Customer Reviews

The Ape Man

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

That's the warning Dr. James Brewster's medical colleague gives Brewster's sister - - a ghost-hunting psychic - - before she sees Brewster changed into the Ape Man. It's also a warning for us. This is not one of Lugosi's better films. It's barely a step up from what he did with Ed Wood. But in one scene Lugosi evokes more pity than anything in Dracula.

Brewster (the filmmakers should have changed the character's name when they got Lugosi to play the part) injects himself with serum from living victims' spinal columns. (I saw the movie two days ago and I've already forgotten why he needs it.)

We watch Bela Lugosi, by this time fighting drug addiction in real life, shoot up. Then, even through bad monkey makeup, we see the shame and horror on his face as he realizes what he has become.

"I can't fight it," he says.

There's one other interesting thing in the movie. Low-budget pictures made during World War II dealt more explicitly with the fact of men going off to fight than ostensibly better movies with bigger stars. In Holiday Inn (1942) everyone wears dinner clothes and dances and drinks champagne on the Broadway Homefront, while in The Ape Man (1943) the cliché girl photog razzes the cliché cynical reporter about being 4-F (in one month he'll be Seaman Cyncial Reporter and kick Tojo's butt).

The last scene makes it clear the producers had no respect for themselves or their audience. Most of the movie is unspeakably bad. But if you get a chance, watch the first half hour to see one truthful moment with Bela Lugosi.

A Monogram/Banner classic co-produced by Sam Katzman and directed by the one and only William Beaudine. Bela Lugosi is Dr. Brewster who has experimented with spinal fluids from a gorilla on himself. He is now slowly transforming to an ape himself and starts to regret what he has done. So Dr. Brewster and his pet gorilla (!) goes out killing people to get human spinal fluid so he can be cured. This is just as stupid as it sounds, and the film has a total lack of logic. But it's a fun and entertaining movie if you are into the genre of old horrors from the 40's. Well worth a look.

Bela Lugosi makes the most of this Monogram Pictures mediocrity, directed by the immortal William "One Shot" Beaudine. "The Ape Man" (1943) remains a silly attempt at tragic horror, but Lugosi shines in the shabbiest of surroundings. There are worse ways to spend 64 minutes. Interestingly enough, Bela's apelike makeup is similar to the Sayer of the Law in "Island of Lost Souls" (1932).

I'm a sucker for cheap Poverty Row horror movies from the late 30s/early 40's, and this is a gem of the genre. These movies exist in a weird internal logic all their own, where it makes perfect sense for scientists to turn themselves into an ape, find out they really don't like being an ape, and then go on a reverse-serum-searching snipe hunt/murder spree, with another ape in tow. You can really see the influence these movies had on Ed Wood.
All the other fixtures of the format are here: spooky old house, wise-cracking reporter, lady sidekick who winds up falling in love with him, police commissioner who's blowing his stack because his men can't find a rampaging killer ape, even the canned music that also turns up in the East Side Kids movies.
One complaint: the print used for this DVD is pretty bad, with a muffled soundtrack that had me straining to understand the dialogue. On the other hand, this isn't a Criterion special edition of "The Magnificent Ambersons", it's THE APE MAN, for cryin' out loud!
BTW: I watched this on a double-bill with the T-REX concert movie BORN TO BOOGIE..."Bela's alright/Bela's alright/a natural born apeman/he's just outa sight!"

Quick word association. What spings to mind when you hear "The Ape Man"? Didja think Bigfoot? The neanderthal from the Geico commercials? How about the fallen stars of Bela Lugosi and Wallace Ford on full display, preserved for posterity? Because that is exactly what the appeal of this film boils down to. See the great Count reduced to knuckledragging around in furry makeup. Squirm uncomfortably as he digs the needle into his vein. Bela has such an irrepressible *presence* that even his lesser works are worth at least a look. And a depressed sigh. The print used seems to have been run over by a cement truck. And possibly drug behind it. The sound is so lousy that about half the dialogue is unintelligable. Perhaps, dear readers, that's for the best...just mute the television and imagine your own story to go along with the images. Chances are, you'll do a better job.

I really enjoyed Bela in this wacky but still good horror flick. I thought the end was the stupidist part where you find out who the mysterious man is. But other than that it was very good.4 1/2 stars

Here we have the local mad-scientist and gland expert (Bela Lugosi) working in his basement lab on his latest project. It seems while doing the usual mad-scientist thing of tampering in God's domain, he injected himself with some vaguely defined ape fluid. The ape stuff had some very unfortunate side-effects. Bela now goes around all hunched over, and wearing whiskers and a wig (both very phony). He swings his arms as he walks and mingles words with occasional grunts. Tragically, the only way he can stand upright as a man is to take injections of human spinal fluid. The only way to get human spinal fluid is to render humans inanimate (i.e., dead). The beneficial effect of the injections has become distressingly temporary; it doesn't last long enough for Bela to get rid of the whiskers and wig. Bela has taken to sleeping in the same cramped cage as Mr. Gorilla, his lab animal companion. The sexual overtones of this we won't even discuss.

This low-budget thriller is a good example of bad acting and unintended laughs. Bela Lugosi made some truly classic horror films, but this clunker isn't one of them. Lugosi and his gorilla pal lurking in doorways and alleys remind one of a simian version of Abbott and Costello. Bela is tall and slender while Mr. Gorilla is short and chubby. The snappy dialogue of the newspaper people is meant to be witty, but gets tiresome instead. The WWII jokes hopelessly date the film. The mysterious skinny guy wearing the goofy hat is a silly plot-twist gimmick that emphasizes the poor quality of the story. It's possible that dedicated Bela Lugosi fans or die-hard fans of old horror movies will find value in this movie. The recommended way for anyone else to view this movie is to use it as a "so dumb it's funny" party tape. Just be sure there has been sufficient imbibing of your favorite beverage to dull the senses.