The Ape Man (1943)
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. These were low-budget affairs that had little to offer but Bela and to take up space on a double-bill. The Ape Man is no exception to these flicks , being a dreary and unmemorable affair. In fact,
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 (like he was starring in a 1980s Italian gore movie) 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. His sis has been off in London investigating ghostly activity in musty old castles. 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 that 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, behind the fireplace. Amidst all these mad-scientist beakers and paraphernalia is a cage. 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. It seems that there has been a bit of a mix-up as to the whole injecting ape-goo into your rump situation.
Agatha sees Bela and says something along the lines of, "you've really let yourself go - you should stop drinking Milwaukee's Best." Then 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.
Around this time we get introduced to a couple of reporters. One is played by Wallace Ford, who I'm sure you all remember as the lovable Babe Jensen from a couple of Mummy movies that Universal cranked out at about the same time. He was the sidekick who kept trying to make a rock disappear by eating it! Ahh, good times. Good times. They come over to the house to get a picture of that dried up old ghostbuster and manage to hear screams from the secret lab. They get their picture of Agatha and then they leave. Later they develop the picture and see Bela lurking in the background. So they decide to go back there to investigate. In the meantime, Bela decides he needs to be a little more proactive in his approach to curing his ape-ishness.
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? And why was Bela living with him?
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. Wallace Ford's girl sidekick gets herself apenapped and strapped down to a table. Wallace 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. Wallace Ford and his lady friend leave the house and see Zippy, a character that 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.
I should have known this movie was somewhat lackluster when I picked up the VHS in the clearance bin for $3.99 and it come in a hideous brown box. If you're marketing a movie in a brown box, you're just basically admitting that you've given up on it completely. It's a thankfully short movie, with no innovative ideas, no performances that anyone would ever want to admit to, and no characters that are completely thought out. Was I to assume that Bela was going mad and that's why he's decided to kill people to get back to normal or did he just come up with the idea once his sister came home? He didn't really seem any crazier than a half-man, half-ape would be expected to be.
I still don't even get what he was doing in the first place with all this ape crap. What was the point? In movies like The Fly, there was a reason the experiments were conducted. In that film, we could slowly see the main character go from normal mad-scientist to crazed half-man, half-fly. Here, Lugosi doesn't do anything but use a bad accent, bad wig, and pathetic hunched over walk to try and put over his performance.
Tom Weaver devotes something like 13 pages to this movie in his great book Poverty Row Horrors. He relates something far more interesting than anything having to do with the movie. It seems that Wallace Ford was really a guy named Samuel Johnson who was born in England, but ended up in Manitoba deserted by his mother. He was taken in by a family who basically only wanted to work and beat him, so he left and went to work in Iowa and met up with a hobo named Wallace Ford. They became pals and then the real Wallace Ford got word that his mother was dying so he and Samuel hopped a train to go back to see her. Ford was killed on the way when he fell under the train, but Samuel went on to the see the mother. She was dead when he got there and he decided to use the name Wallace Ford from then on and became the most famous sidekick in Mummy movie history. Now, I don't know about you, but I'd rather see that story on the big screen than this sludge about Bela and his ape.