10 Outrageous Mexican Wrestling Films You Need To See

6 years after Doctor Of Doom, director Rene Cardona remade the film in colour with added gore and nudity, but excised the crime fighting duo from the original. There’s 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 son’s leukaemia is to steal a gorilla from the local zoo and transplant its heart into the boy’s 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 wasn’t legally available until 1999. Don’t believe it: this is a cheesy good time, a mad melee of fake gore, awkward dubbing, technical goofs and laughable dialogue.