boys casually hanging out by themselves in the woods when they see the ape (Dr. Adrian in disguise) mosey past. Up until the last scene, the way Dr. Adrian’s house was shot, I thought it was out in the country, just outside of town (I’m pretty sure one of the characters even placed it there), but the final scene reveals him to live just across the street from Frances Clifford.

Also, I believe it was meant to be a secret from the audience as well, the fact that Dr. Adrian is dressed in the dead ape’s pelt, because although the doctor stabs the ape and we see it go down, it’s never mentioned what he did with the body, nor does he talk about skinning the ape and making a costume out of its hide. And when the young boys shoot the ape in the shoulder with a .22, we see Dr. Adrian in the next scene in his lab, but he never indicates he’s been injured.

I mean, really a lot of the holes in this movie are never tied up and it seems as if the entire thing is merely there to set up the big reveal at the end, that it’s Dr. Adrian who killed the banker. Hell, the banker’s death is never even shown, which leads to another complaint, the editing.

Whether as a result of a horrendous editing job or simply because the movie is so old, the film jumps around as if half the frames have been cut and lost, more often that not within the scene. So we see Dr. Adrian gathering his things to leave the house, we jump ahead twenty frames and he’s already at the door, we jump ahead fifteen more and he’s halfway down the street. I know in these old movies sometimes parts of them gets lost, but usually it’s not in such large chunks as to be noticeable, at least not all throughout the movie, but holy crap, I bet if all the lost frames were added back into THE APE, we’d have a movie that’s easily twenty minutes longer. And if there’s that much of the movie missing, just let the movie go and cut your losses. If your movie is about a guy who dresses as an ape in order to get human spinal fluid for his mad scientist experiments, and a fourth of that movie has been lost, just let it go, man. It’s not even worth the effort (see also turning yourself into a monster for the same reasons as in ATOM AGE VAMPIRE).

THE APE may qualify as classic by virtue of its age alone, but it fails as a horror movie and, in truth, it fails as any sort of entertainment whatsoever. THE APE is simply a ridiculous and badly-pieced-together mess of an hour and my time would have been much better spent this morning by just watching THE GIANT GILA MONSTER again.


other Horror Classics
Carnival of Souls
Atom Age Vampire
Creature from the Haunted Sea
Nightmare Castle
Black Dragons
The Invisible Ghost
One Body Too Many
White Zombie
Attack of the Giant Leeches
The Screaming Skull
The Beast of Yucca Flats
The Terror
Revolt of the Zombies
The Giant Gila Monster
The Fatal Hour
Dead Men Walk
The Mad Monster
Maniac
Metropolis
The Vampire Bat



Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older