Product Details

• Actors: Bela Lugosi, Louise Currie, Wallace Ford, Henry Hall, Minerva Urecal
• Directors: William Beaudine
• Writers: Barney A. Sarecky, Karl Brown
• Producers: Barney A. Sarecky, Jack Dietz, Sam Katzman
• Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Alpha Video
• DVD Release Date: July 30, 2002
• Run Time: 64 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00006G8F9
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #241,109 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Ape Man" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

APE MAN - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Uniquely silly Forties horror., February 18, 2001

By 

Marc Russell (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ape Man [VHS] (VHS Tape)

The only thing that saves this effort from a one-star rating is its enjoyable silliness, which is pretty extreme even for poverty row Forties horror flicks. This time, Bela Lugosi is "Dr. Brewster" (yet another Anglo-Saxon name for the exotic Hungarian!), whose unholy experiments with apes have given him a face-encircling beard, a slouching gait, and a tendency to sleep in a cage with his pet gorilla. He needs fresh spinal fluid (human only, please) to restore him to normal, so many complications ensue. His only ally is his sympathetic sister (Minerva Urecal), who addresses him as "you poor boy!" (Lugosi was about 60 at the time.) The film was aparently not even intended to be taken seriously, which is its one small saving grace. Even Lugosi is not as charismatic as usual.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Screwy idea, wasn't it?", August 18, 2010

By 

Andrew McCaffrey "The Grumpy Young Man" (Satellite of Love, Maryland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ape Man (DVD)

We open with a title card reading "Bela Lugosi in The Ape Man" which suggests a film far more disturbingly obscene than one might anticipate. It isn't anything of the kind, of course, but I did a slight double-take during the initial scene which contained the following eye-opening line of dialog: "Don't worry, Barney. After today you'll be shooting that one-eyed monster of yours for Uncle Sam." (He was discussing Barney's camera.)

THE APE MAN is exactly the kind of B-movie you'd expect, given that it stars Bela Lugosi, it was released in 1943 and it has the title "THE APE MAN". The film gets right to the point and as our story begins, Bela Lugosi has already accidentally transformed himself into a half-man, half-ape creature. Despite opportunities, no explanation is given as to why mad scientist Lugosi and his mad scientist buddy are involved in such ape experiments. Oftentimes these types of films will give their mad scientist a philanthropic motive: he'll want to find a cure for polio or discover the secret of immortality. Here, however, the point of the experiment seems to be injecting people with ape juice solely for the purpose of becoming apes. The only line of explanation is simply that the experiment worked "too well", leaving him unable to transform back into a man.

The actual ramifications of being an ape-man are left somewhat vague. Physically, he has changed; although, despite being an ape, he still wears pants. His ape make-up is not totally convincing. He resembles less Koko the Gorilla and more the hypothetical love child of Moe Howard and Teen Wolf. It's unclear if this transformation has affected Lugosi's mind in any way, although he does lock himself in a cage at night because he is afraid of what he might do. He's not alone at night, of course; there's a real ape in the cage with him.

This pure ape is played by a gentleman wearing a gorilla suit by the name of Emil Van Horn. A quick check on IMDB lists a total of nine acting credits, all between the years of 1941 and 1948. All nine characters are a variation on "ape" or "gorilla". I wonder if at some point in his career he realized he was becoming typecast. I wonder if he ever stared forlornly into a mirror late one night and - like Withnail's Uncle Monty - sighed and sadly whispered, "I will never play the Dane..."

Getting back to the film, the ape is the source of the ape juice which left Lugosi in his current state. The ape is also Lugosi's accomplice in the crimes he commits later in the film (they engage in a brief but brutal campaign of slaughter on the local area's milk-men). The relationship however is abusive, both verbally and physically. Rarely have I felt so sorry for an actor as I did in a scene early in the film in which Lugosi hobbles over (walking hunched over like an ape with his arms bent) to the cage, grabs a whip and begins to beat and taunt a man in a monkey suit. Lugosi at this point in his life had a large drug habit to support, and presumably was not in a financial position to turn down scripts with names like THE APE MAN. The last time I felt this sorry for an actor was seeing an elderly Boris Karloff in THE SNAKE PEOPLE... and that's only because Karloff was clearly dying before the camera's eye.

Other characters round out the cast. We're introduced to a female journalist/photographer named "Billie". Naturally, this name leads to the requisite scene where her future partner is looking around for "Billy" the man and is stunned to learn that he will be working with a woman. Also, Billie wears a hat that looks like a giant ladybug.

