The Ape [PG]

After the loss of his wife and daughter, Doctor Adrian has become obsessed with finding a cure for polio. When his experiments with spinal fluid prove successful in animals it’s time to turn his attentions to Francis, a young friend of his who suffers from the disease. But halfway through the treatment, the doctor’s serums run dry and he needs human spinal fluid in order to proceed. Opportunity knocks when a giant ape escapes from the circus and kills his trainer, then proceeds to prowl and terrify the town. 

So it wasn’t until ‘the end’ flashed up on the screen that I actually understood what the hell had happened in this movie. For the majority of it, I was thinking ‘this is two entirely separate stories’. But it comes together at the end, which I suppose is the least the film could do after subjecting its audience to a person in a bad gorilla costume (which was wholly unterrifying) and a generic and uninspired central plot line. 

After the loss of his wife and daughter, Doctor Adrian has become obsessed with finding a cure for polio. When his experiments with spinal fluid prove successful in animals it’s time to turn his attentions to Francis, a young friend of his who suffers from the disease. But halfway through the treatment, the doctor’s serums run dry and he needs spinal fluid in order to proceed. Opportunity knocks when a giant ape escapes from the circus and kills his trainer, then proceeds to prowl and terrify the town. 

I think I spent a good portion of this movie over-thinking it, but in all honesty what else are you going to do when something is as flavourless and generic as this? At one point I was thinking, ‘hmm maybe this is some horrible and loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, but it really wasn’t. There was a real weakness in the central plot: firstly, it was generic and pretty terribly clichéd. Secondly, there was the potential for some real drama, tension, and emotion to be packed into it, which just wasn’t at all and that got me kind of annoyed. Thirdly, it’s a tall order having an ape as a horrifying monster. Poe managed to do it well in the aforementioned short story and King Kong had the size factor going for him so it succeeded there. This was just a guy in a gorilla suit! Wholly unscary, in fact more lacklustre and laughable than anything else, and when the switch comes about (I don’t want to give away too much), it happens so quickly that you could miss it in the blink of an eye, which apparently I did! 

The performances are all pretty so-so, it’s a smaller B-grade flick so there really isn’t a lot to report on that front and the editing was a right shambles with scenes changing in a jarring way and sometimes whole chunks of dialogue being cut off midsentence. Amateurs, just amateurs everywhere. 

Starring Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixton, Gene O’Donnell, Dorothy Vaughn, Gertrude Hoffman, Henry Hall, and Selmer Jackson, The Ape is a pretty tame and lacklustre flick filled with ‘action’, ‘drama’, ‘suspense’, romance, and ‘horror’. At the end of the day, sometimes it’s good to watch films that are this boring or bad because it can give you a stronger appreciation then for cinema that is good, so there’s that silver lining!