6 years after making Doctor Of Doom, where a pair of female wrestlers track down a mad scientist, director Rene Cardona remade the film in colour with added gore and nudity. Theres still a luchadora (who wears a bright red devil costume, complete with horns), though her impact on the narrative is reduced to a few wrestling scenes and a sequence where she answers the telephone in the nude. Instead, the plot centres on Dr Krallman, one of those B-movie scientists who thinks the only way to cure his sons leukaemia is to steal a gorilla from the local zoo and transplant its heart into the boys body, which turns out to be a really bad idea. Transforming into a broader actor in a bad makeup job, the boy wanders across Mexico, ogling showering senoritas and tearing apart anyone who gets in his way. Considered shocking in the UK, Apes was one of the original Video Nasties and wasnt legally available until 1999. Dont believe it: this is a cheesy good time, a mad melee of fake gore, awkward dubbing, technical goofs and laughable dialogue.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