In addition to his fellow scientist, Lugosi is assisted by his sister who has a neutral California accent which contrasts nicely with her supposed brother's Hungarian. The sister is a self-described ghost hunter recently back from a trip to Europe where she recorded several phonographs worth of suspected poltergeists. She is more than happy to play these records to any visitor who happens to wander by her house; the effect is something akin to listening to Dougal McGuire's BBC sound effects album.

Getting back to the plot, Lugosi determines that injecting pure human spinal fluid into himself will change him back into a human. The unintended meta-textual irony being that Lugosi is unable to administer the injection himself. The thought of Lugosi spending any length of time not injecting himself must have boggled the rest of the cast and crew.

In any case, the movie logic posits that injecting ape spinal fluid into yourself turns you into an ape. Injecting human spinal fluid into yourself is supposed to turn you back into a human. After typing this review, I intend to ask a dear friend of mine to inject me with the spinal fluid of a panda, after which I intend to take the rest of the year off.

In movies like this, it can be hard to tell who the protagonist is. Billie's reporter partner would seem the clear favorite... except I've watched the movie twice, and if his character is ever actually given a name on-screen it never entered into my brain. Billie herself is given some good scenes at the beginning and the end, but for the bulk of the film she's left with nothing to do but paint her nails and fix her make-up. The motives of Lugosi's sister initially seem admirable... right until the moment where she begins aiding and abetting her brother's serial killing.

B-movies are usually supposed to be short, be fast-paced and not make the audience leave in disgust before the main feature begins. In this, THE APE MAN is a success. Just try not to notice that almost none of the plot threads ever actually come together by the end. And if you stay to the conclusion, you'll witness one of the most audacious breakings of the fourth wall you'll ever hope to see. It's screwy.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars You won't go ape for it, but the film really isn't that bad, June 10, 2006

By 

Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ape Man (DVD)

"Screwy idea, wasn't it?" These, the final lines heard in the film, basically sum up The Ape Man for many viewers. Clearly, this wasn't Bela Lugosi's finest hour - playing an ape man for director William "One Shot" Beaudine and - shudder - Monogram. Critics hated the movie, and many fans point to this as the nadir of Bela Lugosi's career. I, on the other hand, have to disagree. The Ape Man really isn't that bad of a movie - and it's worlds better than, say, Scared to Death, The Gorilla, or anything Ed Wood-related. Bela at least has a starring role in this film, which I find exceedingly average rather than bad. My main criticism of The Ape Man is that the hair and make-up robbed Bela of his greatest strength: his incredible range of facial expressions (well, that and one of the dumbest plot devices in the history of motion pictures, which is revealed at the very end).

I'm not exactly sure what benefit there is to turning a man into an ape man, but we are told this was a scientific discovery of immense proportions. Dr. Brewster (Bela Lugosi), being the committed scientist that he is, used himself as a guinea pig, and now he is badly in need of a shave and haircut (that, plus a stoop in his walk and a tendency to let his arms dangle a bit, are the only simian things about him). Unfortunately, he and his partner Dr. Randall (Henry Hall) forgot to come up with a way to reverse the process. Now, the Ape Man is stuck in his secret lab, experimenting with a cure in between naps alongside his pet gorilla, while the rest of the world thinks the esteemed Dr. Brewster has gone missing. Randall's no help to him at all - he even refuses to get his partner the batch of human spinal fluid Brewster strongly believes will help him - just because you can't take a man's spinal fluid without killing him in the process. Hmmph. Luckily, Brewster's newly arrived spiritualist sister (Minerva Urecal) is a little more helpful, helping to cover for her brother as he and his gorilla go out looking for involuntary human donors on their own. The police are clueless about the Ape Man killer haunting the city, but - wouldn't you know it - a nosy reporter and his new female photographer have to get involved and ruin everything.

The film definitely has some problems - for example, the aforementioned plot device that gets dumber every time I think of it, a late-stage animal mood swing that doesn't add up, and the fact that Dr. Randall is supposedly the only person qualified to fill a shot with spinal fluid and jab it in Brewster's arm. Bela, for his part, is consigned to his pre-Planet of the Apes get-up throughout, which rules out a single classic Bela close-up. Obviously, it's not fun watching the great Bela Lugosi run around like an ape for an hour, but, no matter how bad things were in his personal life or how demeaning a role he had little choice but to accept, Lugosi always gave his all as an actor. He alone makes The Ape Man more interesting and entertaining than it has any right to be.