Just because you happened to star in one of the most overrated horror movies of all time (Dracula), doesn’t ensure you a steady paycheck in the years to come. So it was that Bela Lugosi found himself hamming it up in the somewhat lesser efforts from studios like Monogram in the 1940s. The Ape Man is one such flick and it is not unexpectedly a dreary and unmemorable affair.
The story is a familiar one to those of us who watch those mad-scientist/ape movies that flourished in the period. Bela plays Dr. Brewster who gets it into his head that it would be a good idea to shoot up with ape spinal fluid. I never quite figured out what benefit it was supposed to deliver, but I don’t think I have to tell you what the results were.
Bela grows a nice head of hair, a really bushy beard and he inexplicably develops bad posture. I’m assuming that wasn’t the intended result because he spends most of the movie either whining about it or scheming to get back to the old Bela we know and love.
The movie opens with the newspapers screaming that Bela’s character, Dr. Brewster, is missing. Down at the docks, the reporters anxiously await the arrival of his sister, Agatha.
She meets up with Dr. Randall, a pal of Bela’s who helped him out with his ape experiment. I’m assuming that at this point he’s probably downplaying that whole aspect of his career on his resume.
He takes Agatha to the Brewster house and leads her down to the secret lab. Amidst all these mad-scientist beakers and paraphernalia is a cage. And inside the cage is a gorilla, very badly played by a guy in a gorilla suit and Bela Lugosi, very badly played by a guy in a Bela Lugosi suit.
Bela leaves the cage and growls at the ape in there to get him to calm down and he blathers about something or other and it finally comes out that he thinks he needs some human spinal fluid to get back to normal.
Naturally, this can’t be done without killing the “donor” so his pal Dr. Randall is sort of like, “yeah, I didn’t really mind turning you into a half-man, half-ape, but I’m sort of squeamish when it comes to murder.” Bela and I were thinking that this was a really great time to develop a conscience.
A couple of reporters come over to the house and hear screams from the secret lab. After seeing Bela lurking in the background of a picture they took, they decide to go back there to investigate.
Meanwhile, Bela goes out looking for victims with the aid of the gorilla he was living with in the cage which raises a series of questions. If he has to kill people to get their fluid, why is the ape still alive? If that was the ape that he got the fluid from in the first place, wouldn’t that have killed him like the people? And if it wasn’t the ape they experimented on, why was it living in Bela’s basement?
At some point during the film, Agatha gets involved and holds a gun on Dr. Randall to force him to inject Bela with some human spinal fluid. The reporters of course get wise to something happening at the old Brewster place and return to snoop.
One of the reporter’s girl sidekick gets herself captured and strapped down to a table. The reporter finally gets down to the basement to rescue her and she wakes up in time to fend Bela off with a bullwhip that was lying around the lab.
I can’t really remember what happened at the end, but I think the cops showed up and shot everyone.
The reporter and his lady friend leave the house and see Zippy, a character who has been making pointless appearances throughout the movie, sitting in a car.
Zippy claims to be the author of the movie and says something directly to camera like “screwy, ain’t it?” Then he rolls the window up and on the window is written the words, “the end.” Ouch. Like this movie wasn’t awful enough, somebody tried to get cute which is completely inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the movie. Not funny at all.
With no innovative ideas, no performances that anyone would ever want to admit to, and no characters that are completely thought out, The Ape Man is the cinematic equivalent of being forced into a cage with Bela and his gorilla roommate and having your spinal fluid drained with the only anesthetic being Zippy’s moronic commentary.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
