In the grand tradition of Samson vs. the Vampire Women (1962), Blue Demon vs. the Infernal Brain (1967) or any of the countless Mexican horror adventures featuring the masked wrestler Santo, Night of the Bloody Apes (1972) takes a popular mini-genre in Mexican cinema and updates it for seventies audiences, liberally adding large helpings of violence, sex and female nudity (the film was produced in Mexico in 1969 but not released in the U.S. until 1972). If nothing else the film shows just how far things have progressed since the more innocent black and white Santo features of the early sixties. Sure, the standard stock ingredients are still here – lots of wrestling interspersed with mad scientist/monster-on-the-rampage shtick but there’s also something new – gross-out gore effects rendered in garish color.
In the case of Night of the Bloody Apes, director Rene Cardona decided to intercut real footage of an open-heart surgery into the mad scientist laboratory segments. The effect is jarring to say the least but Cardona has never been accused of subtlety. After all, he’s helmed some of the cruder exploitation films of the seventies including Survive! (1976), a low budget film adaptation of Alive, the bestseller about the Andes plane crash survivors who reverted to cannibalism. At the same time, Cardona has also given us some Mexican camp classic like Santa Claus (1959), Doctor of Doom (1963), which served as the template for Night of the Bloody Apes, The Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (1964) and The Bat Woman (1968).
His son Rene Cardona, Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and helmed a number of even more notorious exploitation and genre films such as The Night of a Thousand Cats (1972), featuring a castle dungeon full of starved, flesh-eating kitties, the Jaws-ripoff Tintorera…Tiger Shark (1977) starring Susan George and Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979), a trashy dramatization of Peoples Temple founder and mass murderer Jim Jones (Stuart Whitman) and his doomed cult. But back to Night of the Bloody Apes.
I first saw the film at the Starlight Drive-in Theater in Atlanta on a double feature with The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula aka The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974). During a scene where the monkey-man was tearing a victim’s head off, I saw a large rat run past my car which seemed appropriate under the circumstances.
In addition to the gratuitous gore, Night of the Bloody Apes also features plenty of female nudity from the wrestler heroine (Norma Lazareno) lounging around the locker room in her birthday suit to a female victim being stripped naked and mauled by the rampaging, sex-crazed monkey-man. Oh yes, the monkey man. See if this makes sense. A grieving scientist (Jose Elias Moreno) tries to reverse the effects of his son’s terminal heart disease so he kidnaps an ape from the local zoo and transplants the heart into his son’s body. The ensuing scene contains the immortal line, “Prepare the gorilla,” as the scientist orders his handicapped assistant (Carlos Lopez Moctezuma) – the Spanish equivalent of Igor – to do the dirty work.
As expected, the patient (Agustin Martinez Solares) gets worse and eventually receives another heart transplant – this one courtesy of an unsuspecting female wrestler. So now we’ve got a sickly boy with a female wrestler’s heart and the body of a muscle-bound Neanderthal (the gorilla man is played by Gerardo Cepeda). Nothing makes a whole lot of sense here but then consider the title (By the way, there is only one bloody ape).
Amid the crudely staged carnage and dull exposition scenes involving a couple of inept cops are occasional moments of fun like the opening scene which introduces the lady wrestlers – they look like rejects from a Batgirl casting call. The atrociously dubbed English dialogue may even make you consider having your eardrums cleaned. Did he really say that? Yes, I’m afraid, he did. For example, in the scene where the chief inspector (Armando Silvestre) ridicules his underling’s investigation as the product of a lively imagination, he tells him, “It’s more probable that of late more and more you’re watching on your television those pictures of terror.” Linguistic experts could learn a lot from this movie; then again, they could suffer serious brain damage.
Night of the Bloody Apes, digitally remastered for Something Weird’s DVD edition and distributed by Image Entertainment, looks better than it has any right to for a cheesy early ’70s grind-house stable. And it comes with an insane amount of DVD extras including an additional feature, Placer Sangriento (English title: Feast of Flesh aka The Deadly Organ, 1967), which makes even less sense than Night of the Bloody Apes and is directed by Emilio Vieyra, the man who gave us The Curious Dr. Humpp [1971).
Though beautifully photographed in black and white and presented in its theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1, Feast of Flesh is rather slow going with a storyline that fluctuates between a masked sadist transforming women into his love slaves and a police manhunt for a serial killer that haunts a South American beach resort.
Other extras include numerous short subjects and burlesque novelty numbers like “Gorilla and the Maiden,” a gallery of ghoulish comic cover art, movie trailers for Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) and other schlock titles, three minutes of gory outtakes from Night of the Bloody Apes and lots more!
You can still find DVD copies of the Image Entertainment double feature available from online sellers even though the company went out of business in 2012. Night of the Bloody Apes is also available in a Blu-ray double feature from VCI Entertainment where it is paired with Doctor of Doom.
Other links of interest:
https://moreliafilmfest.com/en/beginnings-fantasy-cinema-mexico
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/219019584/ren%C3%A9-cardona
https://westernsallitaliana.blogspot.com/2014/11/remembering-carlos-lopez-moctezuma.html
